Xybernaut Claims 'Confusion' in Product Report
Air security company officials say they have no contracts for wearable computers for airport guards.
Ramon G. McLeod, PCWorld.com
Thursday, December 20, 2001
Xybernaut, which last month told PC World that its wearable computer was expected to be deployed at major U.S. airports within three months, now says it has no contracts for such placements and blames the original story on "confusion" during an interview with a company official.
The company's Mobile Assistant 5 product is touted as a tool that will assist security personnel seeking to identify suspicious travelers based on face recognition technology. The company made the original assertion during a November 12 interview at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. Asked when the devices would appear, M. DeWayne Adams, senior vice president and chief strategy officer, said they would be at "major U.S. airports within three months," although he would not specify which ones.
PCWorld.com published the original story on November 13, and shortly thereafter the company placed a link to the story on its Web site. The following day, however, Bloomberg News published a story in which Adams was quoted as saying there were no contracts and that his discussion with PCWorld.com had focused only on "ideal applications" for the device, not planned deployments.
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Noting this discrepancy, PC World tried to reach Adams and other company officials by telephone and e-mail. Adams was not available. But on November 15, Michael Binko, director of corporate communications, returned our call and said that while there "may have been miscommunication" in the original interview, the story PCWorld.com published did not need to be changed.
In a follow-up conversation recently, however, Adams took a new tack, saying the "three-month-deployment part of the story, that was wrong. We don't have any contracts."
"I think the place where we had confusion was in the timeline and language I used in my press interview," said Adams. Binko, after several follow-up attempts to reach him as well, left a message on a PC World reporter's voice mail saying that he could not "add anything to what DeWayne (Adams) said." He did not return a subsequent call for more details.
News Noticed
On November 14, the day the Bloomberg story was published and the day after the PCWorld.com article appeared, the company's stock price rose 42 percent, by 85 cents to $2.89, on trading of 5.6 million shares, or more than ten times its average daily volume.
The company's Mobile Assistant products are wearable PCs designed to perform tasks such as remote video teleconferencing, retrieval and analysis of information from remote locations, coordination of remote commercial and industrial activities, or military field operations. They incorporate optional features such as real-time, two-way video and audio communications through radio frequency transmissions or cellular linkups, global positioning system tracking, and access to information through intranets and the Internet, according to the company's most recent quarterly statement.
The Mobile Assistant 5 consists of two parts: a two-pound computer, worn on a belt, and an 8.4-inch LCD screen. The computer runs on a 500MHz Intel Celeron processor, with 256MB of RAM, and has a 5GB hard drive. The LCD weighs less than a pound and has 800-by-600 color SVGA resolution. The product sells for about $4000.
"Face recognition requires lots of large cameras running through very powerful servers," Adams said in the original interview. "The trouble is, when you get a match, you need to be able to get all that information to the person on the floor immediately.
"With this device, the guard gets the data wirelessly while he is on patrol. He can then see who the person is, walk up, and verify the person's information," he said.
Fairfax, Virginia-based Xybernaut, founded in 1990, has produced similar devices, albeit for very different reasons, for British Airways. Airline employees use the wearable computers to check in passengers while they wait in lines at London's Heathrow Airport. The company also works with utility companies and other industrial firms whose employees have to work in places where an ordinary laptop is too cumbersome. In many cases, the company mates the computer with a head-mounted display that allows for hands-free operation.
The company also has an agreement with IBM to purchase components for 24,000 of its Mobile Assistant Five wearable computers over the next 18 months. According to its quarterly statement, the company has an agreement to pay about $45 million to $50 million for the products. |
