NDAs and a loose-lipped Microsoft Engineer.

... AKA Snowboard sent this to me the other day after a phone conversation.


We are up against strict NDA's -- the company simply can't talk about what they're doing right now.


So I'm waiting. This is interesting.


Thanks!




"It's kind of amazing that one loose-lipped (Microsoft) engineer opened his mouth too many times pushing Jobs to license their software. The guy's conceit drove Apple's CEO mad enough to set him on a course that would go on to sink Microsoft's hope for a winning mobile platform for more than a decade."

Patently Apple



To learn a little more behind the scenes about how the iPad came to be, you could check out Walter Isaacson's biography titled 'Steve Jobs' at a library if you don't own it. I'll recount just one tiny fragment from the book about the birth of the decision to create the iPad. On Page 467 the book recounts:
"One of the engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend of Laurene [the wife of Steve Jobs] and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth birthday he wanted to have a dinner party that included them along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went,  a bit reluctantly. 'Steve was actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,' Gates recalls, but he 'wasn't particularly friendly' to the birthday guy.
Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he had developed at Microsoft. 'He's our employee and he's revealing our intellectual property,' Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had just the consequence that Gates feared.
As Jobs recalled: 'The guy badgered me about how Microsoft was to to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple out to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, your dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, 'Fuck this, let's show him what a tablet can really be.'

LiDAR Partners Program

From reddit


OnSemiconductor

The LiDAR Partners Program is an ecosystem consisting of module manufacturers, module customization partners, and component suppliers. It offers opportunities for LiDAR module manufacturers to benefit from our expertise, reference designs, and component partner ecosystem when designing LiDAR solutions. This program also allows OEMs to be better connected to these module suppliers by leveraging our worldwide sales force to promote the publicly available partner solutions more widely to the industry. If an OEM has specific design requirements, the ability to connect with a customization partner specialized in manufacturing based on reference designs makes turning custom specifications into a product easier for OEMs that do not want to design or manufacture their own LiDAR sensor.

Over the past month, we announced collaborations with a number of LiDAR module manufacturers using ON Semiconductor SiPMs in their sensors. We are pleased to introduce this first wave of partners, listed below, in the LiDAR Partners Program, and look forward to announcing many more in the coming months.

• MicroVision
• RoboSense
• Blickfeld
• SOS Lab

Find out more about our LiDAR Ecosystem Partners and their products today! For live demos of our LiDAR technology, visit us on February 4-6^th at the SPIE Photonics West Exhibition in San Francisco, California.

An Owed Post

When I started this blog it was literally simply a place for me to keep my own research so I wouldn't lose it.

Recently, I have been much less active here... that has been part of my plan. The kids are grown, and I love flying and want to do a lot more of that. That's been my recent focus.

I've been getting e-mails and texts querying why I haven't been active here.. is everything okay, etc.

The answer is, I don't perceive that anything has changed. And yes, things are okay. I'm frustrated too that we haven't had more news.

Researching MVIS, and posting here has gone from a #2 priority, to about #4, and at the moment, I'm in waiting mode -- as are most. I see new iterations of what we already know, if I see something notable that's new it will get attention.

• I strongly suspect that Amazon is the primary Interactive Display customer (and I have previously stated why -- up to and including a strong reaction from an Amazon engineer who was working on new iterations of Alexa.) This also can be sold elsewhere, and not everything that is Alexa enabled is directly from Amazon.
• I suspect Microsoft and Hololens. We know that they can sell this technology to any customer. The market for this should be vast. Remember that most of the machines that use Windows are NOT made by Microsoft, and in Augmented Reality this will probably be the case as well. (Do not forget that Microsoft and Microvision have never acknowledged the connection -- this connection was entirely derived by a lot of research by a lot of different people, here and elsewhere.)
• I still think that the Display Only customer is still in play or they would be trying to sell display-only products elsewhere.

Even in a worst-case scenario, I see considerably more value than we're currently showing.

Figure I owed a post after that hit-piece on SA this morning. (Interesting coincidence with several days of painting the tape after market.) 

I'm still around... 

Video from CES

Thanks for the heads up Mike!

Great review and discussion of the Interactive display at CES

Interesting new Video from Microvision

Very interesting how they have improved projection by recognizing what not to project onto.

No reflections, and different surfaces... cool stuff.

The ability to not project on shiny things may have been a requirement for the market.

Do not doubt the coming enormous popularity of Augmented Reality

....and it will get people out and about. This kind of thing will be enormously popular, far beyond enterprise use.

...and there are a lot of relationships in this business... and they make for an interesting and tangled web; some of it purposeful, some incidental.

Now this was apparently made by an independent developer, but there are LOTS of independent developers working on stuff that will be this cool.Ian Charnas


Hack-A-Day





"Mario Kart^[a] is a series of go-kart-style racing video games developed and published by Nintendo as spin-offs from its trademark Super Mario series. The first in the series, Super Mario Kart, was launched in 1992 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System to critical and commercial success.^[1]

 With six Mario Kart games released on home consoles, three on portable handheld consoles, four arcade games co-developed with Namco and one for mobile phones, the Mario Kart series includes a total of fourteen entries. The latest game in the main series, Mario Kart Tour, was released on iOS and Android in September 2019. The series has sold over 100 million copies worldwide to date. "


If you like Breadcrumbs, this is also a Nintendo Product, and Slade Gorton on the MVIS board has a relationship with Nintendo... He got Nintendo involved with the Seattle Mariners.... and Nintendo and Microsoft know each other...

The Man who Saved the Mariners Q 13 Fox News

"By now, the main story has been well documented: Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan putting the team up for sale in 1991, and Senator Slade Gorton saving the day, approaching Nintendo, which offered to buy the team - then organizing a group of local investors to join as partners."

Map

Amazon Breadcrumb

I've been fairly confident that Amazon is on board for some time.

Part of the story has been relayed here before.. I still won't name names, but I will say Amazon now.... (A Story That Can Now Be Told)

This is some new Sleuthing that's pretty good, how much weight you might give permissions, etc. (are they dropping a hint? I don't know.)

I know the reaction from an Amazon engineer when asking about an interactive display told me all I really needed to know.

I've also asked enough people who sell this thing that the addition of the screen is the number one requirement for the second speaker purchased.

Thank you Walt!


Microvision has a new Data Sheet

The Poached Salmon Platter seems pretty innocuous...

But it is the exact listing from The Whole Foods (wholly owned by Amazon) from Bellevue Washington... right down the street from MVIS HQ... 

Chevron Hololens

Collection of IVAS Articles

Thank you Walt!

It appears that the Army is taking this very seriously.


Soldiers Test new IVAS Tech

The final product -- officials say it will likely be fielded in the fourth quarter of FY21 -- will include a variety of features: a color see-through digital display that makes it possible for the user to access information without taking his eye off the battlefield; thermal and low-light sensors that make it possible to see in the dark, literally; rapid target acquisition and aided target identification; augmented reality and artificial intelligence, to name just a few.
 
How the Soldier Lethality Team



 Army's Tactical Network...

When optimized, the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) is a single platform that features advanced goggles connected to a body wearable computer, or puck, to perform multiple situational awareness functions, including a simulated training environment (STE), advanced night vision, target acquisition and language translation for enhanced situational awareness. 

 Soldier Feedback Drives Modernization

Real World 3D For Operations

Natick Experts... 

Army Tests Augmented Reality Headset

New Night Vision Goggles

Marines try out Mixed Reality  

Third IVAS Evaluation Slated for July 

New Goggles bring AI to soldier Training

Thoughts on the price currently

A lot of people have asked me about this lately. Here are my thoughts.

There are a lot of people who never look at their stocks except to make decisions once a quarter or so. 

If you were holding MVIS five months ago, you may be one of those people and just put a sell order on --- "when it gets to $1 sell."

I think that happened. Then your sell order becomes a market order, and the default at target price -15% or better. (That's how it worked with my broker, when I did such things)

So if 15% of the shares were targeted that way we'd need to sell off about 18 million shares before the price can keep going higher after $1.00. I think that's what's happening.

I think the price is going to close @ .85 +/- a couple of pennies, until there are that many shares traded below a buck. at the current rate, that will be next week...