Target markets for terahertz

(Also posted on the IV API message board.)

One little mentioned feature of the 4000 is that it's portable. If you need to do most analyses, you have to take a sample, transport or send it back to the lab, schedule time on the test instrument, and finally after what is frequently a meaningful delay, you obtain the results. Assuming a 4000 is available, you take the 4000 to the site requiring analysis and immediately obtain the results. Now, given, there are limitations to terahertz spectroscopy, and with its imaging speed, but in many situations, those are not critical. If they are, then there are the fall-back technologies that are well-known. I believe by this time there exists an ample database of terahertz signatures available for spectroscopic comparison, including a variety of important substances. That database will grow as more systems are employed.

These kinds of applications include forensics, remote location spectroscopy, imaging through wood, subsurface imaging, etec.

To have only the few sales API has generated in the two years since product announcement speaks very loudly, not of the product's capabilities, but of the efforts to make money on what should be a gold mine.

Bailhob (an IV MB poster) spoke of management just wanting to make it to retirement. Well you can retire wealthy beyond your wildest dreams or retire with a nestegg just enough to get by on. But when you're sitting on cutting-edge, disruptive technology and are the leader in the world with the only practical product available, what can you be thinking not to be marketing the living daylights out of this windfall and reap the rewards you deserve. To limit your thinking to research institutions and some potential military uses where you will sell only a few systems, or even to some fixed-in-place industrial applications, would seem to missing the bigger picture. It seems to me one would want to target those applications where you have no competition plus the potential for sales of hundreds or thousands of 4000s, not a dozen or two a year to industries where there are already competing solutions.