To Our Shareholders and Friends,
Our team is happy to provide first of many updates on the progress we are making at Shrink Nanotechnologies, as well as a few (hopefully interesting) articles that relate to our business.
Each time I make a presentation for Shrink, I stress the fact that we are not just a research and development company that comes up with “neat” ideas and “interesting” technology. I always stress that we are a commercial enterprise – we are in the business of making technology and ultimately products that will make people’s lives better and create real value for our shareholders. I hope this newsletter will be a useful format to update interested persons on our progress in this regard and to also identify certain challenges we face as a young and growing company.
For my part, I will try and focus my comments on three categories: (1) People and Relationships, (2) Shrink’s Intellectual Property and (3) Business Focus and Progress.
People and Relationships
I invite you to take a look at the “Team” page on our website: www.ShrinkNano.com. You will see that in a few short months, we have assembled a world class group of extremely relevant scientists and industry veterans in each of our business areas. I will highlight just two active and important members of our team.
Dr. Heiner Dreismann is a member of the board of directors of Shrink. He is the former CEO of Roche Molecular Diagnostics, having grown that business more than 100 percent during his tenure, to more than $1.4 billion in sales. Dr. Dreismann presented Shrink at the recent Rodman and Renshaw conference in New York. Shrink continues to utilize the deep industry connections and experience Dr. Dresimann accumulated during his 20+ year career at Roche in order to find the right partners to use our nanofabricated devices and platform for diagnostics applications.
Dr. Roland Winston joined our Science Advisory Board in March of this year. Dr. Winston is the father of non-imaging optics, literally writing the leading academic book on the subject. This science is at the heart of our amazing OptiSol™ technology, which we will be telling the marketplace much more about in the near future. While we have quite a bit of work to be done on OptiSol™, this project continues to be one of the most promising technologies we are working on and one that will hopefully translate very well for our company and our shareholders as we unveil what we have created.
Intellectual Property
Back in May of this year, we successfully reached a very favorable licensing agreement with the Regents of the University of California. This agreement gave us exclusive access to 9 patent pending applications for all fields of use. As important, over the past months, Shrink has sought to develop our own intellectual property strategy by complementing our rights through the UC agreement and fine tuning specific areas of interest that Shrink is pursuing. Of particular note are the applications we have filed in the areas of metal-enhanced fluorescence (MetalFluor™) and solar concentration (OptiSol™). Over the coming months we look forward to sharing the exciting developments we are making in both of these areas, as well as with other intellectual property we are working to commercialize.
Business Focus and Progress
One of the first obstacles we experienced when our team was starting this journey was coming up with a way to explain what we had and what we wanted to do. It’s not as if we were simply selling hamburgers and hotdogs. Secondly, because we have a “platform” technology to fabricate devices and systems – which is applicable in so many business areas – we had to focus our limited resources on specific areas. The questions we asked ourselves in this process was: “Which businesses have the largest unmet needs, offer the greatest economic opportunity and is a business that we feel we can be impactful in – as soon as possible. We matched this answers with Shrink’s technologies and developable products which we had the strongest intellectual property protection on and which we could make a unique and high value-added contribution in. The result of this process was to hone in on Solar Power Generation, Sensor Technology for Medical Diagnostics and Biotechnology Research Tools.
I can say without hesitation that while we have good days and bad days as a young company, and while I wish we were about to reach the proverbial “finish line” with some of the very exciting relationships we are building, our progress towards our goals in our businesses has exceeded my expectations. We have very good, unique and financially meaningful intellectual property rights. We are receiving tremendous press coverage for what are doing (Forbes.com, Renewable Energy Magazine, Technology Review, American Scientist and much more) and most interesting, we are receiving – and often – unsolicited calls from decision-makers at very large multi-national companies who want to learn about what we are doing and who want to collaborate with us. I have never had such interest from such large companies in such a young company, and I believe that in the near future there is a good likelihood that this interest is going to translate well for our company and our shareholders.
So …. in conclusion, I plan on sending out this newsletter monthly and hope that over time we will be able to send specific newsletters customized to your interest. For example, I believe that soon we will have enough content to provide a solar newsletter, so to the extent your interest is focused on our solar initiatives, we will focus our content on solar. The same is true for those who are keen to only learn about our biotechnology research tools efforts. Regardless of your specific interest, I look forward to working hard for all of our shareholders, broadening our technology portfolio and reaching commercialization milestones with our unique technologies.
I sincerely appreciate your interest in our company and if you ever have any question or wish to make a specific inquiry, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me. I will always try to personally respond to inquiries and your feedback.
Best Regards,
Mark Baum
President and CEO
Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc.
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