Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

Sales cycles with the introduction of any new technology are lengthy. All our initial trials and projects are still in place and we are building on them on a daily basis, as recent contract wins show. We are not tying ourselves to any one sector or deal so our exposure to lengthy lead-in times will hopefully be mitigated.

Adoption of new technologies does take time, but we are now seeing evidence that the technology has real traction – once a Timestrip is included with a product it delivers tangible benefits to brand owners, who then look to include Timestrip on other new and existing products in their business.

Coming to market was a big step for us but it really provided the extra profile and funding we needed to start to fulfil our ambitions for this technology.

We have encountered a range of challenges along the way, one of which was making sure that we have sufficient production capacity to exploit the demand that is building up for the technology. We addressed this by strengthening our manufacturing capability and bringing more production machines on line which gives customers the confidence to place orders more quickly.

The key issue for us is continually being available in order to go out to meet potential new customers, no matter where they are based. Hence we spend a lot of our time travelling and meeting multi-national brands.

This, however, is a good problem to have as demand for our technology is increasingly being driven by regulatory changes, especially in Europe, which are affecting the way big brands do business.

We have deals now with household names like Nestle, Whirlpool, and Hamilton Beach/Febreze®. So we are building critical mass and establishing a good sales pipeline. We are now very focused on converting tests and trials into full scale product launches, as well as converting opportunities such as our contract win in August, which is expected to deliver $3 million in revenues over the first three years. We are concentrating on commercialisation and are delivering very encouraging progress – as highlighted by recent announcements.

We have many plans in the R & D phase at the moment, which is crucial to keeping Timestrip at the cutting edge of smart label technology. One of the crucial areas for us is actual integration of the Timestrip into something like the lid of a product so it is activated on first opening, without the consumer needing to do anything extra. We are very excited by developments in this area and the significant potential for this sort of product.

We believe that Timestrip has the potential to become as standard as a bar code on consumer products of all descriptions. We aim to be to product packaging what Intel® has become to computers and to build a global brand in the process. Market trends are very much in our favour. We have passed the tipping point on issues such as food waste and product freshness and consumers and brand owners alike recognise that our technology has real value in helping solve the longstanding dilemma of not knowing how long something has been open for or how long it has been in use.