On My Way Home

Hello everyone.  I’m on my way home from my tradeshow in Orlando.  I’m using the wifi on the plane-It’s butt slow but seems plenty fast enough to update a text-only post.  I think I’m somewhere over Texas now.

This was my first extended stay away from home-I think.  It was quite stressful on the first night-I didn’t get to sleep to nearly 5am local time.  It’s a good thing I left the drapes open and the sunlight was bright in the morning.  I was worried about Satomi, the girls, and my Mom’s operation.  It was difficult to keep my focus.

The “PowerGen” show is an annual show for the power generation industry that alternates between Orlando and Las Vegas.  The last one I attended was in Vegas back in 2001, I think.  It’s just as big as I remember it.  Many of the bigger companies skipped the show because of the slow economy.  I didn’t undertand why until I realized that the cost to exhibit there was almost $40 per square foot and most of the bigger exhibitors had over 1000ft2 each.  And that’s just for the display space.

If all of my plans come to fruition, I hope to have a small booth at the 2011 Las Vegas show.  I spoke to many colleauges from back in my Mitsubishi days.  It was reassuring that they all remembered me-I guess having a hanging name tag helps the memory a bit.  I spoke to several key industry players about my Patent (without the technical details of course) and all agreed that there is a definite market for it.  But all also said that I need to build a prototype and test it first.  If it works, the retrofit market could be well over a hundred units.  For those that don’t know, that’s a lot.

I also spoke with several potential clients for engineered equipment.  The first step is to get on their potential vendors lists and this show has allowed us to start the process.

We are still discussing the options for licensing my patent.  The interest is still high and I will be meeting with our ptential licensees after we get home.  I spoke with them informally at the show and all are optimistic.  I was very happy to hear that it wasn’t necessary about the cost of the license but how my patent would work with their market strategy and the details of implementation.

Overall I am very happy with the trip.  Mitsubishi got us free tickets and the we used our airline miles to pay for the airfare.  The entire trip cost us only a few hundred dollars.  It was well worth our effort and was very motivating-Just what I needed.

I hope to be home in my bed in about 3 hours.