Kooks and Kabura

Ostensibly, it has been a dormant start to 2006 for our favorite patent licensing company. No new licensees, no public announcements, and still no word on when the big-name licensees would be ready to produce second-generation SPD film in quantity.

But you would not know this from reading the Yahoo! REFR message board.

The titter all this month on that board has been over a description of the 2006 Mazda Kabura concept car which included the statement, "Overhead portions of the glass have adjustable tinting so that the driver can twist a knob on bright days to change the roof’s opacity, as desired, from clear to completely opaque."

Well our favorite investors put two and two together and -- news flash! -- decided that the adjustable tinting material in question must be SPD. Never mind small details such as the windows being reported as going "completely opaque", a characteristic never ascribed to SPD.

Eventually, however, it was confirmed that the material in question was in fact SPD. And when I say "confirmed", I mean that an anonymous alias posted a message asserting, without evidence, that it was confirmed. Meanwhile, someone posted an article from the British Channel 4 website which asserted that the Kabura's roof was in fact "electrochromatic". This all led to an amusing discussion over the distinction between "electrochromic" and "electrochromatic", whether those terms were inclusive or exclusive of SPD, and which of them was the proper expansion of the shorthand "EC". Needless to say, nothing was resolved on any of those scores.

What we do know is this: neither Mazda nor REFR nor any source outside of the message boards has ever once mentioned any relationship between SPD and the Kabura. Mind you, all of those can and have been rationalized away: Mazda is being secretive (about an auto show display?!), REFR may be contractually barred from publicizing (people are on to them!), and the press is lazy (somehow it became their job to do REFR's publicity for them).

But by this time it's a moot point. By the time you read this, the Detroit International Auto Show will have closed. Any press release at this point asserting that the adjustable tint material was in fact SPD will be completely after the fact and therefore ineffective for publicity purposes.

Worse still, such a release would call to mind the Jeep Rescue debacle from the 2004 Detroit auto show. It would mean that twice in a span of two years, an auto company was so underwhelmed by SPD in practice that they deliberately avoided reference to it even
though it was in plain sight. The last time that happened, the major supplier of film shut down a few months later.

Frankly, were I a REFR shareholder, I'd rather forget the whole thing.