Timely news?

We may have finally gotten an idea as to what was behind the strange little run, on no news (apart from Harary's long-anticipated promotion) and very little volume, that REFR has had the past two months, from a close of $1.60 last December 5th to over $4.00 today.

The key appears to be a project that had gotten quite a bit of hype on the message boards and which I thought I had blogged about myself, but apparently not. According to the press release from REFR licensee Innovative Glass (true to form as ever, REFR is not a party to the PR, but gets a nice plug for its ticker symbol) they have finally completed the installation of what is apparently the largest SPD-related project ever, at the Indiana University Health Information and Translational Sciences Building in Indianapolis.

The size of the project seems fairly impressive, involving a total of 68 interior and exterior panels (although the average panel size isn't stated). But what sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb was the length of the project -- three years.

Over those same three years, REFR itself burned about $12 million, so unless Innovative scored $120 million out of the whole deal, this doesn't exactly turn REFR into a money-making operation. REFR is simply not going to get rich off this "one project at a time" business, especially if such projects are going to be that drawn-out.

Note that this isn't the first SPD project Innovative has done, and REFR investors are still waiting for the big fat royalty check (not to mention the wave of publicity) from that.

We'll wait and see where this takes us (not very far for very long, so far today), but with REFR's built-in 90-day lag on royalty payments, it will be August before we get any hard data on how, or even if, this impacts REFR's bottom line. By which time, REFR will almost certainly have priced its next stock offering.

And so the music continues on.