Architect of nothing

Yes, REFR has recovered some of its losses today, and of course the longs are dancing in the streets. Never mind that they're celebrating prices that, until a week ago, they were saying REFR could never possibly fall to.

I'll give them this, they're a happy lot when they want to be. The stock rises, and they're delighted; it falls and they're ecstatic, because it's another excuse to do their favorite thing in the world, and that's claiming to be buying more REFR stock. I say "claiming" because I doubt more than 10% of the claimed buys are actually real. But hey, you call the bottom enough times, eventually one will stick. For a while.

Anyway on to today's PR retrospective. This one is a PR and photo gallery in one, and is a summation of all of SPD Inc. exploits outside of their final appearances in the DaimlerChrysler vehicles.

You can review this for yourself, of course, but for posterity's sake I'll run down the list. First, we have an office in Jakarta, Indonesia. You'll note throughout that these installations are scattered in out-of-the-way, or otherwise unspecified locations. Almost as if they didn't want anyone checking up on any of them. Anyway, the office contains two chairs and a table too small for any practical use, even as an interview room. Furthermore, we don't actually see photos of the SPD turned on (clear), so it might as well be just a bunch of darkened glass. The doors built in to the walls than form a complete circle are snazzier than anything SPD could hope to be, anyhow.

Then we have a few glass panels in a Singapore office building. Once again, we only see photos of the dark state. This time the SPD isn't upstaged by any cool architectural features, but as a result the whole thing looks kind of dumpy. It's a glass door. And a glass wall. Whoop de doo.

Finally, we come to the big finish, a pool in an unidentified location in Greece. This one, at least, seems to show panels in both light and dark states, though it seems clear (har!) that regardless of the film's state it's not difficult to see straight through the panels. So much for privacy! More curiously, those panels don't even seem to be hooked up to anything. This may be just as well, as having household current that close to a swimming pool would certainly make me wary. Oh, and in a nice piece of photographic mastery, the photographer's legs are clearly visible in the second pane from the left. Nice work!

Amazingly, despite all these lovely installations (no mention is made as to whether they were actually paid for), SPD Inc. was even then in the process of being written down by its joint owners and was less than a year away from disappearing. Such a pity.

It's also worth a reminder that it has now been a full year since SPD Inc.'s shutdown, and the "competition" which supposedly drove them out of business has yet to actually materialize. I wonder how long before any of the promoters admit that competition might not have been the reason after all.