ElectriPlast: The Journey Continues

Beginning


with the End


in Mind



By D. W.



Special to the ElectriPlast Blog


[Editor's Note: The epic poem attributed to Homer recounts the long wandering voyage of Odysseus and his many changes of fortune during the journey. The following is a longtime shareholder’s perspective on the long journey of Integral Technologies, its search for a product and how it found itself with the invention of ElectriPlast.]


A company in search of itself

Let me emphatically state the obvious: Integral Technologies is a company with an uncertain past. It has a history of missed deadlines, mounting debt and lawsuits from previous partners and former employees. While Integral has met the legal challenges head on and won each case, these issues have impeded its journey to success.

Along the way, Integral has hobbled along on "crutches" supplied by venture capitalists such as Wellington Management, Swartz Private Equity, angel investors and private investors. Their assistance didn't always come cheaply, but they enabled Integral to remain solvent while it pursued its business plan. Although no startup likes dilution, it is quite remarkable for an OTCBB stock to have roughly 45 million shares outstanding when many other companies have been diluted by hundreds of millions of shares. Overcoming such staggering numbers of shares issued is never easy; however, one strategy is the “reverse split,” which is almost NEVER a positive event for shareholders. CEO Bill Robinson knows this and has resisted every temptation to place Integral Technologies in a dilutive position.

Yeah, but will it sell

Some have ridiculed recent license agreements with Heatron and Jasper Rubber Products as being of infinitesimal value. However, many with whom I am acquainted believe those agreements are precursors to real revenue with household name companies. Moreover, I believe history will actually record those agreements as two of the shrewdest moves Integral has ever made. One could make the argument that only one contract with any one of the “majors” has the potential to put us on the road to profitability very quickly.

Integral Technologies has filed 111 ElectriPlast-based patents, each of which supports up to 1500 consumer items as diverse as molding, medical and military applications. These are multibillion dollar industries. How large a slice of the pie do we need in any of those market areas to become instantly profitable and make our seemingly interminable wait worthwhile? So, the question is not whether or not our technology is disruptive (that is a given for those who choose to see); the question has always been: Will Integral capitalize on it?

I’m betting they will because they are free thinkers and paradigm busters. Bill Robinson, Bill Ince and Tom Aisenbrey are radicals who don’t see problems without seeing solutions. In the world of conductive polymers, they are revolutionaries who are well before their time.

That’s what maps are for

Stephen Covey is world-renowned for his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As the title implies, he lays out the fundamentals of leadership outlined in his “Seven Habits.” The second of his seven habits is, “Begin with the End in Mind,” the basic premise of which is that all things are created twice – first mentally, then physically. With the advent of ElectriPlast, Integral has been on a 4-year journey to refine the mental creation – the plan, design and layout of what they want to do and where they want to go. That time spent in preparation is unquestionably leading to the physical creation, the part that you see unfolding before your very eyes. Some people focus on the miscues of this refining process and point to the principals as little more than misguided miscreants. Although not completely understood, others see their actions as necessary, purposeful and deliberate steps in the journey. Very few, however, have the vision or the ability to take the blank canvas and imagine, see, and create the picture that is ElectriPlast. The Integral management team has that ability.

The answers are in the questions

The following Q & A is offered for those who have expressed uninformed cynicism about Integral Technologies and its intellectual property (IP).

• Q. When ElectriPlast was little more than a startling epiphany, how did company officers handle product publicity? Did they hawk this IP on TV or through Infomercials? A. No! They sought legal advice of one of the nation’s premier intellectual property firms – Preston Gates Ellis.
• Q. While Tom Aisenbrey invented ElectriPlast patents at an incredible rate, uncovering many unique and different applications, what was Bill Robinson doing? A. He retained George O. Sailes, the nation’s premier patent attorney (who had filed many IBM patents), to protect Integral’s IP.
• Q. Before a single dollar of ElectriPlast revenue was produced, what did Integral do? A. The company consulted with some of the most brilliant business strategists in the country – the QuanStar Group – to ensure they were following the right path and doing everything possible to ensure they “did it right” in taking this revolutionary product to market.
• Q. Once word surfaced, first in whispers, then in shouts, that we really had something – that there really was something to all of this conductive polymer talk, did Integral flood the market with press releases to artificially inflate the stock price? A. No! They worked diligently making contacts, developing a supply-chain infastructure, presenting their ideas, networking with the captains of industry – working a solid business plan.

What were they doing?

The Integral team was following Stephen Covey’s second of seven habits: Begin with the end in mind! And that, my friends, is what they’ve been doing these past four years. They began their journey knowing what the final outcome would be and which path would get us there.

Those who have spoken with Bill Robinson, or who have observed him in action know that he exudes confidence. Confidence that the plan is coming together! Confidence that our ElectriPlast IP will be protected! Confidence that it will one day be a household name! Confidence that those investors who stayed the course will not be disappointed! His every action is that of one who believes he’s already arrived: He has the end in mind. Integral has created the path. Can you see it?

The bottom line is that a win will make all the negatives disappear on the very same day that a victory settlement is announced. It all goes away. This opportunity is huge and awe inspiring. A few of us here understand the dynamic that is occurring. That is the sole reason why I am here and have remained so for several years.

We are near the end of this long journey. I will be there to help our visionary founders celebrate.

Will you be there?

ElectriPlast: Business Profile

Molding


the


Future





By Mark Vinson
Northwest Business Monthly – Oct 2006
www.nwbusinessmonthly.com

[ElectriPlast Blog Publisher's Note: This article appears in the "print only" portion of this monthly magazine. I have a copy of the article on hand in PDF format, and will happily forward to any asking. Email me at: electriplast@hotmail.com -- PK sends...]


Integral Technologies Banking on Electrically Conductive Plastic


Inventor Thomas Aisenbrey of Integral Technologies has developed a revolutionary new form of plastic that conducts electricity, allowing it to be used for, among other things, electrical circuit boards.

It’s quite possible that the future of the electronics industry is being molded in an obscure Bellingham laboratory, where plastic is replacing metal as the material of choice for everything from circuit boards to cell phone antennas to wire cable itself.

We're talking something here that can be as big or bigger than Microsoft...

For the past five years, Thomas Aisenbrey of Integral Technologies, Inc. has been developing and perfecting a revolutionary, patented material called ElectriPlast, which can do everything copper and aluminum can in a lighter, cheaper manner. “We're talking something here that can be as big or bigger than Microsoft” said Aisenbrey, a 48-year-old inventor who fell in love with all things scientific as a child – built his first radio as age eight and hasn’t stopped discovering new technologies since.

Anything you can make out of metal, we can make out of plastic now

Aisenbrey came to Bellingham from Colorado in 2001 to work for Integral, building flat antennas for trucks. Shortly thereafter, he realized that a new form of electronically conductive plastic could eventually make wire antennas obsolete. “Anything you can make out of metal, we can make out of plastic now,” he said.

The advantage is that plastic is lighter, stronger and far easier to mold and shape, thus making the manufacturing process less expensive. ElectriPlast which is 40 percent lighter than aluminum and 80 percent lighter than copper, can be used to make antennas, wiring, heating coils, circuit boards, braking systems for vehicles, burners for boats, in pacemakers and other medical devices and much more. In the case of a cell phone, for example, the casing itself can be made from ElectriPlast and double as the antenna, replacing the wire antenna that protrudes from most phones today and improving signal reception.

ElectriPlast “has all the properties of plastic, yet has the ability to conduct electricity,” said Aisenbrey, Integral’s chief technology officer and general manager. “Plastics have changed the world and now ElectriPlast is changing the world of plastics.”

I think 2007 is our breakout year

Or it may someday soon. There aren’t yet any products on the market using ElectriPlast. “I think 2007 is our breakout year,” said Integral CEO Bill Robinson of Vancouver, British Columbia.

The company has recently entered licensing agreements with Heatron, a heating and LED company based in Kansas City, MO., and with Jasper Rubber Products of Jasper, IN. Robinson expects more agreements to be signed by the end of the year.

“We’re licensing the technology to different companies,” said Aisenbrey, adding that Integral has no plans to manufacture products itself.

Integral packages its recipe for ElectriPlast in the form of tiny pellets smaller than a thumbtack. These pellets, which will be mass produced at a warehouse in the Midwest, are packaged, sold and shipped to manufacturers who then pour them into molds to make whatever product is desired.

“There are more than 15,000 different resins we can put our recipe into,” Robinson said.

Integral markets ElectriPlast at trade shows and has been featured in Popular Science magazine. Ironically, the entire concept of ElectriPlast is so revolutionary to some that it has required time to gain widespread acceptance in the marketplace.

“A lot of people aren’t molders out there,” Aisenbrey said. “You have engineers that know nothing about plastics, nothing about molding. There are some hurdles out there that you have to overcome. We’re working now with the molders of the world, not the electronic guys. The electronic guys shy away from something they don’t know anything about.”

The publicly traded company reported a net loss of $459,000 for the second quarter of 2006 and more than $20 million since it’s founding in 1996. But those figures aren’t surprising to Robinson and co-founder Bill Ince of Bellingham.

“We’re a research and development company,” Robinson said. “The reality is, it takes from five to seven years once you have a handle on your product.”

Integral received a $6 million investment from the Wellington Investment Group of Boston in 2004, which “allowed us to write our full patent portfolio,” Robinson said. Integral has 18 patents on file and applications for nearly 100 more pending, each covering a specific use of ElectriPlast.

Robinson, who has successfully managed and later sold other companies in the past, won’t rule out the possibility of selling Integral someday if ElectriPlast becomes the latest industry revolution.

“I think this is one of the biggest things you’ll see transforming manufacturing in our lifetime,” Aisenbrey said…

ElectriPlast: Prolific Inventors

Captured,

The Eureka

Moment!




By Vince S.
ElectriPlast Blog Editor



Creativity: Rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.


Innovation, the need to create or invent, is a human trait that appeared in the earliest hominids. They invented stone tools to provide food and protection, which, in turn, ensured their survival. What wasn't invented was discovered serendipitously as discovery worked hand in hand with invention. Fire, stone and metalworking, the domestication of animals, farming, etc., all guaranteed our place at the top of the food chain, while enabling early man to create more tools.

Greek philosopher Plato coined the phrase, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but it was prehistoric man who paved the way for Plato’s theory by putting inventions to the test. In all likelihood, no other task so closely benchmarked the evolution of humans than his innovative spirit and his ability to invent what he needed to find his way through seven million years of human history.

From the very beginning, man has been forced to innovate or perish. From the first system of spoken communication to the cutting edge technology required to put a man on Mars, each notch on the timeline of history has been notable for inventions. And while the greatest minds of all time might disagree as to what comprises the top 1,000, 100 or ten inventions that have been of the greatest benefit to man, they would most likely agree that man's inventive spirit has always been driven by need and imagination.

A list of the greatest inventions depends on whom you ask; however, after considerable research, here are a few that represent man’s inexorable march through time: Language, math, the mechanical clock, the printing press, the steam engine, the battery, the light bulb, the telegraph, recorded sound, the telephone, the radio, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, the computer and the Internet.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

So thought Charles H. Duell, the myopic Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents in 1899. Left up to Duell and other vision-challenged members of the “flat earth society,” innovation would have been unnecessary beyond New Year's Eve 1899. Fortunately for mankind, vision, innovation and creativity were still at work when the new year dawned. Inventors, working on “disruptive technologies” (sound familiar) in the pre-computer era, were known for the quality, magnitude and prolificacy of their inventions.

[Blognote: A disruptive technology is one that dramatically renders the prior art--a U.S. Patent Office term--superfluous. For example, when the automobile was invented, the horse and buggy era was doomed to become a footnote in the history of transportation.]

In terms of quality and magnitude, the following abridged list of master inventors spanned centuries and impacted billions of people: Gutenberg (printing press), Franklin (bifocals, etc.), Edison (light bulb, etc.), Watt (steam engine), Bell (telephone, etc.), Volta (battery), Tesla (radio, etc.) and others. Clearly, their credentials as inventors of disruptive technologies cannot be challenged.

Prolific inventors are rare.

According to the Institute of Invention and Innovation, “Inventors are rare and prolific inventors are rare indeed.” Less than 1% of the US adult population has been granted a patent. Of that number, only 10% are considered prolific inventors; i.e., those who have obtained at least five patents over the course of their career.

Prolificacy, the third and final characteristic of the master inventor, is interesting because inventors in the Information Age have the advantage of technology to aid their search for solutions to problems. A random selection of some of the many prolific inventors, the number of patents they were granted and a few of their inventions are:

• Shunpei Yamazaki (1,432 patents, semiconductors, etc.);
• Thomas Edison (1,093, light bulb, phonograph, etc.);
• Francis H. Richards (894, golf ball machine, etc.);
• Melvin De Groote (925, oil industry, etc.);
• Elihu Thomson (696, electric welding, alternating current technology, etc.);
• Jerome Lemelson (597, bar-code reader, etc.);
• Edwin Land (535, Polaroid, etc.);
• George Westinghouse (361, electric range, etc.);
• Dean Kamen (150, Segway, etc.);
• Nikola Tesla (111, radio, etc.), and numerous other inventors.

Innovation took on a whole new meaning in the Computer Age, when many thousands of new products and techniques were created. In the age of “bits and bytes,” it is possible for a single concept to have a profound effect, a “sea change,” on innovation.

Later, on the timeline of human achievement, another seminal event occurred in the conductive materials arena when Integral Technologies announced the invention of ElectriPlast. Like all disruptive technologies, its birth was barely noticed.

A very happy new year!

Integral Technologies recently announced it had been granted its 19th ElectriPlast patent, a far cry from the 50,837 patents General Electric has received to date! Also, Integral stated that it had filed 37 patents by October 2004. Since, the approval and issuance of ElectriPlast patents has taken up to two years from the date of filing, 18 more ElectriPlast patents should be approved by the end of October 2006.

Furthermore, with an additional 74 patents filed since February 2005, Integral will start 2007 with even more patents. Bear in mind that each patent represents more than one licensing opportunity because manufacturers and their rivals will compete to revise their product lines with a material that conducts electricity better than copper, but is 80% lighter, and is as strong as aluminum, but is 40% lighter. (Attention Boeing: Copper and aluminum, important components in aircraft, can make the Dreamliner lighter and even more fuel efficient.)

What will all this do for Integral’s bottom line? Yes! I thought you’d say that!

Getting back to innovation and prolific inventors, the Integral Technologies laboratory in Bellingham is an incubator for ElectriPlast inventor, Thomas Aisenbrey. With 111 patents granted and in process, his fertile mind generates ideas faster than a Petri dish creates cultures. His patents cover ElectriPlast use in cell phones, PDAs, antennas, GPS devices, computers, automobiles, aerospace applications, communications, electronics, military applications, medical devices, musical instruments, toys, and many other areas.

At one point, this prolific inventor once said there may be as many as 1,500 uses for each ElectriPlast patent. Moreover, Aisenbrey said that 300 patents is a logical number for him to target. (He is about one-third of the way there, folks!) If you consider patents created by users of ElectriPlast, another 100 or better might be created. Now, extrapolate the numbers by Aisenbrey’s 1,500-use theory, and you will get some absolutely stunning figures!

In terms of Prolific Inventors, that would accelerate our “ace,” Tom Aisenbrey, up the depth charts, putting him in some very illustrious company. At that point, the Institute of Invention and Innovation might have to rethink their theory about what constitutes a prolific inventor.

Imagine. Thomas Edison and Thomas Aisenbrey listed on the same page.

ElectriPlast: The Journey

A Trivial Pursuit...



Or the Pursuit

of Excellence?




By D.W.



Special to the ElectriPlast
Blog


Trivial Pursuit is a board game where progress is determined by a player's ability to answer general knowledge or popular culture questions. The game was conceived in 1979 by Scott Abbott, a sports editor for the Canadian Press, and Chris Haney, photo editor for the Montreal Gazette.

There are those who would have you believe that Integral’s pursuit – that of taking its intellectual property in the form of ElectriPlast to market -- is a trivial pursuit, or a pursuit of the trivial. One doesn’t have to look too far to find those who attempt to marginalize or minimize it.

The obvious question is: Why?

Although we are not naïve enough to believe that their motivations for doing so are “pure” in that they are the self-appointed protectors of the stock universe and not merely driven by nefarious designs, it could well be that they just don’t get it – they don’t understand.


“Electrical Toy” Summarily Dismissed

Allow me to share a brief example of how there have always been those who doubted, mocked and ridiculed what they did not understand as well as those who possessed the uncanny ability to see beyond what “is” to what “can and will be.” The following few paragraphs were taken from the opening of an article in the October issue of Business 2.0 titled, ‘The Next Disrupters’ written by Erick Schoenfeld and Jeanette Borzo:

““What use could this company make of an electrical toy?” With those words, William Orton, the president of Western Union, dismissed the newfangled gadget offered him for $100,000 in 1876. Other leading lights echoed his skepticism. “An interesting novelty,” financier J. Pierpont Morgan huffed. “But the telephone has no commercial application.”

The telephone, as it turned out, did have a commercial application or two. It was one of the greatest disruptive technologies in history, changing forever the method of human communication, creating whole new industries, destroying others, and savaging those who failed to grasp its implications – including Orton’s Western Union, which saw its telegraph-based networks come under fierce attack by the rapid spread of Alexander Graham Bell’s electrical toy.

That’s the way it is with disruptive technologies: Almost no one fully comprehends what a shock to the existing order they represent until well after the rattling has begun. You think those guys in the cave knew what they were really onto when they clacked some rocks together and got fire? In our era, as recently as 15 years ago few could have imagined that this curiosity called the Internet would utterly challenge the way we work, play and challenge incumbent senators in Connecticut.”

Make no mistake about it –

Integral Technologies and its ElectriPlast technology, with 111 patents approved or pending, is setting the stage to become the “it,” a true disrupter in the conductive polymer industry. This Blog, this article and all those who would presume to speak for Integral Technologies intend to show that their pursuit, far from being trivial, is the pursuit of excellence.

Future Blog pieces will show the path they have followed and are following in that noble pursuit.