Our most important milestone as a company in the past year was joining NASA’s “Ride the Light” project. “Ride the Light” marks our first major commercial contract to develop laser power beaming as a power source for vehicles – and with NASA no less! This project will impact our future for some time to come, too.

In addition to the “Ride the Light” project, other highlights of 2011 include:

• Another hugely successful exhibit of our technology at SPIE, including a whole exhibit space devoted to our historic free-flying quadrocopter flight at the Future of Flight Aviation Center.
• Presentation at “NASA Day on the Hill,” where we were the only private company invited by NASA to have a display booth.
• One of the key presenters at the Space Power Workshop being held in Los Angeles. LaserMotive’s Tom Nugent spoke on “Transitioning Power Beaming from Terrestrial to Satellite Applications” before this crowd of satellite power experts, which featured speakers from the leading space technology organizations in the public and private sectors.
• Major media coverage ranging from Fox News to Photonics Online.

In 2012, we will continue to pursue additional contracts – details of which we can’t discuss at present but will be sure to share when the time comes. In addition, we’re looking at the possibility of more and expanded demonstrations of our laser power beaming wireless recharging systems. We’ll let you know as we get closer and details are finalized.

Here’s to a successful and prosperous 2012!

“Laser power beaming continues to gain awareness, both with industry professionals as well as the public,” says Tom, “and the interest in the general news media at this level helps confirm this.”

In addition to WOFL, LaserMotive had meetings with select trade media during the Exhibition, including Photonics Online and Unmanned Vehicles Magazine. We’ll post more as coverage comes out.

In addition, we attended the AUVSI Program Review Air Day. We made some good contacts and learned quite a bit as well. LaserMotive also presented to a group at the Pentagon, as well as presented to a defense venture capital group that was were very interested. During all this, we continue work on our entry for the next Power Beaming Competition to be held later this year. Although the dates are still tentative, we expect that this should take place in the second or third quarter of this year.  We’ll share more details as we learn them.

We continue to focus on laying the groundwork for our next level of growth in the upcoming weeks.  All in all, we’ve taken significant steps and made significant contacts in this direction in the past weeks that we believe will come to fruition in upcoming weeks and months.

On our first day, we did roughly 7 rows in 7 hours, i.e., 1 row/hour. This rate was much below the required average. Why so slow? Dave describes it as the “kid in a candy store” effect — there was so much to see and so many people to talk to, we spent a lot of time talking with vendors at lots of booths.

Today (day 2), we were more aggressive, and wound up covering 17 rows in 7 hours, or ~2.4 rows/hour (even with taking time to say hello to many of the sponsors of Team LaserMotive). That’s a little better than the ‘required’ average, but leaves 16 rows for the last day, a day when we will also be leaving early to catch a plane. In order to cover everything, we will need to average 3.2 rows/hour. Certain categories of product are represented by LOTS of businesses, so now that we’ve seen some of them we can breeze by others. But I suspect we’ll be sprinting down the last few rows before we head to the airport Thursday….

From the start of 2010 and just on the heels of its win in the NASA-sponsored Power Beaming Competition (bringing home a purse prize of nearly $1 million), LaserMotive has garnered a number of business and technical achievements throughout the year that we believe will lay the groundwork for even greater ones in the upcoming year. Among the highlights of 2010 are:

• Starting the commercialization of laser power beaming, as LaserMotive used some of the NASA prize money to hire two team members full time.
• Release of our white paper on power beaming to UAVs, which garnered a surprisingly large amount of publicity.
• Attendance at AUVSI trade show in August, along with our public demo of the laser-powered micro-helicopter, flying for as long as 6 hours at a time and setting a record.
• Demo in October of a free-flying laser-powered quadrocopter, barely 2 months after meeting our partners in the endeavor (Ascending Technologies), and setting a number of technical records in the process.
• Receipt of a variety of industry awards, including Seattle Business Magazine’s “Innovators of the Year,” the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum, and winners of the MIT Enterprise Forum’s NW Startup DEMO.

There was lots of work that generated interest from potential customers and partners. We can’t say much about those discussions at present, but hope to be able to share more with you in 2011 as these relationships come to fruition.

We’d like to thank all of you for your support in the past year, and wish you the very best in the upcoming New Year!

Check back next week to see the completely new look!