Hi all, I came across Graham Griffiths about 10 years ago and...

Hi all,

I came across Graham Griffiths about 10 years ago and got to know the NEA story, the company, the product, the people and market quite closely and became a top 20 holder.

After Graham left NEA, we still stayed in touch 3-4 times a year as he bounced around various opportunities and gave me the heads-up on Pointerra in early in 2015. Over 3 meetings he tried to explain to me the concept, business plan and value proposition of 3DP but I suffered a severe bout of professional myopia the couldn't see this much beyond an engineer's useful plaything. I also felt they were getting severely ripped off (=screw*d) on the backdoor listing so I stayed away from the initial CR.

Several times a year, Graham would politely remind me to have a look; I'd pull up the announcements and could still not see what Graham wanted me to see.

Until about a year ago......as NEA's real value propositions started to be reflected in its SP.

Lets be very clear here: NEA is (now):

1) NOT at all about flying planes,
2) very little about camera technology,
3) a bit about photo-metric, 3D processing software,
4) a bit about high def 2D and 3D visuals and tools
5) quite a lot about big data cloud management (they have several tens of Petabytes in their libraries = bloody huge),
6) becoming much more about analytics and finally,
7) intelligence (the very big, longer term value driver).

Mega data sets of Petabyte are now common; Zetabytes are close and storage hardware technology is advancing at an amazing pace. So the next stage not just the processors to deal with the sets but the analytics/algorithms that can run through them.

This is something that NEA is becoming good at. Its not about hiDef pictures; its about what additional data, analytics and algorithms you can attach or use behind/to each pixel.

NEA's primary data is stored much like a 3D pyramid in space with certain degrees of accuracy for each of the 3D coordinates (more in the horizontal and less in the vertical).

Pointerra has a much more accurate point in space data product model which is different to NEA's country-size volume products. And I can readily see businesses using BOTH platforms....especially if 3DP goes down the same analytics/intelligence path as NEA.

No doubt, many of NEA's learnings have been transferred to 3DP which gives me a lot of confidence. I've spoken with 3DP management over the past 6 months and I believe they have a high value-add product that is being taken up by POC clients quite rapidly (much quicker than NEA's product was initially).

They are small, they will make mistakes, they will miss the occasional target, but I really do think they have something more than an "engineers plaything".

I'm in.

Cheers,