Top prize eludes firm from Orono Las Vegas competition still yields key contacts

ORONO – Officials with a local software company may not have come back from a Las Vegas spatial technology competition with the top prize, but that doesn’t mean they came back empty-handed.

Chris Frank, chief executive officer of Intelligent Spatial Technologies, said Monday that he and his colleagues came back with enough business cards to make a stack about an inch and a half high. But it’s not the business cards that the company finds important. It’s the contacts the fledgling firm made as it’s trying to find partners for bringing its technology to the market.

“We did not win, but that did not deter the traffic we got at our booth,” Frank said. “We made a lot of key connections.”

IST went to Las Vegas earlier this month to a competition sponsored by Navteq, a Chicago-based digital mapping company that provides the databases used in most car navigation systems. IST’s goal at the event was to showcase its iPointer software, which would enable digital hand-held devices such as cell phones to determine which direction they are facing.

The idea behind the technology, Frank has said, is to allow users to download certain information about a given landmark simply by pointing a hand-held device at that landmark, be it a business or a building.

The firm is looking to line up partners, such as cell phone service providers, with which it hopes to make its iPointer software available to consumers, Frank said. The company that came in first in Las Vegas, winning $50,000 in cash and $75,000 in Navteq data, already has partners and has raised about $10 million in capital venture funds, which is something IST also is seeking, he said.

The Orono company has some good partnership prospects, however, such as SK Telecom, a South Korean firm that, according to Frank, has a 120 percent market share in its native country. Its seemingly impossible share is so high, he said, because many South Koreans own two cell phones each.

“They’ve got everything that we want,” Frank said of the foreign firm.