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FTR Ltd.
(FTR: AX) |
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CEOCFO Current
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FTR Ltd. develops and sells digital
recording and content management systems specifically related to the court,
hearing room and legislative markets
Technology
Steve Townsend FTR Pty Ltd (FTR: AX – Australian Exchange) is the world's leading supplier of courtroom digital audio recording systems. FTR Pty Ltd and its U.S. subsidiary FTR Ltd. are owned by FTR Holdings, a public company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The U.S. office in Phoenix, Arizona provides administration, sales, marketing, product management, and technical support, and R&D and production are handled in the company’s Perth, Western Australia headquarters. In December of 1998, FTR introduced its latest product offering, FTR Gold™, a truly open, computer-based digital recording solution. FTR Gold captures, stores, and manages digital audio and associated text. As court and hearing rooms switch from tapes to CDs, court administrators, judges, lawyers and transcribers all benefit from faster, more accurate and less costly access to court records. According to Mr. Steve Townsend, President and CEO of FTR Pty Ltd., “FTR is the only solution that is flexible enough to let all courtroom participants take advantage of the complete digital record. For example, lawyers can purchase a copy of FTR Log Notes for around US$300.00. A lawyer, paralegal or judge can take notes using the Log Notes application. At the end of the day he or she can simply request a copy of the audio on CD, or through our online service called ForTheRecord.com. All notes can be associated with the corresponding audio and synchronized with it in a two step process. Once that is done, the notes are fully searchable and will instantly navigate to the audio that is requested.” As to the position of FTR in their industry, Mr. Townsend tells us, “Since changing our focus to a simpler product in 1998, one of the things we have done very well is convey to customers that this is a transition from cassette tape recorders to CD. That is all this is about-- nothing fancy, not a revolution but simply an evolution, which is a good message for the pragmatic person; and courts tend to be very traditional and very pragmatic. FTR is the market leader. We spend an extraordinary amount of time talking to our niche market, we are at every trade show and we have been in every publication for the past five or six years now. Therefore, I think you would be hard pressed to find a court system in North America that was not aware of us.” The future for FTR is filled with expansion plans. “The next year and beyond is really about two things for FTR,” states Mr. Townsend. “First, we will move into our adjacent markets-- markets that have similar demands and will reference our core market where we already have a leadership position. Examples would be police and other law enforcement applications, such as interview rooms and recording in police cruisers. City councils and school boards have been fairly good “adjacent” markets for us already; we estimate that there are a hundred thousand or more recording venues for school board meetings and city council meetings alone. Therefore, we will make an aggressive move towards that market within the next six months. In the education market, we may be 18 months off, but it is a very attractive market when you look at the potential of online learning, and the concept of recording class room events so students can participate in the process using electronic notes and audio, or even audio and video. We intend to geographically as well. For example, in Europe we see a lot of potential right now. The second part of the strategy, and most significant, is that FTR will begin to promote our underlying linking technology. We recently added a developer’s section on our website that allows customers and third party developers to have complete access to our application programming interface (API). With this, they can embed FTR’s linking technology in other applications. For example, the link you create when you use our Log Notes application can be placed in Microsoft Word. So if you prefer to take your notes in Microsoft Word, FTR can be used to allow the user to insert small time stamps, each of which acts as a hyperlink to the audio and associated content. So you’re no longer using FTR Log Notes to manage your content, but Word instead.” Mr. Townsend tells potential investors, “I think the difference for us is that we have actually spent time building a very solid balance sheet; we are sitting with a good amount of cash at about 5.5 million dollars (Australian). Both of the core companies are very profitable, and continue to show revenue growth. The digital recording business showed revenue growth again in US Dollar terms, over the prior year. I think that the best message that we can send is that we have not spent a lot of time trying to hype anything or buck the trend because we knew the technology sector was going to remain depressed for some time. We believe the appropriate and responsible action to take is to shore up the balance sheet to make sure we come out of this very healthy. Therefore, we are a good bargain right now which is the advantage to investors that are looking at us. I also think that from a management standpoint, we have been very responsible and will continue to foresee good growth.” FTR Gold consists of three core components: FTR
Reporter™, FTR Player Plus™, and FTR Log Notes™. FTR Reporter provides
digital audio recording, archiving, playback and duplication. FTR Player
Plus is available free and is downloadable from the Company’s website. FTR
Player Plus provides full-featured playback of audio, immediate access to
testimony, fast reproduction, and transcription capability. FTR Log Notes
is an electronic note-taking software application that makes it easy to
annotate digital audio files for dynamic referencing. Various optional
components are available so customers can design a system that meets their
specific needs. FTR ReporterDeckTM is a hardware-based solution
that provides a turnkey digital audio recording and can be used in place of
FTR Reporter if a customer prefers a simple "plug-n-play" system. Both FTR
Reporter and FTR ReporterDeck include CD and network archive capabilities. |
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