Way back in 2005, Bob Werner of Euclid Discoveries gave an interview to Roger Wood. Through the magic of mp3 storage, that interview is still available on the web. Here are some of the great quotes from this interview:

Bob: EuclidVision is an object-based video compression technology built with mathematics and computer vision, which will deliver orders of magnitude, 4-15 times the performance of the world standard MPEG-4. That’s a lot but essentially what that could evolve into is you could turn your iPod into a DVD player. [...]

Roger: This seems like the right product at the right moment.

[...]

Roger: Bob what stage is this product in? I know you’ve probably done research and development, are you past that stage?

Bob: We’re past that stage. We’re ready for commercial deployment. Our exit strategy to our investors has always been when we are ready for commercial deployment the company will be sold privately. [...] We’re at the commercial deployment stage now, and we are privately seeking purchasers.
[...]

Bob: We raised money in seven different rounds. In each round, we succeeded in coming up with the technology we needed to get to the next round. [...] We went through seven phases to get to this point. Its stressful, but well worth it. The angels seem to like it.
[...]

Bob says that he and Richard were unable to get funding from west coast investors (too skeptical), and he is proud to say that he was able to get the majority of his money from investors close to home in Kentucky and Tennessee, investors who had never been offered this kind of deal before.

Bob talks a lot about how his management of his angel investors is done by constant communication, and how this keeps them happy with the relationship.

Not much public news since 2005, and of course, this leads to all sorts of speculation and rumor. If the company was up for sale almost five years ago, what happened? And how much more money had to be raised in the last five years? How much have the investors from those previous rounds lost to dilution?

Maybe a lot of questions, but if the angels are happy, as Bob claims, no worries for Euclid Discoveries.

Philip James Whitley raised over $5 million dollars in funding for his company, NearZero, promising revolutionary data compression results. After stringing along investors for the better part of a decade, Whitley is facing his day in court before the Serious Fraud Office of New Zealand.

It’s a long story, both familiar and sad, of people cashing in their life savings to make a fortune on a revolutionary technology. A technology that Whitley still claims exists, but so far has been unable to produce. (In fact he claims he destroyed it intentionally.)

Sachin wrote about it here a couple of years ago. You can now get an update from the papers in New Zealand.

Testimony in the trial had Whitely proclaiming he was “richer than Bill Gates.” Turns out that now he is now bankrupt and facing possible jail time, but he had a good ride while it lasted. Failure to map an adequate exit strategy seems to have been his biggest weakness.