Interview March, 2009

Thierry Braconnier, Strategy Manager at I-CES

Q1 : What benefit do you gain from obtaining your first worldwide patent ?

This first patent brings us true recognition for our technology on an international level.

In fact, I-CES is now one of the companies recognized as having the ability to offer technologies that improve digital exchanges.

Q2 : What will be the technical impact of this patent and the other patents pending publication ?

All you have to do is read the daily news to realize that the digital world is currently facing some major issues:

• - bandwidth for the internet and mobile telephones,
• - technical infrastructure (3G, GSM, taking down antennae, etc.),
• - obtaining information of a constant quality, even if the file size in bytes is smaller.

So, all of the technologies that will help make exchanges more fluid, reduce file sizes without altering their quality, and reduce the environmental impact of these information technologies, if only by limiting the nearly exponential growth of storage servers, are already having a huge technological impact on our future lives.

Today, our patents can provide concrete solutions to these problems being encountered.

Q3 : What about the economic impact ?

The economic impact results in part from what we've just discussed. One concrete example is the music industry, which is trying to gain new momentum. How will it quickly find a technology that offers a new format, and songs in higher-than-standard quality, with an identical file size – in short, a new economic model – if not with our own patents ?

The economic impact of the patent we have obtained, and of those to come, could easily be measured in hundreds of millions of dollars or even more, for a clever industrial company who realizes that our technologies are protected at least until 2029.

Q4 : What does the future hold for I-CES ?

As I've already said, publishing our patents drew attention from the main stakeholders and industrial firms using technologies that require digital compression.

Because it is difficult to be completely invisible, if that were our desire, since our patent was delivered we have been in informal contact with certain industrial firms.

Still, we are aware of our size in relation to the industrial companies in the sector. That's why we have never tried to set ourselves up in opposition to them, and we are convinced that we have the ability to generate real synergy for the entire digital community.

So there's no need to relive the story of David and Goliath.

We should expect that, within a few months at most, I-CES will announce that it or its technologies have been acquired.

We are prepared for an acquisition, especially since estimates of the impact of our technologies on certain sectors could reach several hundred million dollars, either in savings on production costs or simply in direct or indirect revenue (royalties generated by patent licenses).

Today, for the entire planet to continue sharing information under optimal conditions over the coming years, we need technical and economic solutions that can be implemented quickly.

The interest we have attracted suggests to us that we are one such solution.