The right product at the right time

As you review the outstanding technology featured in this "Best in Test" issue, don't underestimate the value of an outstanding product to a company's success. Zinovy Shnaper knows this well. In a down market for manufacturing, Imperx, the Florida company that the Russian immigrant founded in July 2001 with colleague Petkov Dinev, has enjoyed strong sales growth largely because it chose the right product at the right time— a frame grabber for laptop computers. "We looked around and found that no one was really filling this market niche," says Shnaper, whose background includes both electrical engineering and business management.

Two and half years later, Imperx has sold more than 5300 frame grabbers, added faster models, and adapted the frame grabbers to run on PDAs. This fall, the company launched a new line of cameras for high-end machine-vision uses, and earlier this month it unveiled a 2-Mpixel, high-definition camera for surveillance applications.

But the track record with the initial product, in applications ranging from medical to military to industrial, was the real door opener. "The credibility we established with frame grabbers for the mobile computing market made distributors willing to look at our new camera line," says Shnaper, who spends about half of his time on the road working with customers and a global network of 28 distributors. Only 18 of the frame grabbers have been returned because of malfunctions, mostly the result of the beating that laptops take in military and other harsh environments.

While Shnaper's success certainly has been boosted by a career that has spawned wide contacts within the military community—he was a subcontractor in the Strategic Defense Initiative—he prefers to focus more on the importance of having a good business model. "You've got to develop the right product, work hard at selling it, and stay within your budget," he says. "Looking back, it was a blessing that we couldn't obtain outside funding to develop a high-end camera as our first product." Shnaper adds that too many start-up companies get bogged down in R&D. "You really need to get your first product to market within 3 to 6 months."

Will the next few years offer a better climate for budding technical entrepreneurs? Shnaper thinks so, especially in the imaging market. Noting the boom in security applications, he points to a new DARPA report predicting that cameras used in surveillance will skyrocket from the current worldwide installed base of 40 million to some 300 million by the end of 2005. It looks like the right time for the right products.

Contact Lawrence D. Maloney at lmaloney@reedbusiness.com