Camera venture gets support from Alaskans

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — A pair of Anchorage angel investors with a bent for science and finance have helped a high-tech company go public on a Canadian stock exchange.

Mead Treadwell and John Wanamaker, with partners, recently invested $750,000 in Immersive Media Corp., according to documents filed with Canadian securities regulators. Immersive makes a cutting-edge camera that shoots 360-degree images in real-time. The camera was used by the U.S. Capitol Police in President Bush's inauguration motorcade in January, the investors said.

Alaska — a rough-around-the-edges bastion of fishermen, loggers and oil-field roughnecks — seems an unlikely venue for venture capitalists.

"People say you can't do venture capital in Alaska," Wanamaker said. "Well, it turns out you can!"

Immersive, based in Portland, Ore., and Calgary, Alberta, sold its first stock to the general public in March. Its shares are traded on the Canadian venture-capital exchange, a sister organization of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Treadwell, Wanamaker and some Canadian investors recapitalized Immersive early last year as the company made its first sales of the camera and prepared to go public this year, they said. The fresh money helped take the company's technology from a research project to a commercial product, said Myles McGovern, Immersive's chief executive.

The company has lost $8.5 million since its inception, including $1.7 million in the last six months of last year, according to financial statements filed with Canadian regulators.

The market for Immersive's camera is primarily the law enforcement, security and defense sectors, according to Treadwell, a former Alaska deputy commissioner of environmental conservation. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the need for high-tech surveillance equipment has apparently skyrocketed.

"The homeland security market has just burgeoned," he said.

The camera, called Dodeca 200, looks like a small soccer ball with lenses all over. The lenses are actually wide-angle video sensors that capture a spherical image of whatever they're looking at.

The cameras can be mounted atop police cars or military vehicles, for example, to capture 360-degree images that can be either transmitted live to people monitoring the pictures on computers elsewhere or stored for later use. People watching the images feel like they're at the spot where the action is happening.