Next time you watch Mulder and Scully hunting down some poisonous pariah of the paranormal, crank up the volume.
Listen. Hear that QSound?
No? Well, the producers of TV’s X-Files do. It’s right there on the soundtrack, even if QSound Labs’ 3D audio-enhancement signal can be too subtle for uneducated ears.
The point is, QSound’s still kicking. And few Calgary corporations summon so many associations — some pleasing, some less so — from the wellspring of recent recall. Madonna dabbled in QSound. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters wallowed in it. Sting’s engineers used it on his pristine recording, The Soul Cages.
Then there’s Larry Ryckman — the ex-president/CEO with the high-gloss hair and the rented limo.
In Larry’s day, QSound Labs was known as Archer Communications. And Ryckman’s subsequent ban from trading securities in Canada is too fresh in public memory to rehash here.
But if current president/CEO David Gallagher gets chatting to a seatmate on a domestic flight, whose name comes up?
Sting’s? Madonna’s? Guess again. It’s always: “Wasn’t that Larry Ryckman’s company?”
“And I’ll go: ‘Well, y’know, he left almost 10 years ago.’ There’s been a few Grey Cups since then,” Gallagher sighed.
The upside is, after years of licking wounds and mending its image, QSound Labs has moved on. The company’s audio division recently turned a profit for the fourth quarter in succession.
As for that super-sexy, professional audio component, it was shunted to the back of the bus when corporate directions shifted in the mid-’90s. That’s when Gallagher’s troops started spinning out an enormous variety of computer, video-game and Internet applications.
“In September ’97, we hooked up with RealNetworks, and started applying our technology to the streaming sector,” Gallagher recapped. “When you have a person sitting in front of a PC they generally have two speakers or headphones — a perfect situation for QSound.
“We took our expertise from video games, PCs, TVs and VCRs and built software for that situation,” he said. Today, Gallagher’s gang pals around the corporate playground with biggies such as Microsoft, which has applied QSound’s sound enhancement software to versions of Windows Media Player.
Then there’s Philips, the audio octopus which helped pioneer the compact disc. In a joint venture, QSound Labs and Philips recently created a 5.1 channel soundcard for PCs, called Acoustic Edge.
“It took a lot of work, but it’s getting good reviews,” said Gallagher. “This could give us a chance to do more work with Philips. That relationship could be a real dark horse for us.”
Feel free to conclude the company’s audio division is stable and a money-maker. But, Gallagher admits, its newest direction — represented by 15-month-old, Seattle-based, QCommerce Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary — involves more risk. What’s QCommerce?
“Our first focus was to build tools to help people sell their own goods on the Net,” Gallagher explained. “We provide you the ability to build your own (virtual) store, stock it, take credit cards, and produce shipping instructions.”
This year, QCommerce cranked it up a notch, buying ChoiceMall.com — a virtual mall, which now plays host to 2,000 merchant cyber-tenants.
Last week, the division added ChoiceWorld.com - a kind of Net Yellow Pages. “We gather all the traffic we can acquire through our (partnering and licencing) relationships, and affiliate marketing, to ‘drive people to the mall.’ We make money off the merchants, not their customers,” said Gallagher, sounding like the landlord of TD Square.
If it all sounds a tad too ‘virtual’ to coax investment cash from your billfold, that could explain why QSound Labs share price has gone flatter than Madonna’s high-C. Currently in the $1 US range, it’s been staggering since spring, like so many of QSound Labs’ Nasdaq counterparts.
Gallagher’s counter strategy: Take profits from the audio side, and pour them into QCommerce Inc. “Our business model is close to the bottom line. We (strengthen) the QCommerce model, so the risk gets taken out of the stock price. Then there’ll be an appropriate increase in shareholder value,” Gallagher concluded the analysis.
“All we’ve gotta do is do our job, and the stock price takes care of itself.”
If all else fails, he can always call Fox Mulder.
