| | were developed in collaboration with our early customers and they will be used by all customers to accelerate their FPOA chip development. • We hired Glenn Wiley, a seasoned sales professional, as Senior Vice President, Global Sales. Under Glenn’s leadership, we broadened our customer acquisition strategy and transitioned our sales model from direct sales to a manufacturers’ rep sales channel. We have made good progress in a short period of time, with manufacturers’ rep firms selected and under contract in 20 of our 22 North American territories. These sales representatives are focused on the high-performance segment of the market, and they are eager to offer a 1 GHz product that is available off-the-shelf, speeding their customer’s time-to-market. As of today, MathStar has trained over 90 sales reps on selling FPOAs, and we are accompanying our new reps on sales calls to their customers in our target markets. We are pleased with the customer’s responses. • Our marketing strategy is showing results, too. We recently attended two major conferences: the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas that targeted high performance video customers, and Machine Vision East in Boston for the machine vision market. We had an excellent response at both trade shows, and we came away with the kind and number of leads that we wanted. We are making good inroads into increasing the awareness of the FPOA, and our chip has been featured in a wide range of industry publications in our target markets. MathStar currently has 12 design wins in our target markets. We are where we want to be with our customer pipeline, and we are confidently re-iterating our guidance of at least 25 additional design wins by the end of 2006. As we previously guided, we expect to close the majority of design wins in the second half of 2006 because customers can then access both our Version 2 Design Tools and sample our production silicon. Accordingly, our sales staff spent the first quarter of 2006 signing and training our sales reps, and we did not close any design wins in the first quarter. We made the difficult decision to delay tapeout to ensure a production quality chip that we could produce at low cost and high yields. We are proud of the progress we made in tools, application libraries, increased feet-on-the-street, and the customer pipeline. We are very well positioned for a steep ramp as the FPOA is launched into a market eager for a high-speed, reprogrammable device. During the remainder of the call, we will discuss these items in greater detail, starting with Dan Sweeney with an update on production. Dan… |