Linius Technologies: The video Whizzards

8 December 2020

Linius Technologies (ASX:LNU) has been listed on ASX since May 2016 and the share price has seen some high highs and low lows. Specifically, a high of 21 cents back in January 2018 and a low of less than 1 cent during the worst of the Corona Crash in March this year. The period in between was essentially characterised by a lack of successful commercialisation of the company’s technology, which resulted in a gradual decline of the share price in the run-up to the March market crash. However, since mid-October Linius’ share price has been on the move, upward that is.

Linius has pioneered a pretty amazing technology that lets users search for very specific video fragments within, often large, video files. Linius’ so-called video virtualization engine (VVE) can tag and categorise individual video scenes on a massive scale, enabling users to search these videos based on keywords. We have written about Linius in Stocks Down Under on 25 August 2020, so have a read of that article to get the full background on the technology. Suffice it to say that the company’s technology opens up a broad range of potential markets, such as sports, education and video conferencing to name a few.

It took a Whizzard to get the stock going

Linius has recently made some great progress with key partner LiveTiles (ASX:LVT) that uses a white-label version of Linius’ technology for its customers to use in their video conferencing, specifically Microsoft Teams. Customers can search all of their company’s recorded video meetings for certain key words and let Linius splice the results into one custom-made video. LiveTiles has been rolling this service out among several clients. Despite this progress, though, Linius’ share price didn’t really do much, apart from a temporary spike to around 4 cents in September. It took a more elaborate announcement in November to get investors exited.

On 25 November Linius announced a new product, Whizzard, which is basically the same product that LiveTiles has been rolling out for a while. It is available for US$4 to US$32 per month per user. The difference is, this time around Linius mentioned that Whizzard is available not just on Microsoft Teams, but on Zoom and Webex as well, and that it is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). In fact, AWS is funding a small part of the product marketing. Imagine what AWS’ market reach could do for Linius.

Zoom and Webex combined account for the majority of the global video conferencing market, so the opportunity is quite substantial. And Linius is targeting the corporate and educational video conferencing market at the same time.

Now that’s a magic wand

We at Stocks Down Under have been strong believers in Linius’ technology, having owned the stock for four years now. So, we have seen the highs and we have seen the lows (full disclosure, we still own Linius shares). But just in the last two weeks, on the back of the Whizzard announcement, the company’s share price has broken out and got back up to levels last seen in mid-2018.

Now, when it comes to emerging technology companies, the proof of the pudding is in the commercialisation and that has not been Linius’ strong suit. So, a bit of help from Amazon’s magic wand in rolling out Whizzard is more than welcome and it may just turn out to be what the company needs to get it’s share up to where we think it belongs.

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