"We felt it was important to secure the necessary funds today that would enable us to make critical investments in our business and product development. We believe without this investment the company's ability to ramp our existing products, as well as the methods by which we pursue full commercialization of the Poet technology, would be constrained. The certainty of a raise today, versus the unknown market environment that could possibly be faced in the future, warranted us to proceed with the raise. Additionally, as part of this offering, we were able to secure sophisticated institutional investors, which we expect to provide expanded awareness for Poet in the U.S. and other international financial markets.

So we have felt the pain and dilution to get the hedge funds on board. The only way we see the benefits from this will be if POET can deliver results.

The big picture is POETs ability to provide a disruptive platform that attacks the total solution cost in a way that cannot be done by any technology that exists today."

But, FJ, if we do what you suggest in the last paragraph quoted, wouldn't we have been wildly successful and wouldn't the loonies (as Chris Chu told you would have been "easy" to raise) have done as well as the dollars to get us there? This was extremely expensive PR, then, for the purpose of spreading what we feel and hope is disruptive news? Hey, I don't doubt it would help some if the time comes, but if that was POET's thought process, they, and as a result we, paid well over retail for it.