SEQUIM — The founder of a now-defunct Internet company who saw his assets dissolve during a market collapse 15 years ago is now thriving as an inventor, with one product line now on the market.
Fritz Braunberger, 61, of Sequim is the founder of Vision Works iP Corp., located at 1400 W. Washington St., Suite 270.
The company employs between one and five people depending on the product being developed.
“Everything we have done so far has been our own,” he said.
“Inventing is problem-solving. The hardest part of the problem is identifying the problem. Once you do that and you can define the problem in detail, then you might have a chance at solving it.”
Working out of an unfinished garage at his home southwest of town, Braunberger has received 27 patents so far, with 34 more in the works, he said.
Vision Works currently has two spin-off companies based on Braunberger’s patents — StrobeWise and BabyDot.
StrobeWise is a separate legal entity that is wholly owned by Vision Works iP Corp., Braunberger said.
“It is ready for investors, if we choose to go that route,” he said.
Traffic safety device
The StrobeWise product is a deceleration warning light that flashes amber LEDs rearward from a vehicle upon detection of minute levels of deceleration.
This warns following vehicles to slow down even if the brake lights are not on.
“StrobeWise 2 for motorcycles, StrobeWise G4 for fleet vehicles and IdleWise for fleet vehicles are all being sold,” Braunberger said.
“Also, we invented a better and brighter brake light for motorcycles which is being sold as well.”
Braunberger is the “primary inventor of the StrobeWise electronic device, with collaboration from my son Beau,” he said.
StrobeWise has been on the market since about 2008 and is available online at www.strobewise.com, amazon.com and through the Whitehorse Gear showroom — a distribution company in Center Conway, N.H. — on the Internet and through its print catalog.
Over the past seven years, about 1,000 StrobeWise units have been sold, Braunberger said.
The biggest order so far was to outfit 55 transit buses servicing Cleveland, Ohio.
The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority also is ordering up to 30 additional units for installation on newly acquired buses, he said.
The cost of installing one unit on a bus is about $375.
Braunberger also is negotiating with the city of San Antonio, Texas.
If approved, there would be about 450 buses installed with the equipment, Braunberger said.
Unit production
“We have manufactured complete units here in the past but in recent years have gone to outside manufacturers to perform the bulk of production,” Braunberger said.
“Our previous manufacturer was in Oswego, Ore., but we have changed and are now using a manufacturer in Las Vegas, Nev.
“We hope and plan to open up a manufacturing facility here in Port Angeles. I am in charge of the production here.”
BabyDot is a separate legal entity that has outside investors and stakeholders, Braunberger said.
“Vision Works iP owns a minority position in BabyDot now,” he said.
BabyDot markets the BabyDot Label, which changes color when stored breast milk is spoiled, letting moms know it should be thrown away.
“I am the inventor of the BabyDot Label,” Braunberger said.
“BabyDot is in the final stages of product development, with working prototypes completed. We hope to manufacture these here as well.”
Before Braunberger was a full-time inventor, he was chasing riches at the helm of a brand-new technology: the Internet.
At the turn of the millennium, he was living the dream.
Four years previously, with $10,000 in personal savings, he had founded IntraCom — an Internet company designed to cater to medical professionals — out of a two-bedroom apartment in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The company was the first to acquire federal Food and Drug Administration approval to transmit echocardiograms — a type of test that uses sound waves to produce images of a patient’s heart — live and in real time over the Internet to doctors around the world, Braunberger said.
“We developed [IntraCom] and grew it to three offices in three cities and ended up hiring 50 employees and had 500 stockholders,” he said.
With United Bank of Switzerland as an underwriter, “we were going public,” he said.
“We were in the private equity round of going public, and they valued us at $80 million in 2000.”
Then the “dot-com bubble” — an era spanning from 1997 to 2000 that saw the meteoric rise of upstart Internet-based companies, commonly referred to as “dot-coms” — crashed and wiped out his business, he said.
Pauper overnight
“It collapsed so fast,” he said.
“That was it. We tried to find a partner — tried to get acquired. But everybody was afraid. All the players were afraid. Everybody else had to partner up or they got wiped out.”
Braunberger “lost everything,” he said.
“We lost our house. We lost our cars. All the stockholders lost.”
Going through an extreme low point in his life, Braunberger and his wife, Allyson, 62 — living at the time in Los Angeles — eventually packed up their two boxer dogs and two cats, “and we drive up north to here,” he said.
That trip “was just miserable.”
But not all was lost.
Before leaving L.A., Braunberger in 2002 founded Vision Works iP Corp. and submitted two inventions to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for consideration.
“We started filing patents, and none of them were approved until after we moved up here,” he said, noting the process can take years to complete.
“That was pretty naïve. I have learned so much. Getting a patent is one thing, but people — if they like it, you are really lucky. But that doesn’t mean you are going to get paid. You have to battle all the resistance to paying you.”
During his down time, Braunberger has gotten by on odd jobs — mending fences and providing manual labor at area farms.
“It has been a struggle,” he said.
‘We never gave up’
But the winds are starting to change.
“We still have to watch every penny right now,” he said.
“But we have sacrificed and held things tight, and we never gave up. And our time is happening now.”
“We are now selling portfolios to Ocean Tomo, and they do a real good job,” he said.
Ocean Tomo is an intellectual property merchant bank headquartered in Chicago.
Braunberger also is working with Asian companies at present and is in talks to partner with American companies such as Microsoft, he said.
For more information about the company, visit www.visionworksip.com.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
