Article Excerpt:
TWST: We would like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Manaris and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Mr. Fraser: Manaris has been around in its present form since January 2003, which is the time at which I became a member of the Board. It is an OTC Bulletin Board company. There was a reverse takeover of a shell on the Bulletin Board. The original shareholders vended in C-Chip Technologies. So the original story behind Manaris was C-Chip, and it was called C-Chip up until the middle of last year, which was when we had a special shareholders' meeting and changed our name to Manaris. C- Chip is a remote locate and immobilize chip that you put into virtually any electronic device. At the moment, the prime use for the chip is in the credit management market for motor vehicles. It is a device that is controlled through a Website using a cellular network. It has a GPS component to it and there is an analog or digital radio in it, which means that we can locate a motor vehicle virtually anywhere, and immobilize it. It could also be used for other high value equipment such as television sets. So that has been the principal business of Manaris since its inception in 2003. We have since acquired two additional subsidiaries and the holding company changed its name to Manaris. The two additional acquisitions were done at the beginning of 2005. One was a company called Avensys. Avensys is a Canadian company and was a private company in the business of selling and producing environmental monitoring solutions and services. It really has two aspects to its business. One is in the manufacture and sale worldwide of Fiber Bragg Gratings and Optical Fiber Sensors to telecom and other sensor markets. The other aspect is in the distribution and sale of both its own fiber optic sensors and other environmental monitoring solutions, primarily into the Canadian market. As an example of the latter, we have a contract that we announced late last year to supply Hydro-Quebec with limnimeters, essentially a device to measure the depth of water in a hydroelectric dam. Thirdly, we have a subsidiary called Chartrand Laframboise, which is an investigation business here in Quebec that does surveillance, monitoring and pre-employment screening. So the overarching story is risk management, monitoring and surveillance.
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