Name: GigaBeam Corp.
Location: Herndon
Funding: The company raised initial seed money in a $2.5 million private round of funding in February 2004. It raised $7 million in October through a venture public offering administered by HCFP Brenner Securities and another $2.5 million in a private funding round in February. The company's stock trades on Nasdaq's over-the-counter bulletin board under the symbol GGBM.
GigaBeam's Doug Lockie shows a WiFiFiber II transmitter-receiver antenna assembly. Major clients include Dartmouth College and Donald Trump's properties.
(Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)
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Big idea: GigaBeam installs ultra-high speed wireless communications links between buildings that the company says can transmit voice, video and data signals at speeds of 1 gigabit per second. GigaBeam's antennas emit pencil-thin beams of radio waves that permit businesses, the government and the military to coexist within the same geographical space with no interference. The technology is capable of downloading a DVD in six seconds. GigaBeam is developing a product that will transmit data at 10 gigabytes per second.
Example of use: Gigabeam is installing wireless links on the campus of Dartmouth College and between Trump International Hotel & Tower and other Donald Trump properties in New York.
Big-name customers: Dartmouth College, Microwave Satellite Technologies Inc.
Founded: 2004
Who's in charge: Lou Slaughter, chairman and chief executive, and Doug Lockie, president and chief technology officer. The two co-founded the company.
Employees: 30
Web site: www.gigabeam.comPartners: GigaBeam has strategic alliances with Mantero Networks and Core Source Technologies of Germantown, Sophia Wireless of Chantilly, and ThinKom Solutions of Torrance, Calif.
Best employee perk: "We have energy bars and all the coffee you can drink," Lockie said.
What the name means: "We send gigabits of information using gigahertz, so I called it giga," Slaughter said, "and it uses an RF [radio frequency] beam, so GigaBeam."
Quote: "There are 750,000 business locations that have more than 20 employees," Lockie said. "A large percentage of those companies will never get fiber because of the cost of trenching. I see us being able to take the price tag down and bring a minimum of a gigabit to every one of those locations."
