Wireless Ronin Technologies Inc. Message Board

The company provides "product" or "solutions" that cost them more to produce then the selling price they receive for their product. You have the top two executives salary at 8% of gross revenues. How many companies can survive with 8% of their revenue being paid to the CEO and CFO?

Dunkin Donuts attempt to install has been well chronicled. They have performed several RFP's only to not move forward with a rollout. They previously selected Texas Digital, who then sold to a different company.
Why would Dunkin choose RNIN when they won't be around in a few months?

They took the art of leading statements to a new max.
Next week they'll buy an ipad for one of their clients and they will have "Aligned with Apple" in an exclusive, non-exclusive digital marketing endeavor.

Lots of franchises lining up to invest in a company that won't stay open. "Yes, we'll pay you up front a years worth of fees and enjoy your service until May when you run out of our cash."

Like you know.
Either way, I don't see why anyone would invest in this company. Liquidation value is almost nothing.

Who's going to buy into this company at this point?

There isn't a way out. Any buyout of the company would include the heavy load of overhead RNIN currently has. Days are numbered I'm afraid.

It really shows what type of pandering and manipulation can take place on these markets with these smaller companies. Not sure who is behind it, but it looked like something funny on Thursday when the price shot up. What was surprising is that a couple of the fund managers who called in on the call were excited about the day of trading as if something fundamentally had change, meanwhile it was all manipulation on a company that looks to be sadly closing it's doors in 60-90 days. That means real people out of jobs looking for work all because they were loyal to a company that could never make $100 million turn into a profit.

Sentiment: Strong Sell

I think the blog stated exactly what is going on there. Well stated in the blog. Fact-based.

Ronin isn't really overpaying many employees. After they went public, many got bumps in pay, but not to the level that that the suits did. For a company making the $6 million a year. the salaries that are being paid to execs are high, but to the rest it's probably not that out of line. Problem is they have so many people that need to touch the product for a given sale.

Oh... hopefully you can!

I don't know what's worse. The penny-stock chasing day traders than try to pump up the stock then dump, or what you keep saying.

If you hadn't paid attention, retails "has been going digital" for as long as RNIN has been public. Just check their previous earnings calls from years ago.

What is the actual product Samsung would be buying from Ronin and at what price?
They are going to buy a company for software that allows you to schedule content via HTML5?

At this point, can you even describe what the service is they are providing?
There is nothing proprietary about them. No reason for Samsung to pay to buy a bunch of salaries.

Ronin had piles of cash at one time which gave them an advantage from a marketing standpoint (tradeshow booths and nice dinners for clients). The acquisition of McGill brought the Chrysler relationship, but it basically duplicated the creative staff already in place at MN and added executives to an already top heavy company that had a VP or Director behind every door. That helped allow for layoffs the year or two later when cashburn was huge. (Bigger than currently is).

The skillset to create good content is valued, but this isn't Life of Pi special effects that are being created by these artists. These are menuboards and other signage with minimal effects. If they had a special skillset they were paying a premium for in Windsor, I'd be more concerned they were overpaying for an unneeded skillset than be encouraged by it. This is a prime example of where these investment companies are not following the rules of Warren Buffet by investing in what you know and understand. The content developers are not a special sauce. The special sauce at one point was the software but not the software is becoming a commodity as well with the advances of Samsung, etc. (better hardware).

I'm following Ronin from a standpoint of watching the story at this point. A once seemingly promising company that raised close (maybe over) 100MM in dollars based on what was said and promises of huge pipelines and revenue targets. Since going public, the company has spent that money with only sales of 42 million. For every dollar of sales, they spent over 2 dollars to get that sale.

The company has never fundamentally been able to create and sell a product at profit. That doesn't scale.

The cash cow in this was always supposed to be the "support" or hosting fees which is now up to $2,000,000 recurring, but the need for that disappears as hardware gets smarter and RNIN isn't selling media players anymore.

I believe in #2. There are 65 software vendors alone competing for this space, not to mention hardware companies like Samsung, NEC, who have their own solutions. With HTML5, you are essentially creating websites for each piece of content. This isn't even as much as a need for software anymore as there is a need to have people who can create content in HTML5. (Think of it as creating websites, that's about all your doing). Is Ronin's re-occurring revenue going to be based on being a web hosting company? There are plenty of webhosting companies out there that can host websites.

Regarding Perkins and Marathon, they both bought in, but you can tell from their questions they have a definitely lack of understanding of what the technology is or isn't. They've dumped millions and millions into this company for it only to not break even in a single quarter. I can't speak for them on how long they will continue to throw money away. The questions and enthusiasm from the Q&A call is almost laughable. But it isn't funny. It's sad because real people put their hard earned income in the hands of these professional investment companies only to see it invested in this.

What Samsung is doing is basically providing a screen that can run website content out of the box. Anyone can create website content. After a couple years of paying high "hosting" fees, these companies will realize that hosting can be managed far simpler than paying these re-occuring fees. (How much do you pay to a NOC to support your website each month that thousands of people may access from Ipad, desktop, or laptop computer). $300 per node per year for everyone who views your website?

Analogy - Samsung is selling a car. Ronin, Scala, etc., are all volunteering to be the pine tree air freshener that can be hung from the rearview mirror.

I can't imagine the price would be very high.

I'm sure they need to raise another $3,000,000 to get them through another quarter. The QA session yesterday was funny. I'm glad I don't have money in those investment firms. The one lady "Lee" tossed up a bunch of softballs as was highly impressed with every answer. Questions not asked: "Of the 300 of the food service locations, are they all contracted to buy from RNIN, or is it just an option to with a recommendation?" Also not asked "Since your not selling media players with the Samsung agreement, is the total projected revenue per sale likely to decrease?" Probably so.

SELL SELL SELL

These fund managers are eating it up like it's a big deal. Funny stuff. Glad I don't have my money in those funds.

"Don't look behind the curtain", right? If everything is going smoothly, when will they have a quarter that breaks even?

This has been going on since they went public. When they went public there was a $125 million dollar pipeline. The revenues are down. The burn rate is the same. I'm curious how long this game can be played.