VeriChip: Ready for a breakout?

Posted May 24th 2007 3:10PM by Gary Sattler
Filed under: Good news, Products and Services, Consumer Experience, Competitive Strategy, Marketing and Advertising

Is VeriChip (NASDAQ: CHIP) ready for a massive breakout? I sure think so. Put aside for a moment the vast and potentially divisive implications of the technology and look at it in a strictly business sense. VeriChip offers technology that is absolutely bursting with potential. The chip, implanted just beneath the skin on a subject's arm, is dormant until scanned using a reader to extract the contained data. The chip costs about $200 to install, plus between $20 and $80 annually, depending on the amount of information on it.

Pets and farm animals are already being chipped as a means of loss prevention and for quick identification. Now volunteer Alzheimer's patients can elect to be chipped to facilitate location, identification and provision of medical information in the event that they wander off or are otherwise separated from guardians or loved ones. Patients with certain chronic life threatening diseases are being solicited as subjects for the device and there are rumors afloat in the UK that soon parents will be solicited to offer up their children to the technology. Yet to be approved by insurance companies as a covered procedure, the concept is still relatively new for use in people but based on the ongoing push by the company and its placement of chip readers in the hands of doctors, insurance company approval is strictly a matter of time.

With the simplicity and effectiveness of the silicon chip concept, however, come some possible negative issues that are very real. Some people claim that the very nature of location fixing technologies threatens our autonomy as individuals. For now the implantation of chips remains completely voluntary or a discretionary matter of personal safety for those who cannot choose to protect themselves. However, as evidenced on the British 9/11 forum, there are staunch defenders of the rights of personal freedom who are crying out in the wings that this is the first step to the total immersion of humanity into an establishment of complete institutional control. NewScientist.com has reported that religious groups have even protested the technology as a significant precursor to the "mark of the beast" as described in Christian literature.

All other considerations aside, one fact remains. VeriChip shares gained 27% last Friday with the news of the Alzheimer's patient chipping proposal. The technology is real and effective. It's safe, easy to implement and has significant benefits. The insurance companies are sure to approve coverage for these procedures as soon as VeriChip has assembled adequate data for the FDA and AMA. It's proven to work and the market is boundless.

I submit to you that right or wrong, my opinion is: "This one is going to fly."

Tags: alzheimer's, chip, identification, implant, mark of the beast, MarkOfTheBeast, newscientist, reader, RFI, verichip, verimed