Four “New” products released at IAI show

There’s something about trade shows that’s both exhausting and invigorating. You’ve got about 90 seconds to catch someone’s interest, determine if your product is relevant and then explain it to them. But, and the but is important, you have the opportunity to introduce your work to colleagues and strangers.

So, this week I was up at vendor expo at the IAI educational conference in Milwaukee showing off some of the products we’ve been working on. For anyone who might be reading this and is not part of the forensic community, the IAI is the International Association for Identification, a forensic professional society.

Aneval was in a booth with Executive Forensics and Mountain State University because we had all collaborated on some research. So we showed off our research at the University. But mostly we focused on the fuming orange because the co-inventor decided to use it in his graduate work and he needed to get some volunteers. None the less, we showed off four products, each revolutionary in its own way.

The Fuming Orange is a fluorescent cyanoacrylate for torch fuming of finger prints. What makes it special is that it is excited by incident light from 365 nm to 540 nm; a huge range that makes it compatible with almost any commercial light.

Then there was a similar product CN-Yellow Crystals. This is a solid cyanoacrylate that is used in place of the liquid in fingerprinting chambers. It also has a fluorescent glow when excited around 365 nm to 430 nm. Both the CN Yellow and the Fuming Orange should eliminate the need for dye staining. Which will speed up and improve fingerprinting.

What’s interesting about them is that the base technology from which they were developed is from plastics compounding. I talk a lot about cross pollinating in science and industry and these products are a good example.

In fact the last fingerprinting product, the AI Dyes comes from textile printing technology. These products are actually older, but I never really marketed them. The AI dyes, color the background around fingerprints. These are useful because eventually fingerprints fade. With these, the image will remain.

The fourth product, Blue Blood Tracker, is a blood detection chemical, originally developed for hunters. It’s better (in my highly biased opinion) then the fluorescent agents because it works in room light and is a permanent change.

So on one hand all of the base science is old hat in other industries, these technologies are new to the forensic market. I guess the take away here is it pays to read outside your core field. You never know what ideas you might be able to retask.

But that’s all for now as I have almost a 100 people to follow up with after the show and still need to get some of my own lab work done yet this week.