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Check this following latest article on copytele
Magicom, The Cursive Man's Telephone
If you think one Magicom telephone is awesome, think what two people with
Magicom's electronic handwriting capability can do together. Put an
engineering drawing onto the screen through its built-in scanner. You and a
colleague next door or in the next state or next nation can use a stylus to
mark up data on the special message pad simultaneously.
Say you are redesigning the kitchen sink. You will be working on the sink
drain while your design colleague is making changes in sink contour. There
is no one bit-at-a-time ASCII driven transfer at modem speeds. Changes
appear instantly, as drawn. If a third colleague is standing off to the
side of the Magicom device, she or he will still see a clear image. There
is no need to view the image head on. The image on Magicom's pad won't wash
out in direct sunlight, either. The image is said to be so intense, so
tightly compressed, as to be as clear as an illustration in a book. And if
you can't puzzle out your remote colleague's squiggle, no problem. Just use
the requisite two phone lines with Magicom and you are in voice contact,
too.
This device was demo-ed on a video played at the annual meeting of its
creator, CopyTele, at a hotel at the firm's Huntington Station, Long Island
base. (There will be no demos here of Magicom itself until after a formal
debut in Shanghai this fall. I had the sense China will debut it in
October.) The Magicom video featured a contract being revised by a woman.
Her changes were stored on a message buffer until a man, working elsewhere,
called back, okayed her changes and signed the deal on his Magicom pad.
The video spoke of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in
1876 and, rather grandly, called Magicom the successor to Bell's device.
Magicom does offer an impressive array of mostly familiar fax and e-mail
features. In fact, it offers all the things you would like a telephone to
do if only you had the technology to cram them into one compact package.
But Magicom's success depends on its novel screen, which appeals to China
because of the clarity and flexibility it offers for oriental ideographs.
CopyTele's usually reserved chairman, Denis Krusos, seemed euphoric as he
showed CopyTele's assembled shareholders the Magicom video tape and held up
a mockup of the device in his hand. Magicom is a mite bigger than a lap top
computer, some three inches wider and somewhat thicker. CopyTele is ramping
up output of its Magicom units in Shanghai, under its joint venture deal
with a government-backed unit there.
Krusos was asked how many Magicoms CopyTele hopes to produce. He said that
if CopyTele keeps its small plant going in Shanghai (he didn't promise
this) and COPY also completes its larger Chinese plant early next year,
CopyTele could produce 1 million Magicoms in 1997. At $1,000 a pop
wholesale, this would hurdle the much-derided, heavily shorted company with
no-sales to date into the billion dollar arena. The retail price would be
"well less than $2,500." You could figure, say, $1,500. When Krusos was
asked if sales next year could be as little as a few million dollars, he
said cryptically, "We'd be surprised if it were this low."
It was made clear that if the Chinese plants did produce a billion dollars
worth next year, COPY would earn major profits. So if Magicom turns out to
have the kind of appeal Krusos and his fans expect, CopyTele could be
another Xerox. But wait! How many times have you heard that before? You can
be sure the shorts don't expect anything of the sort. In fact, they were
clearly not impressed. Neither were Nasdaq traders generally. CopyTele
Shares, which changed hands at 6 before the meeting, rose 1/8 and also
closed the week at 6 1/8. The stock is well off its June 17 peak of 9 7/8s,
adjusted for a 2 for 1 split. By the way, a stanch CopyTele bear with a
popular newsletter is said to maintain a heavy short position on the theory
that CopyTele will run out of money and the stock will go to zero.
If so, under the rules he wouldn't have to buy in shares he sold short. On
the other hand, a COPY investor who stations his wife at the phone bank
each year to get the tenor of the remarks after each annual meeting, says
that, unlike prior years, callers had "nothing but positive comments."
Meantime, even without sales, CopyTele is beginning to resemble a real
company. Mr. Krusos, a lawyer and company spokesman, introduced his
lifetime associate, President Frank DiSanto, who is the innovator of many
of CopyTele's 58 patents registered in the US and in OECD nations.
He proudly introduced other members of COPY's burgeoning team -scientific
researchers and a key marketer CopyTele lured from Panasonic. Magicom
aside, CopyTele hopes to play a role in the replacement of the 70-year-old
cathode ray tube which still enjoys a $500 billion market. For a
perspective, remember that, while widely used today, liquid crystal display
screens have won only 2 percent of this market after making 10 fold gains.
Other meeting highlights: The chairman spoke of project work at the
company's new lab near Huntington Station. He spoke optimistically of
COPY's progress in holographic color. He told of intense effort to develop
enough speed for video transmission, also eventual removal of Magicom's
touch screen for a better means of doing the same function at lower cost.
Krusos noted that viewing screens are the most expensive part of any device
that employs them. Magicom screens are made for CopyTele by Hoya of Japan:
"Cost comes down as volumes pick up under our deal."
Keep in mind that CopyTele has disappointed investors (and pleased short
sellers) many times in its fifteen year history. Whether COPY will soar
still isn't clear. And there is many a slip twixt the chip and the lip. For
one thing, relations between China and the U. S. are tortured. So is
CopyTele vulnerable to political disputes between the two nations? Krusos:
"China is not adverse to an economic benefit. We provide that."
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