Curtis, thanks for the reference to the Toshiba cell phone note. This helps put in perspective not only the importance of Spyglass but also another company, SanDisk, which has most of the patents on flash memories for cameras, cell phones, MP3 music players, and the like. Toshiba and SanDisk recently announced a joint venture to produce flash memory cards in a new plant in Manassas, Virginia. These cards, unlike current versions which have a maximum capacity of about 256 mb, will have ten times that capacity, or more, all non-volatile, with no moving parts. Clearly, one application is cell phones, enhanced to allow not just Internet access but full scale communications - sending notes, reports, uploading spreadsheets, accessing remote databases, etc.
I'm still not clear why the "Prism" technology on which much of the Spyglass software is based is better than or worse than the technology used by Phone.com. The two approaches, according to Vilchik are entirely different, but I'm not enough of a specialist to know which one is better. Still, I think the Toshiba deal is very significant because Toshiba is a big time company - one of the largest producers of appliances for which Spyglass software would be useful.
It may also be of interest to note that Toshiba, through its collaboration with SanDisk and Matsushita, dealing with issues like security (to prevent unrestricted copying of copyrighted material, such as music, video, etc.), has developed a standard and a format different from one being developed by Sony. Having monitored these developments for quite a while, I think that Toshiba, already a leader in many of the component parts that are used in this sector, is about to make toast of Sony. Spyglass is definitely on the right side on this one. Assuming that SPYG receives the equivalent of about $1 per phone using its technology, you could conservatively estimate a market valued at $500 million in the next three or four years.
Art |
