Equity - Good thoughtful analysis again, thanks!
I like this stock only if progress is made on the RBOC deals.
You said that, if GMGC were an IPO today, "My [Equity's] guess is that it would be priced at $15, open trading at $40, spike to $55, and then close first-day trading at around $50. What's your guess? Remember, the stock jumped from its IPO price of $14 in February 1995 to $32 in an instant."
If it were an IPO, I think at best it might issue 15 million shares and close at $30 for a market cap of $450 million. The Feb 7, 2000, market cap is $350 million. When I think of it in IPO terms, I conclude that it is fairly valued for a technology company that has failed to establish a brand after two tries (Magic Cap, Portico).
The March 8 call should certainly be of great interest. I do not think there will be any real news until then, and my guess is that we will be in the range 7 1/2 - 9 1/2 until then.
I will be looking for good news on Bell South on March 8. I am also hoping to see some talent to complete the lineup. Their burnrate was running about $4 million per month for the last three quarters, and I expect that it is still over $2.5 million per month, so we also need a plan to finance operations after they run out of cash in (my guess) May.
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Here is a long post that I made yesterday on Raging Bull.
GMGS Is PIM With Voice Interface, Not Web Browser, Not General VUI
Bellsouth ID
I hope I did not add to the confusion. Bellsouth and Bellsouthmobility are the same. Mobility is the cell-phone arm.
By the way, only 12% of phone subscribers use voice mail. As Bellsouth says, "Won't it be nice when the others get the message?" (Bellsouth has 37 million customers.)
GMGC Products
GMGC's innovations that have been brought to market since 1993 have all been personal communications platforms. GMGC has little impact at present in the general VUI market for PC commands and the VUI market for automated voice response and interactive voice response (AVR, IVR) used for querying bank accounts, etc.
GMGC's Potico and MyTalk products are voice-activated personal information managers (PIMs: voice, email, fax, scheduler, news, stocks).
GMGC's opportunities are here and now; and they have been slow and inept at execution. They came up short with financing and marketing knowhow for their flagship product, Portico, in 1998 but are doing better with MyTalk, Portico's little brother. Even MyTalk is far bigger under the Excite branding.
GMGC's present products are integrated services, not components or platforms for voice technology. They do not market general VUI tools. (GMGC's first product was a personal assistant operating system, Magic Cap, and for that there was a development system available to developers of which I was one.)
There is a vast difference in the skills and business plan for a company marketing directly to consumers (such as GMGC with MyTalk and Portico) and one selling software platforms to Sony and Motorola as GMGC did with Magic Cap. In the end GMGC's position may end up somewhere in between, i.e. as an OEM for voice PIM systems to be branded by Excite, GM, and Bellsouth.
In agent technology GMGC has a more fundamental and research-oriented position. This work was begun at the time of Magic Cap (1991 or so). Conferences for this technology are still often 50% academics, and the commercial value of GMGC technology in this area is difficult to estimate.
General VUI Comments
Just like the mouse has become a common adjunct to the keyboard for user input, so voice user interfaces will become increasingly common for not only PCs but controls for equipment of all types such as entertainment appliances.
At the core of VUI systems of all types are software engines for voice-to-text (usually for queries and commands) and for text-to-speech (usually replies). GMGC buys major portions of these "engines" from others.
The VUI interface will run locally when the information desired or the item to be controlled (your stereo volume) is local. When the information is stored on the network the interface will execute centrally. The centralization of information, out of fashion for a while, is coming back into fashion with a rush since high bandwidth for access permits the centralized info to be retrieved with a simple web browser, or now, with a voice browser. Anytime-Anywhere-Access, AAA, is what it is all about.
The leader in VUI for the PC user interface is Dragon Systems. See www.dragonsystems.com. Dragon is privately held and probably already profitable or nearly so.
From the Dragon's mouth: "Founded in 1982 by speech industry pioneers Drs. Jim and Janet Baker, Dragon Systems is well known for its long history of innovations and its large patent portfolio. Privately-held and headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, the company employs over 325 people across the globe, and has one of the largest speech research organizations of any company in the world. It has European subsidiaries in Munich, Paris and in Marlow near London, and additional research laboratories in Cheltenham, England (Dragon Systems GmbH, Dragon Systems SA, Dragon Systems UK Ltd, and Dragon Systems UK Research & Development Ltd, respectively). Dragon Systems also has a subsidiary in Tokyo, Japan.
AOL And VUI
The AOL platform is highly centralized as to content but major components run on the PC client. To run AOL you need proprietary AOl software that includes many things in addition to a fairly standard browser. AOL can quickly incorporate VUI for the user interface and that is unlikely to be GMGC technology, since a necessary part of it will be to replace the keyboard and mouse for common PC commands.
Much like Excite, AOL could use GMGC for a more general anytime-anywhere access (AAA) to mail. |
