Here a great post about Upgrade and Barrons from the Raging Bull:
By: fenris
Reply To: None
Wednesday, 16 Feb 2000 at 9:18 AM EST
Post # of 2267
The truth behind the Barrons article.
Daniel Bland CEO of Upgrade was attacked by Rhonda Brammer in an article in this
weeks issue of Barrons, so I've dug up what I could find out about him. His track record
indicates that he is a very capable CEO with vision, drive and enthusiasm for building
businesses. However, he was in particular attacked for his involvement with Empyrean
Diagnostics who apparently was in violation of the Vancouver stock exchange reporting
rules. Empyrean was not the only company in violation of the draconian rules imposed by
that stock exchange, so was a lot of other good companies. As a matter of fact the rules
that required companies to report their every move to the stock exchange was so badly
thought out that they were deemed unworkable and has now been changed. Rhonda
Brammer makes no mention of this in the article nor does she mention that Daniel Bland
was the board member that was nominated to sort out these so-called irregularities with
the approval of the stock exchange. Further, Rhonda Brammer does not seem to
understand the fact that bringing cutting edge technology to the market is fraught with
problems that easily falls foul of such rules that almost always favours the established
companies. Lastly, Rhonda Brammer infers at the end of the article that there is
something very wrong with paying a research company (Infusion Capital) in shares for
writing a report on the company. This is a common practice with start-ups since shares in
the company is the only commodity such a company has got. The only way to get any
publicity whatsoever about a start-up company which is strapped for cash is to pay in
shares. Now, if only this report had produced spectacular results in share price and
everyone had cashed in at the time we should be asking questions, but the fact is that
nothing happened as a result of that report at the time, hence the question we should be
asking is: why Rhonda Brammers innuendo?
The way I see it, the Barrons article is a shoddy piece of journalism based on old ill
informed newspaper clippings and a superficial telephone interview from where
statements were taken out of context in order to paint an intentionally negative picture or
so it appears. The article was as far as I understand rushed through to meet a publishing
deadline, maybe even missing the editors final approval. The motivation behind writing
such a negative article full of innuendo just before a publishing deadline to be published
on the very same day that Upgrade was submitting their filings to the SEC seems to me
at least suspicious. Particularly, since Rhonda Brammer makes a big meal out of the fact
that Upgrade has not filed with the SEC, well now they have. Upgrade did not have to file
until May this year but chose to do so well before the deadline and has announced this
publicly on several occasions that they will be fully reporting on the 14th of Feb (one of
which was the UK investors meeting on the 28th of Jan which I attended), so Upgrades
intentions to file on this date has been in the public domain for a long time which Rhonda
Brammer should have been aware of at the time of writing.
I dare say that although Upgrades share price dropped dramatically on monday reaching
a low at the market open of $26 only to close at $45 7/8 on Tuesday proves that investors
has been queueing up to get this stock (in a company at the forefront of a
$10,000,000,000 smart card market as estimated by IDC, Disk Trend and DataQuest) at
a discount price, and that soon any damage to Upgrades share price will have been
rectified. The real loser is going to be Barrons magazine and their reputation for
publishing such an irresponsible article. This is going to take a lot longer to repair than
Upgrades share price, because Upgrades performance will be around indefinately to
remind everyone of how useless Barrons is for any opinion whatsoever on financial
investments and I believe that Barrons make their money from being a so-called authority
on financial matters. There'll be more than a few red faces at Barrons when the
revolutionising cost/storage capacity of Upgrades Ultracard starts to sink in, and it's
Andrew Seybold (technology analyst and consultant for Microsoft, Apple, IBM, HP
amongst others) who calls it revolutionising, not me. I'd love to be a fly on the wall when
the time comes that Rhonda Brammer and her colleagues at Barrons receives their new
credit cards next year which all will be Ultracards courtesy of Upgrade.
Just to clarify exactly what Upgrade's Ultracard technology is, it is based on existing hard
disk drive technology and makes it possible to store not just Megabytes but soon
Gigabytes of data on a humble credit card which only costs a few dollars to manufacture.
Compare this to the existing smart cards with an expensive flash-RAM chip embedded
that costs in excess of $10 to produce and normally doesn't store more than 64 kb. The
Ultradrive (reader/writer device) is based on existing off-the-shelf components and will
cost no more than $40, hence it could soon find its way into the drivebay of every single
PC in every home. The way I see it, this technology will not only replace all current
magnetic stripe and smart cards but because of it's revolutionary cost/storage capacity
ratio will become the software industry's preferred removable storage medium replacing
floppy disks, CD-ROM reader/writers and any other removable storage medium for the
simple reason that they can't compete on price. Whatsmore, the Ultracards huge storage
capacity can live side-by-side with the current magnetic stripe card and flash-RAM card
technology thus making the Ultracard technology instantly scalable within the credit card
industry (which it is initially aimed at) without any transition problems from the current
technology to the future technology, exactly what the industry wants.
It is not without reason that Mellon Bank Corporation recently bought 100,000
RESTRICTED shares at $44 per share. Now, courtesy of Barrons uninformed and
superficial article which scared out a lot of weak shareholders, Upgrades (unrestricted)
shares are trading at the same level but it won't be for long. Anyone wanting to verify what
I've said can visit Upgrades website upgd.com (I recommend downloading the
executive summary), also look at Upgrades subsidiaries' websites
efornet.com who provides the encryption technology and eprim.com
who are the e-commerce management arm of the Upgrade group who alltogether forms
a turnkey solution for incorporating e-commerce into mainstream commerce. In other
words, it will be the same card customers useses to purchase goods over the internet
from home as the card they use to purchase goods with in the high street. The high
storage capacity of the Ultracard allows biometrics (such as fingerprints) to be stored on
a credit card for the first time at a realistic price. Also, look at the Ultracard website
ultracard.com for info on the Ultracard technology. The structure of the
Upgrade group of companies is easiest to understand from the executive summary I
mentioned earlier. Finally, if anyone wants to check out the actual patents Upgrade has
on the Ultracard technology, go to uspto.gov and look up patent number
5107099 filed by Ultracards chief scientist Malcolm Smith, now I bet Barrons wish they'd
done their research better.
FEEL FREE TO COPY AND PASTE THIS AT WILL SINCE I HAVE DONE MY
RESEARCH PROPERLY AS OPPOSED TO BARRONS.
(Voluntary Disclosure: Position- Long; ST Rating- Strong Buy; LT Rating- Strong Buy)
ragingbull.com
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