Yes , hindsight is great. I too sold just a nice portion of my shares to get my investment out ... but I started selling when it first spiked ... had I waited, would have been another $350,000 in my pocket. But in the meantime, can't really cry cause I still have a nice chunk of shares and now that I have my investment out I can feel more comfortable sitting it out and waiting.
In the meantime, the following is a segment taken from last night's Nightly Business Review program which highlights ASR. We are in one very hot sector and it seems it is getting more and more positive press. Should be really good for TSIS going forward.
03/10/2000: New Voice Portals Open Up On Demand
SUSIE GHARIB: Companies like QWest and U.S. West could soon see their customers finding new uses for their telecom networks. Some upstart companies have a new way to call up the Web on your phone. Stephanie Woods reports.
STEPHANIE WOODS, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: The desire for information anywhere is driving a new market. Call it a voice portal. Like on the Web, you can call up stocks, weather, sports, traffic, but with a telephone and your voice. Listen.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: To hear a stock quote, say the desired company name.
UNIDENTIFIED TRADER: Big blue.
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE: OK. Ticker symbol IBM is down 4.
WOODS: Start up company Audiopoint has service available in the Washington, D.C. market with plans to be in 25 cities by year?s end.
NICK UNGER, PRESIDENT & CEO, AUDIOPOINT: We?re experiencing pretty good demand, I think, given that we?ve really been sort of test marketing the service. We?re certainly live with the service, but our marketing efforts now have really been geared to trying to generate enough interest so that we can learn exactly how the market will receive what we have.
WOODS: Audiopoint is one of several companies trying to make a go of voice portals. BellSouth launched a similar service in Atlanta in January and says its getting 200,000 to 300,000 calls a day. Tell Me Networks plans to launch a voice portal at the end of April. One of its founders, a former Microsoft executive, sees opportunity where his previous employer hasn?t.
HADI PARTOVI, VICE PRESIDENT OF PRODUCTION, TELLME NETWORKS: All the big companies that are in this space like Microsoft (MSFT), AOL (AOL), they?re targeting the screen based phones. So they are actually going after the sort of, the next generation sort of phones and they are kind of leaving behind the 300 million phones that are already out there that people are using every day.
WOODS: Speech recognition makes voice portals possible. Nuance is the technology company working with Tell Me networks, while Speech Works is behind BellSouth (BLS) and Audiopoint.
STUART PATTERSON, CEO, SPEECHWORKS: What we are doing with speech recognition and speech activation is we?re just providing a new interface that?s very useful for certain times of the day or certain places where you might be traveling.
WOODS: Voice portals plan to make money selling advertising on their services. But analyst Gary Arlen says that could be a turn off.
GARY ARLEN, PRESIDENT, ARLEN COMMUNICATIONS: Wading your way through the commercials is going to be a real deterrent to some customers.
WOODS: If voice portal companies find some success, expect them to call up the stock market not for quotes, but for financing. Stephanie Woods, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Washington. |
