>HJ, do you consider msft wheat or chaff right now, and have you sold any?
Wheat, but we are in a bear market.
>have you sold any?
I had my Msft shares hedged for almost all of the down turn...unhedged them for a couple of days...then sold off 1/2.
Btw
My single current largest position? Autonomy!! My average cost? 10c ps:-))))))
Autonomy's potential of being the next Microsoft is there.
This stock might probably get whacked along with all the rest. But when the next real buying opportunity comes next.
BUY IT!!! Trust me on that.
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CAMBRIDGE, England--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 2000--Autonomy Corporation plc today announced that it has acquired a majority stake in Cambridge-based speech recognition company SoftSound Ltd., details of the transaction have not been disclosed.
Spun out of Cambridge University in 1995, SoftSound produces advanced speech recognition technology that has received industry accolades in both the UK and US, the University will retain a stake in SoftSound. The combination of SoftSound's speech technology with Autonomy's advanced pattern recognition technology will deliver infrastructure products to enable voice and speech records to be managed in a completely automatic way. By using Autonomy's technology, for the first time, speech can be handled in the same way and alongside text, it can be automatically linked, categorised and searched, capturing and utilising valuable communication threads.
Dr Mike Lynch, Chief Executive Officer, of Autonomy commented: "Digital communication is the foundation of new economy and it's the emails and voicemails which are the currency of this economy. We believe that this acquisition will allow Autonomy to bring together speech and text and to provide the building blocks on which the new economy is built."
SoftSound has developed a complete system that applies a fast speaker-independent speech recognition system to access the information in audio streams such as news broadcasts or archives. SoftSound technology drastically reduces the required data rate of high quality audio and speech for extremely low bandwidth situations and allows audio to be recognized and processed virtually instantaneously. By combining this with Autonomy's technology, new applications and products for speech and audio processing will be made possible as will new ways of interaction with machines and handheld devices including WAP, broadband and voice over IP. Autonomy's first commercial products utilizing SoftSound's technology are scheduled for release towards the end of 2000.
SoftSound owns two global patents in speech recognition and analysis techniques and its technology has been highly commended by academic and industry bodies including: TREC (the world-respected Text Retrieval Conference) where SoftSound's technology pioneered the creation of a Spoken Document Retrieval category where speech recognition technologies are compared and benchmarked. In the US, SoftSound has been a successful participant in the US defense industry's DARPA Continuous Speech Recognition Evaluations since 1992, where the technology is objectively compared against all best-of-breed comparisons. SoftSound was one of very few non-US companies invited to participate in this ongoing industry benchmarking project.
Dr Mike Lynch, Chief Executive Officer, of Autonomy commented: "Having explored other options within the speech field, we concluded that the acquisition of SoftSound gave us ownership of an advanced technology at an extremely competitive market rate. This deal opens up a whole new market for Autonomy to show the value and intelligence its technology can bring by automating the management and delivery of voice and speech across multiple potential applications."
Tony Robinson, aged 37, founded SoftSound in 1995 with Aidan Paul; Dr Robinson will take the position of Technical Director of Autonomy's speech subsidiary and will sit on the Board alongside representatives from Autonomy. Dr Robinson has an extensive background in academic research into signal processing and classification at Cambridge University and has published over 100 research journals covering speech, language and audio processing. He has held many research fellowships, including Cambridge's prestigious SERC Advanced Research Fellowship. Dr Robinson was also an Invited Researcher, at NTT's Research Laboratories in Tokyo. Dr Robinson obtained a degree in Natural Sciences in Cambridge in 1984 and a PhD in Dynamic Error Propagation Networks in 1989.
Aidan Paul Mr. Paul was formerly the Director of Corporate Finance for Technology and Telecommunications at Robert Fleming in London. He held previous positions at the PA Consulting Group, BICC, and GEC in consulting, product planning and design, communications, and optical and medical electronics. He received an honors degree in Electronic Engineering from Bristol University. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered Management Accountant.
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CAMBRIDGE, England, May 14, (Reuters) - Britain's first Internet billionaire seems to be really enjoying himself, but money is not what drives him.
For Mike Lynch, head of successful software company Autonomy Corporation <AUTN.ED> <AUTN.O>, the best things in life are free, and expressed in simple-looking formulae with mind-boggling implications.
Ask the balding, bearded 34-year-old mathematician what he'd like to do with his riches and he looks a bit puzzled.
But get him onto Bayesian probabilistic inference theory, the 18th century mathematical foundation of the artificial intelligence that is making his fortunes, and he's off at the speed of light.
"I am enthusiasm driven, addicted to it," he says in his office in a science park on the edge of the university town of Cambridge.
His excitement has turned Autonomy into one of Britain's biggest 50 or 60 companies, worth some $5 billion, and animates the way he explains the complex science that absorbed him first at the town's university and now in business.
Autonomy makes software which can "understand" unstructured information -- i.e. human prose --, detecting context and themes.
It is listed on the Easdaq high-tech stock market in Brussels and is anything but a household name in Britain, despite being the darling of technology investors who have upped its share price 20-fold since it went public in 1998.
Last week's long-awaited dual listing on New York's tech-celebrity Nasdaq should help change that as U.S. investors, whom the world tends to follow, are likely to take more notice.
Lynch's ambitions are not modest.
"Our goal is to be in almost every piece of software in two years' time," he says.
The science behind the company is intricate but the idea is simple.
Having a program that can sense meaning and not just words enables computers rather than people to read an incoming email and work out which employee is best suited to deal with it.
"Computer information used to come in a form computers liked but now it comes in a way humans like," Lynch says.
"The amount of unstructured information doubles every three months in companies."
DISCIPLE OF THE "EINSTEIN OF MATHS"
The son of an Essex fireman, Lynch is one of a few dozen experts who have studied the probability theory put forward in the 1750s by English country cleric, Thomas Bayes.
It is a very consuming subject but Lynch has also learned how to run a business and go out and sell an idea, something he says British academics still often find very hard to do.
When not working he reads -- Isabel Allende is a favourite author --, plays jazz saxophone, sails in warm climes or sleeps off jet lag, from constant trips to Autonomy's U.S. offices, at the rural cottage he shares with his dog, Gromit.
From Lynch's Cambridge office window, the view is dominated by a large empty shell of glass and steel that warns against over-optimism.
It used to house Ionica, a wireless telephony company that got too confident, spent a lot and went broke.
Lynch welcomes the recent fall in tech stocks which he says should make venture capitalists think twice before throwing money at ill-conceived businesses.
He has little time for the dot-com notion that the more a company spends and the deeper it goes into loss, the better its prospects will be.
Autonomy itself, now four years old, is set to break even this year.
Further down the line the company hopes to use its software to help computers understand speech and recognise people.
However, Lynch has comforting words for anyone worried that he might one day help create computers that are cleverer than humans.
"We like to think machines are intelligent," he says, "but they are about as bright as a sea slug in a pint of Guinness."
>LONDON, May 9 (Reuters) - Autonomy Corp Plc <AUTN.ED> said on Tuesday it was listing some $200 million of shares on Nasdaq to help boost the British software company's profile in its biggest market, the United States.
Autonomy said it would list 2.2 million shares from Wednesday at $124 per share, a thin discount to Monday's $127 mid-price close on the pan-European high-tech Easdaq in Brussels, its only home to date.
Chief Executive Mike Lynch told Reuters that U.S. clients preferred to deal with companies listed there and found Easdaq "a bit exotic."
"Listing on Nasdaq has always been our stated goal and although we started in Europe, our U.S. operations now outstrip the rest of the world," he said.
The New York listing will represent 5.3 percent of Autonomy's equity which Lynch said he hoped would be enough to meet U.S. demand.
Some 880,000 shares are a new issue that will raise $109 million for the company, which uses pattern-matching algorithms drawing on information technology, probability theory and arcane maths to help computers "understand" unstructured human prose.
Lynch said the money would be used partly to expand into southeast Asia and Latin America.
The rest of the stock is being sold by existing shareholders including Lynch, Britain's first Internet-related billionaire who said he disposed of shares worth some $30 million but still owns about a fifth of the five-billion-dollar company.
STAR OF BUMPY HIGH-TECH SECTOR
"It is amazing how many people have still never heard of this company," said James Middleton of Tilney Fund Management.
"This listing will bring them a higher profile."
The tranche of new stock is tiny compared to the nearly 42 million Autonomy shares in issue.
"The company is getting very near to break-even so there is no point raising more money than it needs," Lynch said.
Autonomy, based in the university city of Cambridge which is surrounding itself with high-tech industry, has seen its share price rise by 160.8 percent so far this year, outperforming the Easdaq market by 121.2 percent.
It has shared the bumpy ride for technology stocks, hitting a peak of $218 earlier this year before wallowing as low as $46.25.
Derek Brown, European Internet analyst at Robertson Stephens, said competition for the stock would be tougher on Nasdaq than in Europe, where it had been seen as the single player in its field.
"There will be more companies on the landscape for U.S. investors to benchmark Autonomy against," he said.
Brown has a "long-term attractive" rating on the stock and said U.S. competitors included Excalibur <EXCA.O>, Vignette <VIGN.O> and Inktomi <INKT.O>.
Autonomy reported a 1999 pre-tax loss of 680,000 pounds ($1.04 million) on March 9, down from a loss of 1.74 million pounds in 1998.
The shares will be offered in the form of American depository shares and will trade under the symbol <AUTN.O>.
Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, Bank of America Securities, Wit Soundview and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson are the underwriters for the new share issue.
Autonomy and one of the selling shareholders have also granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 330,000 additional shares. |
