Mike, Mr. JMD, may I suggest you take a look at Rmbs?
Just bought some today at 40.5 Its been on my radar screen since not too long after it went public. I missed the early stage of its [absurd] mo-mo post IPO run up, and elected not to play in the later stage which I was certain would lead to a huge crash. Which it did, from mid 80s in mid August, to 40 or so.
But anyway, the reason I mention it here is that I think that it has a lot of investment similarities at this point to Lor/Gstrf. It has if anything a surer lock on huge future earnings than Lor has. But like Lor/Gstrf, it has negligible earnings this year, and won't have all that much next year, though like Lor/Gstrf, the cash should start rolling in in 1999.
Rmbs has been annointed by Intc to provide the super high speed memory interface that Intc needs to remove that bottleneck to its push to sell ever increasing processor performance. The big bottlenecks right now are the Internet, for the consumer space and to a lesser extent the whole space, and memory access speeds, for all spaces. (Graphics processor/interface bottlenecks have been pretty will met as the need arises.)
Rmbs was founded by techno blue blood Stanford EE profs and entreprenue partnership personnel with Kleiner Perkins seed money, six years ago or so. It is actually a software company. What they sell are not memory chips. The world is cock a block with companies pouring capital into that capital intensive, commodity competitive industry (= lousy investment longer term). They sell patents for a 1.5-2% royalty of memory chip sales prices for adopting companies. Estimates are they will get that percentage of perhaps 30-50% or worldwide memory chip sales within 3-5 years. The march begins 1999 with the Wilamette Intel processor chipset.
Check out April's Windows Sources Mag for perspective:
zdnet.com
(If this link doesn't work, it probably means you have to subscribe first. Which means you need to register; its free. Go to www.zdnet.com)
Doug |
