NEXT CKFR
Brooks et al: I have one proposal, though I wouldn't claim the economics match CKFR. It's General Magic, GMGC. (TLindt's "rule" about picking stocks with Intuit relationships could apply here, too).
The vision here is more to do with being the 'voice portal to the Internet'. As a play, it's perhaps more similar to an @Home than a CKFR.
This is still clearly in the high risk category, there are other big companies (Motorola, Lucent) aiming to compete in this space etc (so far, so much like CKFR). Still FWIW, this is the second largest investment I have made after CKFR.
Briefly they have:
1. the best technology for recognizing multiple, complex voice commands
2. an operations center (rather than selling servers), be quickly deployed to all users
3. a lead in "v-commerce" ie voice-activated commerce
4. proprietary technology (MagicTalk) underlying their service
The advantages they get from these are as follows:
1. The ability to differentiate between commands or requests, for a large number of users with different voices, is critical to offering a service with the widest range of service options - ie a portal.
2. Technology improvements and (importantly) new services that they connect to can be rapidly deployed to all users, in the same way as a new service or modified search technology on Yahoo or Excite.
3. Advertising can be used to subsidize lower cost or free services (think of the AOL model) - and audio ads have fairly high 'clickthroughs'. Example "To place a trade with Charles Schwab, say 'Trade Now' ". The Intuit deal (again public info), includes a free service where you can access financial information from Quicken.com (which will also become part of the Portico service).
4. Don't have much to say on this - I should know more than I do. I've not clearly established for myself how much of an advantage this confers. Frankly I'm more convinced by the proprietary operational know-how that you acquire in operating a service (a la CKFR) that does something which is fundamentally quite hard.
On criteria (1), well I'd say it's somewhat neglected, but still not exactly cheap. General Magic still has a slightly bad smell from all the dumb things they were trying to do before. They've now spun those off into a separate company and are focusing on the Portico service.
On (3), I've not analyzed the accounting in minute detail, but have been through enough to have a fairly good feel about their management.
Anyone interested, come on over to the GMGC thread, where the tone of debate is fairly free of hypesters, though not quite at the analytical level we've come to expect here. |
