From Briefing.com
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CMG INFORMATION (CMGI) 268 1/8 CLOSED CMGI's presentation on Tuesday at the H&Q conference was essentially the same as that made at the BankBoston Robertson Stephens conference and NationsBanc Montgomery Securities conference held in February. It emphasizes CMGI's plan to create cross-synergies between all the companies they invest in. Some money managers here had obviously not seen it however, as there were audible gaps when the 42,000% return since CMGI's IPO in 1994 was shown, and the more than ten times return for the past year was shown. Over the last five years, only Dell (DELL) and Cisco (CSCO) have higher five year returns. CMGI's ownership stakes of all of its venture investments turned public was $194 million at this time last year. It is now over $1.8 billion. This only counts those holdings in companies that CMGI has already brought to market. CMGI did list the companies in their IPO pipeline; most likely to be brought to market soonest are: Raging Bull, Furniture.com, and Ancestry.com. Most disappointing to us, and perhaps to others, was David Wetherill's refusal to discuss anything about iCast, the new company that CMGI @Ventures III is funding with $100 million to build a streaming media technology in the vein of Broadcast.com (BCST). Mr. Wetherill did, however, wet everyone's whistles with a short multimedia "tease" promotional video about iCast. With thunderous bass, swirling dramatic colors, and sweeping panoramic views of beautiful landscapes, the piece was certainly exciting to watch. But it wasn't an iCast video delivery, of course. It was just multimedia video on a laptop, projected onto the huge conference video screen, and was kind of a pyschedelic swirl of colors and sound. Right in the middle of it, we noticed, was a still picture of the Grateful Dead rock group, from their "hippiest" period, about 1969. Either Mr. Wetherill is trying to soften his billionaire internet capitalist guru image, or CMGI has some Deadheads in the programming staff. Probably the latter.
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