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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (6307)	6/9/1999 8:39:00 AM
From: Straight Up	Respond to of 10081

Hi Mark In reviewing the new Portico features, I have noticed a pattern. Each of these features is truely designed for the corporate customer. I wonder if GMGC is going after the corporate customer, using QWST and BS relationships, to change the way companies currently do business. Could the Portico/Kenya products REPLACE a companies voice-mail systems????? With these enhancements it would make more sense for a company to use Portico - it receives faxes, reads email and you can forward and file your voice mail messages. Employees don't have to be tied to the office anymore waiting for the important - phone call, fax or email. This is BIG, IMO Straight Up -- Inbound fax receipt: Subscribers can receive incoming faxes and have them automatically forwarded to a specified fax machine or view them on their computers as images stored within their Portico e-mail box. -- Phone or e-mail-based notification: receive notification about specified e-mails, voice-mails, upcoming meetings and stock changes through either a phone call or an e-mail generated by Portico -- Create and forward messages from the Voice User Interface (VUI): designed similar to what a corporate office voice-mail system would allow -- File messages via voice: Portico subscribers will be able to file messages (voice-mail, e-mail or fax) in folders titled "sent," "filed items," "trash," or "in-box"-- in the same way e-mail users can file messages in folders on their computers.

To: Mark Oliver who wrote (6307)	6/13/1999 3:48:00 PM
From: Kurthend	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 10081

Mark, I dreamed I went to Supercom on Thursday for about 2 hours. Unfortunately I wasn't able to stay in my dream for the 1200 showing at the MSFT booth for the half hour wireless presentation. Maybe next time. Everything below is IMO:) After spending some time looking for GMGC information, I now know or think I know why GMGC employees seem to confident. I could be way off base, but it was refreshing to hear the information first hand and not from the internet from people who really have no clue what is going on. It is also amazing how much information you can get by talking to people in the flesh instead of the phone or by email. You can get almost as much information by what people don't say or by their facial expressions. I do have renewed faith in ole GMGC. Regarding the news article concerning E-Bay and Intuit's Auction Site. I guess that little smile I got when I asked about Intuit's Auction site was in fact the type of smile I thought it was (from Tuesday's visit). I didn't speak to any GMGC employees on Thursday but went by their booth for the last half of one of their demonstrations. There were approximately 25-30 people at the demo. The demo (I recognized some of the same "actors" in Atlanta as from last fall at the InterOp Convention) seemed much more professional as from last October. I did find it interesting to see a man, dressed impeccably, sign up for the free Portico trial. I didn't catch the name but below the name was the company name of Fujitsu. There had been a question concerning competition from Philip's Speech Processing on this thread. I went by the Philip's booth and inquired about their technology. To make a long story short, Philips' technology (speech engine) is not in competition in any way to GMGC. In fact, they told me that their direct competitors are Nuance and SpeechWorks. Philips only license the speech engine. The individual I spoke to was definitely aware of GMGC and Portico/MagicTalk. For those that think GMGC is failing due to the failure of their system or marketing prowess are way off base IMO. I picked up a WK pamphlet at the convention. I noticed that on the bottom of one of the pages it read, " Revolv is available now on an OEM basis to carrierss. Commercial end-user availability from the first carrier partners will be in early 1999." Here you have QCOM and MSFT which are two powerhouses and they are late according to this pamplet. Even MSFT has to wait for the carriers. This just demonstrates IMO why there have been delays with GMGC. GMGC can only wait for the big boys. If I had to take a SWAG, then WK and Revolve will probably start getting revenue near the end of calendar Q3 or beginning of Q4. Another SWAG is that there are probably 3-4 carriers that are internally trailing and the other 5 or so carriers could be possibly setting up their equipment for the internal trials. This is IMO:) Carriers will determine what they want and carriers will market Revolve (this sounds a lot like the agreement between GMGC and BS). My last SWAG is that WK is indeed working very closely with GMGC and that WK believes that they can get all of the carriers to sign up. I went to the SUNW booth and spoke to an individual that had a booth inside of SUNW's area. There were many smaller companies inside the SUNW area. Anyway, this person (although wasn't involved directly with GMGC) knew all about GMGC and PORTICO. This individual went on to say that a high level BS manager (executive level) was very impressed with GMGC and had told him that "PORTICO is the way to go." Based on this information and other information that I have received, BS is a done deal and GMGC will do everything in their power to ensure that BS gets what they want. Something else about BS. They are a very aggressive and proactive company. They want the best and latest technology to improve their services. GMGC can provide the type of technology for BS to help BS become the one stop shopping center for all of a company's telecommunications needs. This is what BS is looking to do IMO. I now believe that GMGC does in fact need to go after the carriers. Let the carriers market MagicTalk to the big businesses. These big businesses will be the first to adopt any new technology. Once the big companies adopt MagicTalk, then the rest of the public will become sold on this technology. I guess a good analogy (or the best one I can think of) is the adoption of the computer and PCs first by large companies and then the general public at large. Also, many of these other unified messaging companies I believe will have a hard time selling their service to the open public due to the limits of their technology. GMGC has the VUI, the Kenya technology, they are addressing the VPN and firewall issue, internet companies such as Quicken and E-bay (if that latest article is indeed correct), and above all they have the carriers which will be instrumental in marketing Portico or MagicTalk to the large companies that will ultimately lead to public acceptance or large scale acceptance of Portico. Take care, Kurt PS Even after my second visit, I am much more optimistic about GMGC and the adoption of their technology than ever before.