>>I think that one does not want anc to be over 0.20 . . . will be buying<<
Morning Luc,
I happen to agree with you! For the past number of days, there has been a significant wall of shares maintained on ask (approx. 300,000 shares in total). Now today, a block of over 200,000 shares show up at $0.18!
In my opinion, there are only two scenarios where this would occur. The first is that a number of shareholders have decided to unload their holdings and have the sell orders lined up and they hope that these will be eaten away. In my opinion, this is not a very smart way to have a large number of shares purchased by others. You do it over time in smaller chunks.
The second is that there is a concerted effort to keep the share prices down. This way you can accumulate the shares at lower prices. Now, I also believe this to be true in that there has also been a healthy amount of good sized bid orders as well. Once again, I see this as an indication of accumulation.
Awhile ago, I mentioned that I believe that Angoss could be considered as a much more attractive take over candidate. They are much better positioned now than ever before.
I also believe that the rest of the world is starting to wake up to the potential of Data Mining. I believe that this field is now becoming recognized as important to the ongoing success of corporations with clean data stores. When a new trend or business opportunity is just getting underway, it has been my experience that you start to see larger corporations beginning to swallow the smaller ones. The potential in this area is enormous and we are just now starting to see the first wave of many acquisitions.
On this note, I just received this bit of information that was listed on Oracle's website. I have to agree with the assumption that Oracle's strategic move strongly reinforces the importance of data mining technology.
Oracle Acquires Data Mining Business Of Thinking Machines Corporation
(June 7, 1999)
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., June 7, 1999-Oracle Corp. today announced the
acquisition of the data mining business from Thinking Machines Corp., a
leading provider of advanced data mining software for predicting customer
behavior. The acquisition will extend Oracle's data warehouse platform and
business intelligence solution to include enterprise reporting, ad hoc
query, advanced analysis and mining software based on a common Internet
platform. The data mining software will also become an integral feature of
Oracle's customer relationship management (CRM) suite, which will facilitate
the implementation of e-business solutions developed by Oracle customers. In
addition to the software technology, Oracle will receive rights to the
domain names think.com and thinkingmachines.com.
Founded in 1983, Thinking Machines Corporation revolutionized
high-performance computing with its massively parallel supercomputing
technology. The company has evolved to focus exclusively on its Darwin data
mining software for database marketing in the financial services and
telecommunications industries. Darwin analyzes massive volumes of customer
transaction, demographic, and psychographic data, which can often amount to
hundreds of millions of customer data records. These advanced analyses help
companies profile and target customers with greater accuracy, reduce
customer attrition, assess customer profitability, cross-sell to existing
customers, and detect fraud.
"Data mining has become a critical feature for many applications including
e-business and CRM," said Michael Howard, Oracle's vice president for data
warehousing. "Thinking Machines has the most precise and scalable data
mining software technology on the market, and their parallel software roots
are a perfect match for Oracle. We expect to significantly expand the reach
of data mining into Oracle's key markets."
The Internet has resulted in an explosion of data available to supplement
internal systems. Demographic information has become a prerequisite to many
analyses, and is often used in combination with internal data that tracks
every aspect of a customer's interaction with a supplier. The proliferation
of this data has made it difficult or impossible for many companies to
manually sift through the information. Data mining and knowledge discovery
techniques are valuable for not only analyzing past behavior but also
predicting future behavior.
"Now that the compelling benefits of data mining have expanded its
popularity, executives are placing higher demands on the depth and breadth
of information garnered from corporate data warehouses," stated Robert
Doretti, president and CEO of Thinking Machines. "Darwin, Thinking Machines'
data mining software engine, now allows these data warehouses to become
highly productive customer information repositories."
Darwin puts powerful data mining techniques in the hands of general business
users and experienced analysts alike. Easy to use wizards automate data
mining, while providing advanced users with full control over all options
and parameters. Darwin combines advanced analytics-including neural
networks, decision trees, and memory-based reasoning-with unmatched power
and price performance. The one-button model-code generation, powerful
scripting language and robust software development kit bring predictive
forecasting capabilities to sales, call center, marketing and collections
organizations. Darwin runs on Sun and HP servers and exports data mining
models in C, C++ and Java for execution within Oracle databases. A Windows
NT release is planned for later this year.
Oracle Corporation is the world's leading supplier of software for
information management, and the world's second largest independent software
company. With annual revenues of more than $8.3 billion, the company offers
its database, tools and application products, along with related consulting,
education, and support services, in more than 145 countries around the
world.
____
In an email from Angoss, their comment on this news was . . .
"Among other things, we believe this announcement will accelerate decisions of other vendors to consider business partnerships and agreements to integrate data mining solutions into their product portfolios. ANGOSS is very well positioned to benefit from this development with other vendors." Lon Vining - Angoss V.P. Finance & CFO
So, in summary Luc, I think you are wise to take a better position in this company. I have a large position in it, and I have not - and will not - sell till the time is right. And in my opinion, we are just starting to wind up the watch now.
Crazy Canuk |
