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Gold/Mining/Energy : Net Shepherd Inc. (WEB) on ASE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ulster1 who wrote (268)	7/19/1999 3:04:00 PM
From: WhatsUpWithThat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1252

Fair 'nuff, U1, but in all fairness you didn't get much response because I think those of us invested feel the pertinent info is already posted on this thread and not hard to access. I don't think anything new has been added to the equation since the stock was in the $4's. Flip through the posts here and you'll see some lengthy ones that tell you why those of us here are still long in spite of the price slide. Answers.com: they haven't announced precisely what they'll do with it (come ON, NSI, let your shareholders and the workd in on your plans!), but ideaLab! took shares in this little ASE company in trade for it rather than insisting on cash, which I think is what first really got my attention. Answers.com is much like AskJeeves, and dovetails nicely with NSI's community software and proven ability to (hate the word) leverage a community of people to do the back-end work that is so costly to AskJeeves (ie. the actual research to get the answers). Note that the value in these products is only partly technology, the English language parsing engine; the balance is the answers database, which is built up by people....and NSI has proven to D&B how effective their community-building can be. There was a column in theStreet.com on ASKJ that raised this very issue, the expense of running all the back-end researchers. So if NSI can lower this cost, that is a compelling argument in favour of Answers.com. OTOH, Answers.com is starting from behind the starters' blocks. ASKJ is already out ahead, has the mindshare of investors. NSI has a job ahead of it to promote its solution (when it announces one <g>) Plus, so far ASKJ is primarily interested in licencing its engine to put a friendlier front end on customer service tech support for companies like Toshiba and Dell (AskDudley for Dell, if you can believe it!). If NSI can put Answers.com to more creative use, and especially bundled with the means of populating the back end on a wide variety of topics... I have no problem with you being short, of course, but personally I think the safer bet is long, or at least on the sidelines until there's an announcement. WEB lately has shown I think a real bottom while people are waiting, so the only way it's going down significantly is if NSI announces something really lame and the market stamps a big "L" on their forehead...which isn't my bet. WUWT