Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DownSouth who wrote (6852)	9/23/1999 8:02:00 AM
From: Apollo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Vision......and Bandwidth...borrowed from the EMC thread and one of their visionaries (Bill Fischofer): "GBLX+EMC GBLX held its shareholder approval meeting today regarding its pending merger with FRO (the FRO meeting is tomorrow). A number of meeting attendees have reported that one of the items mentioned by GBLX management at the meeting is that GBLX is expecting to "announce an arrangement with EMC in the 1st Qtr regarding 'storage on demand'". Such an arrangement would be fantastic news for shareholders of both companies. As I previously mentioned, bandwidth and storage are one of those hand-and-glove relationships which will be one of the central themes of 21st century technology growth marrying "information in motion" with "information at rest". EMC shareholders wishing to capitalize on this synergy may wish to look closely at GBLX. Disclaimer: I am long both GBLX and EMC and consider both to be core holdings. Re: Storage on demand This is only slightly off-topic so I hope the thread will forgive this post. Communications channels need buffers to ensure smooth flow and the higher the bandwidth and the greater the number of channels the larger the buffers needed. The forerunner of this can be seen in today's announcement at biz.yahoo.com of the deal between Akamai (to IPO next month under ticker AKAM) and FRO (soon to be merged into GBLX). The point to realize is that within a very few years the net will be the communications infrastructure for everything: voice, data, video, TV, etc. Consider the logistics of broadcasting the Superbowl, Olympics, or the World Cup finals to the world via the net. While the backbones will carry the main load you need local caching to handle the snarls and to smooth out the "jitter" that would otherwise result in such massive multicasting. Storage on demand means that the network can provide automatic buffering for preloaded content (e.g., commercials, especially regional ones) as well as handle the separate commentator and replay features that different locations will demand. This isn't 20th-century TV. An Italian businessman in a hotel in Sao Paolo may well wish to listen to an extended interview with the Italian goalkeeper being held by an interviewer from Milan which would be of limited interest to the local Brazilian audience. Better still, consider that the businessman probably isn't going to be able to watch those events live (it's a business trip, after all). Today we're just beginning the evolution from VCRs to disk-based TV recorders like TiVo. Think of a personal videorecorder as an analog to a telephone answering machine. Note how most phone companies today offer voice mailboxes which eliminate the need for answering machines and provide access from anywhere for the traveler. Now fast forward to a time when all "TV" flows dynamically over the net. Networks will be highly incented to sell individual subscribers personal viewing services which include a few hundred gigabytes to allow automatic "recording" and selection of various "live" events for your delayed viewing pleasure. That's storage on demand. For a few dollars a month why bother with maintaining your own hardware when the network will do it for you and allow you to access your "videobox" from any "TV" anywhere in the world? If this sounds like science fiction it is because we are still in an age when dead-tree publications engage in handwringing about an impending "bandwidth glut". The key to successful long-term investing is to see beyond the present circumstance to the drivers of what is to come. Bandwidth will explode and it will be global. The previous scarcity will be the new abundance and it will drive a host of new products and services which today are either visible in only the dimmest of outlines or are as yet completely unimagined. Underpinning this vast sea of data as it sloshes around the globe will be equally dramatic demand for storage which will make EMC shareholders very happy in the years to come. GBLX is just one of the sources of this demand but as the first and so-far only IP carrier to span the globe I expect it to be one of the strongest beneficiaries of this trend. The synergies are just too powerful. I would encourage those wishing more insight into this type of reasoning to visit gildertech.com and spend 4 shares of EMC for a subscription to the Gilder Technology Report. While EMC is not one of Mr. Gilder's companies, GBLX and many others are and his track record in identifying tomorrow's tech leaders is little short of amazing."