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Strategies & Market Trends : Rande Is . . . HOME -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jon Stept who wrote (13603)	10/18/1999 2:58:00 PM
From: Rande Is	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57584

Jon, I don't see Hearme as competition to the IP telephony biz at all. . . nor do I see them as having the same patents. The differences are essentially as follows: IP Telephony. . .person-to-person; station-to-station simultaneous 2way personal conversations. . . .these will eventually be directed right to your set-top box, with your telephone plugged in and ringing away. This is exactly like telephone. . .only via the internet. . . providers are NTOP and FCM and others. Hear Me's Live Audio Chat Rooms. . . never person-to-person . . but rather "topic" based. If you go into the Java Script Audio Chatroom and try to carry on a conversation with your brother. . .you will be booted and probably asked not to return. This is chat only. However, I believe that corporations will set up a half dozen of these rooms for different purposes for their internal use. Say. . one for technical discussion. . .one for Research and Development . . . one for Marketing and Advertising. . one for the Sales Department. . . and perhaps one that is available to the public, where people can ask questions about a newly launched product and get immediate response from a technician. But in no way does HearMe's product displace internet telephony in any way. . . it is strictly topic based. . .and will be used for communities and discussion. . . but not as a primary means for communication. I guess my example was misleading. . .I was thinking in terms of a 24 hour technical support for service technicians. . .not for person-to-person conversation. The real trick to making money in these rooms is in generating enough dough to cover the expensive high-bandwidth needed. EXTRA observation. . . .some people do better typing than talking. . . I am one. . . I type from a combination of brain hemisphers. . but when I speak, I often get tongue tied, which is when the neural message fails to find the proper pathways. So I can type my thoughts and say what I mean a high percentage of the time, yet speak the same thoughts and be misunderstood regularly. I answer dozens. . .sometimes hundreds of questions all day long . . . but when the Wall Street Journal calls and wants to know what I think about this or that and I stumble and fail to get my point across. Now imagine the flipside of this coin. . . those that can express themselves beautifully verbally, yet hunt and peck on the keyboard. . .or constantly lose their train of thought. So I believe that Audio Voice Chat rooms will be a big fad for several years. . . yet there will be an equal demand for both spoken rooms and text rooms. . . .and when the video chat rooms evolve, there will be a group that will embrace them as well. . . probably a younger, more attractive group. . .LOL! Rande Is