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Strategies & Market Trends : Three Amigos Stock Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ben Wa who wrote (17054)	10/26/1999 9:31:00 PM
From: Sergio H	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29382

Mayo, I just started looking at ADBL after reading about it in the latest issue of Worth. You can access the story for free at their website: worth.com At first glance, I like the story. Sergio -------------------------------------------------------------------- Audible.com The car is stuck at a crawl. News radio is getting repetitive, and music is not quite soothing the savage beast. What a waste of time, every commuter rages. Audible (Nasdaq: ADBL; recent price, $11.06) is aiming to change all that. "If you could use your eyes, you would be reading and not listening," says Audible co-founder Donald Katz, who in a previous life was a regular contributor to Worth. "You probably would be reading The Wall Street Journal, your business-specific information, or a book. We take these print brands and create an audio platform where it never existed before. You basically program your own listening time." If you're locked into driving to work every day or committed to an hour at the gym, why not listen to a 45-minute reading of stories from that day's New York Times (95 cents)? Or tune into an audio rendition of Bill Gates's Business @ the Speed of Thought ($10.95)? It's simple enough: Go to www.audible.com, and start an account with a credit card. Be sure your PC has audio capability. Download Audible's AudibleManager software. You're set up. From there, pick from among 17,000 hours of listening programming. The audio file can be sent to the hard drive of your PC -- an hour of content is two MGs in size and takes about six to eight minutes to download via a 56K modem -- or directly to your portable audio device, whether it's Audible's MobilePlayer, a Philips Nino 500, a Casio Cassiopeia E-100, or any of numerous other new palm-sized PCs. You can then listen to the device as you would a Walkman or hook it up to your car stereo. In some cases, Audible's edge over traditional media is a matter of convenience and price -- as when Audible offers Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis at $24.95 for the unabridged reading, versus $59.95 for the book on tape. In many other cases, there is no traditional alternative, and that is Audible's great strength. There is no other convenient means of getting an audio version of the San Jose Mercury News or Slate magazine or a newsletter from Harvard Business School -- much less of getting it in a timely and almost instantaneous manner. Audible was founded in 1995 with venture-capital support from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and launched in late 1997. The company has attracted investments from Microsoft, Intel, Compaq, and AT&T, and has acquired exclusive rights to content ranging from The Economist to Bantam Doubleday Dell's audio books. Audible has a new deal with Diamond Multimedia and is cementing others with companies like Philips, Creative Labs, and Motorola, ensuring that these firms will make the next generation of portable PC devices Audible-ready. Audible is betting on the proliferation of these devices, and on a not-too-distant future in which cars will have PC-like devices in their dashboards. How big is the potential market? "The books-on-tape market is $2.2 billion now," says Michael Kwatinetz, a managing director at Credit Suisse First Boston. "If you add on some amounts of newspapers, magazines, and comedy, you are going to get to $2.5 billion to $3 billion easily. Given some growth, this will be a $4 billion to $5 billion market in five years. The question is how much of that will be digital download. We think five years from now, the digital download of that market could be $2 billion to $2.5 billion. If Audible executes, they should be the number-one player in this market."