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Technology Stocks : Interdigital Communication(IDCC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (3433)	1/18/2000 11:40:00 PM
From: Bux	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5195

IDC shooting for the moon! Or will they crash and burn? With all the knowledge Qualcomm has of CDMA don't you think it's a little odd that Nokia went to IDC for help than Qualcomm ? Jim, as my previous post said, No, I don't think that's odd. First of all, Qualcomm has helped Nokia with CDMA, that's a fact. It might have troubled Nokia that Qualcomm didn't share all their knowledge like an open book. Nokia might have realized they have a lot of catching up to do and the engineers they did have that knew anything about CDMA were already busy as could be working on projects that were vital to Nokia's future. Nokia couldn't very well wait while the rest of their engineers went to CDMA school, Qualcomm would barely give them the CDMA time of day, there were no qualified CDMA engineers who were unemployed but looking for work and they were paying dearly for the few CDMA engineers they were able to "steal" from other companies. So, how can Nokia jump start their CDMA efforts? Well, here's IDC, mostly a motley crew of money grubbing patent attorneys who got tired of the normal 9-5, a few disillusioned CDMA engineers who didn't have a viable product but knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk. Truth is, IDC shares had been languishing for well over a decade except for a little hopeful bump and pop along the way here or there. IDC had some new blood who wanted to make something of these nearly worthless shares and they needed a respectful company to help them create an air of legitimacy. So, Nokia got a few engineers working on stuff to help position them better in CDMA, IDC got a little legitimacy to those not critical enough to dig a little deeper. When one digs a little deeper one question that comes to mind is why would the big and powerful Nokia write off any interest in the IPR that comes out of this relationship? IPR is normally the tangible asset that comes out of a R&D expenditure. Could it be that Nokia doesn't expect any valuable IPR to arise from this relationship but merely that some "work" gets done that furthers Nokia's CDMA positioning in a hurry? I would suggest that the most accurate way to view this relationship is that some "renting" of engineers is going on. These engineers are obviously working on something that's important to Nokia and IDC benefits from the way the association legitimizes IDC. The risk/reward ratio with an investment in IDC is not favorable as it was a couple of months ago. Investors who want to protect their capital will not take it to Vegas which is what an investment in IDC amounts to. In order to get to payday, IDC has many high hoops to jump through to get to the steady stream of revenue they are dreaming of. Whether this ever materializes is a real crapshoot and if it does materialize, it will need to be large enough to justify the current price and then some. If I wanted the odds on my side, I would sell shares short. Bux