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

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (16309)	1/25/2000 12:44:00 PM
From: SecularBull	Respond to of 54805

Your assessment of my calculations is correct. LoF

To: John Stichnoth who wrote (16309)	1/27/2000 9:01:00 AM
From: blan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

HDR pre-tornado winds in Japan?? John, As per your request a long time ago here are a few articles you might find of interest. Even as an overworked sod in Tokyo with hardly enough time to keep up with the posts here, I thought these too valuable not to post. If the speed-reading dervish Ruffian or anyone else has posted this trio, please ignore them. I AM some thousand posts behind. What strikes me as significant about these articles from where I sit in Tokyo is 1) the sudden interest in the subject by the Nikkei News (the WSJ of Japan), 2) the posting of three articles on the subject in the same weekly issue, and 3) the abrupt group movement into the field. In the land that invented group-think long before the term was bandied about here :-) , company herd movement means a tacit acceptance to step boldly/timidly/finally into new territory. In this case, the first appears to be true. (While the Hitachi news is old-hat, there are a few details here that escaped the initial article I read. In the interest of the collective punch I include all three articles.) You or someone else who has a better handle on the rapidly evolving HDR build-up than I could probably put this into the larger picture. But with Japan moving in, after being so slow to get into the Internet and other computer/tech related areas, I'd venture to guess that this is significant dust-devil activity (read: building tornado in distance). And of course, once they get going, exporting the tech won't be far behind. And if nothing else, there are some impressive numbers. Regards, blan In no particular order: article one HITACHI, QUALCOMM TO PUSH DATA-TRANSMISSION SYSTEM Hitachi Ltd. has tied up with Qualcomm Inc. to commercialize a system permitting mobile telephones to function as nonvoice data-transmission terminals, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported. The system was developed by the California-based telecommunications-equipment manufacturer. The two companies are to conduct joint feasibility tests of a High Data Rate (HDR) system in the summer. Hitachi plans to invest some 10 billion yen [$100 million] to build a domestic production line by year-end. Sophisticated cellular phones, which use international standards to enable rapid transmission of voice and other forms of data, are seen to have the strongest growth potential in the area of high-speed mobile communications. Such high-speed transmission is needed for cell phone-Internet hookups. Hitachi and Qualcomm believe, however, that separating image- and text-data transmission from voice data allows major global telecommunications carriers -- to whom the data-only systems will be sold -- to cut spending costs. The systems that Hitachi and Qualcomm plan to market has a maximum throughput of 2.4 megabits per second, about the same as sophisticated cell phones. Such cell phones handle both sound and data transmission and require companies to invest as much as 1 trillion per network. A network built with HDR focuses exclusively on communications efficiency and enables the same frequency band to cover three times the number of users. Also, capital-spending costs for telecommunications carriers are relatively low, at abut 200 billion per network. The two companies plan to add the HDR feature to cell phones using the cdmaOne format. [end ] (article 2) CELL-PHONE USERS TO FIND NET DEALS Fujitsu Ltd., Sony Corp., and the Nippon Telegraph and telephone Corp. group all intend to enhance Internet-access services for cellular-phone users, industry sources said. Nifty Corp., Japan?s largest Internet-access provider and a Fujitsu subsidiary, will introduce a special membership status for cell-phone users in the spring giving Internet access for a basic monthly fee of 200-400 yen [$2-$4]. The company hopes to sign up 3 million subscribers for the program by the end of fiscal 2003. At that time, Internet access for cell-phones users is expected to generate just over 7 billion [$70 million] in revenues annually, or one-sixth of Nifty?s total current sales. Sony Communication Network Corp., which runs the So-net Internet access service, began considering a fee-based system enabling cell-phone users to retrieve information. NTT-ME Information Xing Inc.., which runs the ?goo? search engine, plans to set up a home page for cell-phone users in the spring. The first step will see a search feature provided for i-mode, an Internet-compatible cell-phone service offered by NTT mobile Communications Network Inc.., better known as NTT DoCoMo. [end] (article 3) MOBILE COMPUTING TO EXPLODE The number of users of mobile-computing services, including Internet access, is expected to triple from 17.23 million in fiscal 1999 to 52.92 million by fiscal 2003, said the Mobile Computing Promotion Consortium in releasing a survey. The industry group estimates the number of mobile-communications service subscribers at 59.56 million in March 2000, of which 53.83 million are cell-phone users and 5.73 million personal handy-phone system (PHS) subscribers. Many cell-phone subscribers have been signing up to use their terminals to access the Internet, notably via the i-mode service offered by NTT Mobile Communications Network Inc.. The number of cell-phones subscribers is predicted to reach 59.75 million by March 2001 and 72.59 million by March 2004. PHS subscribers, whose numbers have been stagnating recently, are expected to increase gradually as more people use PHS handsets to download music. PHS users will likely reach 6.03 million in March 2001 and 7.45 million in March 2004. [end]