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Technology Stocks : General Magic -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Challo Jeregy who wrote (7946)	2/9/2000 8:00:00 AM
From: equityanalyst	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

Challo - Speaking of RB, here's another interesting post (thanks, whitephosphorus) relevant to GMGC and speech recognition development: "Lernahooligan alert -- pulling out all stops: That,it turns out, is what Lernout & Hauspie (LHSP:Nasdaq - news) was doing Monday when it dug (once again!) into its bag-o-tricks to juice its stock. I had pointed out the stock was up on "no news" because, quite frankly, I hadn't thought that the latest in a string of press releases justified the rise. But based on my email, not only was it responsible for the rise, but it was yet another reason why I'm an idiot. (Duh, we already knew that!) Seriously, folks, I didn't take the press release seriously because it was yacking about a "prototype" for a Palm Pilot-like device that recognizes voice. (Lernout makes voice-recognition software.) Prototypes come a dime a dozen in Silicon Valley, where they're unaffectionately known as "vaporware" until they are actually rolled out for sale. So many prototypes simply never make it to market, and when they do, they're often produced much later than originally expected. Lernout expects its product to be rolled out "sometime" by the end of this year. However, Lernout has more than once shown up at investment conferences armed with demonstrations of its software, only to have the demo flop. (I've only heard the stories from on-the-scene sources, not seen them.) So, armed with the new prototype of its palm device, Lernout went on CNNfn Monday night to showcase the product. Turns out it was a fake demonstration. According to the transcript, the Lernout device displayed this message: "Can you meet us for lunch ... on Thursday? We'll only be an hour. Whatever happened to the two-martini lunch? Got to run, Allan." The reporter was then prompted by the Lernout exec to reply to the message. She said, "OK, why don't we say, 'No, I can't make it Thursday, but what about next Monday?'" To which the device responded: "What are my stocks doing here?" Huh? That has nothing to do with lunch. What happened? According to a Lernout spokesman, "It's a prototype, not a real product." My point, precisely."