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Technology Stocks : InfoSpace.com -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: spal who wrote (1521)	3/10/2000 7:11:00 PM
From: A.L. Reagan	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 3070

Spal, I think we agree 100% on the principles, but are seeing all these companies through different eyes. HOOV has a staff of almost 100 researchers, writers, editors and analysts who create on a daily basis copyrighted content (the 15,000 company capsules and 5,000 or so full-blown profiles). This is a nice little internet company with a "less cash" market cap of around $70 million, on current quarterly revenues of a little over $6 million. It should turn a profit by the end of this year. Like everybody else, HOOV also aggregates content, and sells its content to other sites, such as INSP. TSCM is a pathetic FK'ed up outfit that never had a viable business model and whose proprietary content is pretty much limited to their opinion columnists. I am trying to get a handle as to what content INSP actually creates, or otherwise owns. Horoscopes? The phone book? Recipe tips? Stock quotes? Restaurant guides? What do they actually create and own (versus package and distribute)? Unless I've missed something big time, anybody who believes that INSP truly and legally owns* any appreciable amount of proprietary and unique content probably still thinks Al Gore invented the Internet. INSP is primarily a repackaging and distribution model. They run a Yahoo-clone website with some minute percentage of the page views of Yahoo. They are presently at the forefront of delivering internet content to wireless devices, which is quite a bit more complex than using HTML to format content and HTTP as a transport mechanism. INSP hopes to be able to integrate a variety of wireless mark-up languages, transport protocols, and interface standards and overlay it with a "portal" like user view and action feature set. In doing this, they are by far not the only dog in the kennel (although Naveen may bark the loudest). The only way in all your wildest dreams you can justify INSP's current valuation is the assumption that it is about to become the Yahoo of the wireless internet world. I'm certainly willing to bet that Yahoo will be the Yahoo of this world, and that AOL+TWX will be the AOL of this world. Plus any of a dozen other candidates, which may include INSP. Right now, it sure has a good chance to the the first guy out of the block and into your palmtop or cell phone. To do this, INSP will spend an enormous amount of money trying to develop a delivery platform that is by an order of magnitude more complex than HTML/HTTP and the Intel PC. This may or may not work. Other software development organizations may well produce a better, faster "platform" product. Everybody's working on it. But, as the big guys enter the field, INSP will end up being a bit player, like it is in today's PC interface portal world; but will maintain its business as a leading step & fetch it "infomediary" packager and redistributor in both wireless and PC-interface web worlds. INSP does not own content in the legal sense of the word. Maybe I'm missing some key points, but I'm not sure you folks are seeing through all foggy hype and getting a very clear picture of what exactly you do own in INSP. ### P.S. I probably should quit writing these posts until INSP runs up to $300 so I can safely short it!