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

To: gdichaz who wrote (19918)	3/12/2000 7:35:00 PM
From: kumar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Smartcards : I'm not Eric, but... on the GG listserv, a gentleman has been providing some compelling reasons to consider SNDK (Sandisk) in the smart card arena. SNDK's major (only?) competitor is Sony with their Memory Sticks. and he does warn, to "keep an eye out" for what Sony does. Both companies have an impressive list of partners that use their technology. My take is : These 2 will battle it out, and there may/not be a clear defined winner. In GG terms, I'd paraphrase and say "both are in the tornado", "both have barriers to entry", yet this could be a game of a tornado with no clear gorilla. cheers, kumar

To: gdichaz who wrote (19918)	3/13/2000 5:20:00 PM
From: gcrieff	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 54805

hello gdichaz possibly another way to play the smartcard idea is biometric id, you can see companys like cherry are starting to manufacture keyboards with smartcard readers and fingerprint id's,soon they will be everywhere. motorola, siemens,sagem are including them in mobile phones this year. if theres a gorilla to emerge from the biometric field it will probably be idx, they have also developed a biometric certificate, for which there may be the possibility of adoption by verisign.

To: gdichaz who wrote (19918)	3/14/2000 9:30:00 PM
From: Eric L	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Cha2, << How about helping us here re Smartcards? ... way (other than such huge outfits as Schlumberger) to participate >> Not a real short easy way to respond to this ... not ignoring your question ... I'll respond this weekend. Interesting however, that little DataKey (DKEY) of Minneapolis, is up 428% YTD and it was up 15% on this gruesome day. Also, the Infineon (Siemens spin off of their semiconductor division) IPO went off yesterday. They were kind of cool yesterday but were up 8% today. Infineon is the largest manufacturer of smart card silicon (which is in short supply due to industry allocations and the huge demand for their 16-bit crypto chip used in GSM SIM cards). They also source the silicon for the AmEx "Blue" card. Infineon has some interesting things going with WIND and Siemens is involved with GMST in the eBooks thing. Best, - Eric -