MMI.V heads up to resume trading monday after 7 week halt
should explode
John Kaiser's 300 Dollar Fantasy! This is the best report ever put out on Meteor. Please
read a few times. There is so much to absorb:
>>Triple digit valuation fantasies
Meteor management has only a very vague sense about the degree that this play is being
watched. That there is a huge audience waiting in the wings is only hinted at by the broad
distribution of inquiries from the most unlikely sources. What we do not know is how much
capital these watchers have at their disposal and how big their visions are as to what
Thoughtshare might be ultimately worth.
As it stands now Meteor will have about 35 million shares fully diluted, which will double to
70 million when it acquires the remaining 49.7% held by Jim Miller and the founders. Add
another 15% for the options that will eventually have to be granted to attract Silicon Valley
hotshots who will take Thoughtshare into the big leagues, and you have a company with 80
million shares issued.
Throw in another 20 million shares for the $100 million plus the company will try to raise
over the next year to bankroll the Thoughtshare marketing blitz, and we have 100 million
shares. That number certainly makes me choke, but doesn't seem to have hampered stocks
like Unique Broadband Systems Inc UBS-V: $8.35) which ran from $0.60 last November
to a February peak of $17.75. Put the Thoughtshare story into the same market cap league
as some of Canada's other technology startup winners and you get a price target in the
$10-20 range.
Then start thinking about Thoughtshare as a key building block in the evolution of the
Internet, throw in broker hotshots of the sort who think a book four golf story might be
worth $10 billion, and your head starts to spin at the valuations that might ensue. When you
consider that Yahoo with revenues of $500 million and profits of $10 million has a
market cap of $100 billion, what's to stop the market from dreaming about $300 Meteor?
But, back to earth.
Thoughtshare has not yet delivered a commercial product and won't be in a position to
attract triple digit fantasy valuations for at least another year. I mention these fantasies to
illustrate the thought process that could drive the Meteor market after the CDNX trading halt
ends.<<
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kaiser Bottom-Fish Tracker 2000-16
Copyright 2000 John A Kaiser
March 28, 2000
Meteor Technologies Inc (MMI-V: $2.10 halted)
Tel#: (604) 682-7076
Web Site: www.meteortechnologies.com
Refreshing the Thoughtshare story
Synopsis: Meteor Technologies Inc (MMI-V: $2.10 halted) has announced a
series of transactions that signal a full-scale goahead for the
Thoughtshare change of business. Trading could resume any day. On March 16
Meteor published a detailed news release whose main points are a) it is
conducting a private placement of 4,000,000 units at $0.86, b) it is
acquiring an additional 15.3% stake in Thoughtshare for $4.2 million, c) a
third party is purchasing an unspecified interest in Thoughtshare for $2
million, d) Dr Jim Miller, a key member of this third party and a founder
of QLT Phototherapeutics Inc (QLTI-NQ: $55) and Inex Phamaceuticals Corp
(IEX-T: $7.50), has been appointed CEO of Thoughtshare, e) an agreement
that allows Meteor to acquire the remaining 49.7% of Thoughtshare on terms
based on the imputed market cap of Meteor, and, f) the commercial release
of the first version of the Thoughtshare technology will be in the second
quarter. All of this is still subject to Meteor shareholder approval and
CDNX approval. The private placement has already been completed. The
lengthy trading halt imposed by the CDNX was unfortunate, but
understandable in light of the exchange's unofficial recognition that
Thoughtshare is a success story in the making which will legitimize
Meteor's funding and acquisition model for resource listings embarking on a
change of business. If Meteor turns into a fundamental success story, it
will be a blow to the hidden CDNX agenda of turning the venture exchange
into a broker facilitated shell IPO manufacturing institution that flushes
its failed listings down the toilet. The importance of the news release is
that the financing and big league people needed to implement the
Thoughtshare technology in all its manifestations are now in place. There
will probably be a few more hassles from the CDNX during the next few
months as Meteor acquires the rest of Thoughtshare, but once that is done
and Thoughtshare has successfully launched its Thoughtmap product, the next
stop will be a substantial financing and a NASDAQ listing application. The
stock will likely trade well ahead of traditional valuation benchmarks, but
probably not any more so than any other of fthe market's technology
darlings. The following writeup is very long, but in light of the limited
information Meteor has disclosed, and the fact that Meteor is heavily owned
by my readership, I feel obligated to share my understanding of the story
and why I think it is so great.
Thoughtmaps as Internet content organizers for everybody
When I initially described the Thoughtshare technology last June I
emphasized its function as a sophisticated bookmark organizer that allowed
a user to package up the Internet equivalent of a guided tour complete with
annotations, and share it with anybody. These "knowledge objects", which I
dubbed "tours", have since been renamed as "Thoughtmaps". Thoughtshare's
marketing strategy is to deliver a free downloadable Thoughtmap "taker"
with limited "maker" functionality, and sell a more sophisticated
professional Thoughtmap "maker" which will allow the registered owner to
"brand" his/her Thoughtmap creations. In this sense the Thoughtmap maker
will be a kind of publishing tool. The professional versions will also
eventually offer the ability to implement security measures that will
enable the creator to embed access controls. This has huge implications for
the problem of providing selective access to restricted content. I'll talk
more about this later. Thoughtshare has been very quiet about its marketing
strategy, and part of the reason is that the founders did not have the
skills to deal with this problem comprehensively. One of the key reasons
for bringing Jim Miller into the picture as a direct shareholder of
Thoughtshare was that he has the experience and connections to put together
a proper marketing strategy and team. One of the pleasant aspects of the
Thoughtshare technology is that it complements most web-based ventures, and
consequently will not be perceived as a threat that has to be resisted.
Over the next six months Meteor investors will see two types of news
developments. One will be the look and feel of the actual product, which
absolutely every Internet user will be able to test personally. The other
will be announcements about alliances involving major destination sites and
portals who wish to encourage their users to create and use Thoughtmaps.
Most of these sites are depending on the eyeball traffic based advertising
revenue model, and anything that steers users to content hosted by their
sites will be in demand. Many destination sites will create their own
"tours" to highlight their sites. If there is anybody who should be quaking
in their boots, it is the people behind etour.com, an outfit that packages
up specialized Internet tours that it lets you take if you give them lots
of personal information. Thanks to Thoughtshare they will find every other
web site has suddenly become competition in the tour creation department,
and, eventually, every Internet user. Once the product starts to be adopted
by key "distribution" sites, and the technology press initiates coverage,
we should see monthly statistics about the number of downloads. Because of
the universality of the Thoughtmap's usefulness to Internet users, its
proliferation will have a viral dynamic where each user will encourage at
least several others to download the Thoughtshare software so that they can
share a newly created Thoughtmap. The proliferation rate will be boosted by
the fact that the Thoughtmap serves very well as a communication tool for
professionals who must service a large clientele individually with
essentially the same information. For example, Thoughtmaps are going to be
a gift from heaven for brokers and newsletter writers who need to point the
attention of their clients or subscribers to an array of Internet hosted
items they want to present in a more graphically friendly manner than is
possible by a series of links embedded in the body of an email message.
Viral and word-of-mouth proliferation are slow getting started, but when
the initiators are pushing the product to a big list of potential users,
the product can move up the growth curve very rapidly.
Thoughtshare as the PowerPoint for Internet content
When backflip.com launched its bookmark storage system in late November it
helped spark market interest in the Thoughtshare story. But backflip.com is
a very limited story because all it does is offer an external filing
cabinet for your bookmarks that is managed by a supposedly helpful
electronic librarian. Furthermore, backflip.com wants to be your exclusive
bookmark organizer and consequently belongs to that control freak genre
despised by net savvy users. The Thoughtshare story is much more
interesting and open-ended. It lends itself to a variety of metaphors. One
that I find useful, and certainly not all-encompassing, is that of
Thoughtshare as the PowerPoint of the Internet. For those who do not know,
PowerPoint is the slide show organizer included with the Microsoft Office
suite. In a certain sense an Internet session log is a slide show. A
Thoughtmap will be like a PowerPoint slide show that has been annotated
with notes and which draws its content from the Internet. Just as you can
rearrange the slide sequence using the PowerPoint slide sorter, you will be
able to do the same with the Thoughtmap. The bookmark metaphor is too
limited because all it suggests is a very effective file clerk function.
The PowerPoint metaphor is richer because it begins to hint at the creative
function underlying a Thoughtmap.
What is so special about the Thoughtshare technology?
Yet another metaphor for a Thoughtmap is that of a sophisticated electronic
briefcase or email. An email is no longer just a blob of dry text with the
occasional hyperlink. All kinds of multimedia objects and even interactive
applets are showing up embedded inside emails (along with those nasty
viruses). In its basic form a Thoughtmap is a file that contains
information about the owner/creator of the briefcase, the URL addresses for
all its indexed web pages, the relationships between these pages as defined
by both the Thoughtmap creator and the web site's internal structure, and
the viewing sequence defined by the creator. In addition the Thoughtmap
file contains the footnotes attached to each of these nodes or pages. The
Thoughtshare founders have also figured out how to "attach" any file to the
nodes so that not only can you open a text box, but you could open any
audio, video, graphic or document file. None of this in itself sounds very
impressive and in its basic static form is nothing more than a relational
database. What is special about the Thoughtshare software is the CZWeb
technology that allows a user to visualize this system of nodes and links
in an interactive manner where you can zoom in and out of clusters within
clusters and wander from cluster to cluster. More importantly, the
Thoughtshare software is designed to provide this visual mapping on the fly
in a separate window as you surf the web. With enough time and effort
anybody can cobble together a finished Internet tour. But nobody else has
software that will do it for you live! This technology is the fruit of a $6
million research project at Simon Fraser University supervised by
professors John Dill and Brian Fisher. The other special thing about
Thoughtshare is the Waymarking technology developed by Steven Forth that
lets a user attach a comment to any node or link. Big deal, so I fill out a
little memo field in the record that describes a particular node's URL
address. But Steven Forth pointed out to me that what I am talking about is
a piece of cake. The real trick is how do you "attach" the visual depiction
of that annotation to the dynamic graphical presentation of the system of
nodes and links, and keep it attached while you zoom in and out of that
cluster so that you can see and open that footnote at any time? For
somebody who has wasted an awful lot of time trying to get the little tags
to stay where they belong within an Excel spreadsheet chart, the
significance of the Waymarking contribution immediately struck home.
A Thoughtmap as a transferable briefcase and its implications for B2B
commerce
Once you start to think of a Thoughtmap as a file equivalent to a briefcase
into which you can stuff just about anything, your imagination can run wild
with all the bells and whistles that are possible. One obvious development
is that the Thoughtmap will eventually have embedded in it a security
system that will allow the "owner" of the Thoughtmap to control access to
its contents. Later versions of the Thoughtmap will also have the internal
facility to authorize access to restricted content on the web such as
pay-per-view pages or sensitive corporate information. It may even be
possible for a Thoughtmap to collect a bunch of pay-per-view information
about content administered by a variety of web sites and then be submitted
to an independent billing system which loads your Thoughtmap with the
financial credits needed to access the restricted content. The pay-per-view
sites merely collect these authorization codes from the Thoughtmaps when
the content is actually retrieved, and batch all such transactions on a
monthly basis to the billing system which verifies the invoice and cuts a
single check to the pay-per-view site. Here is a solution for the problem
of how specialty sites which publish valuable content can conduct micro
transactions without maintaining a cumbersome and expensive billing system.
Just use your Thoughtmap maker to assemble a list of items you want to
view, surf to the Thoughtshare "ATM" site, "plug" your Thoughtmap in, and
when it is loaded with credits, just take your own tour you just created
and retrieve the content you need. Replace this business about financial
credits with simple access codes, and you have a very powerful tool for
turning Thoughtmaps into passes that give specific people access to certain
pages within Intranets. All of a sudden we have a portable briefcase that
can be loaded with links to complex and size intensive documents such as
architectural drawings or engineering blueprints that shouldn't be
accessible to just anybody. Rather than emailing a messy batch of
attachments with obscure file names people will be able to prepare
Thoughtmaps that point to these password protected documents stored on a
web server. The ability to attach footnotes on top of footnotes in an
endless series will let these portable briefcases operate as discussion and
negotiation vehicles. Where a big fat file is not a problem the Thoughtmap
can be turned into a mini web site onto which a lawyer has loaded a bunch
of contract documents for which an index has been created. The lawyer can
then create a sequence of items that need input from the client. What is
the value of this? The value lies in the fact that everybody has very busy
schedules involving a variety of projects and obligations that make it
tough to even have a telephone conversation. The Thoughtmap can let two
parties work out the details on their own schedules, and even though this
involves back and forthing the Thoughtmap, the job will probably get done
faster than trying to tee up a time to talk or meet.
Thoughtshare as a desktop organizer
The guided tour metaphor already makes clear why librarians, search
specialists, consultants and teachers are going to fall head over heels in
love with Thoughtshare. The portable briefcase metaphor helps show why the
business-to-business Internet world will move quickly to incorporate
Thoughtshare technology into their web sites. Then there is the grand-daddy
metaphor for Thoughtshare, its role as a desktop organizer. Forget about
always relying on Windows Explorer to track down in which obscurely named
subdirectory you have stashed that obscurely named file. In the world of
always on Internet connections the Thoughtshare desktop organizer will
hardly distinguish between content stashed on your hard disk and on some
distant web site. Users will be able to organize their desktops in numerous
customized configurations, not just one. Perhaps it is possible that
Thoughtshare will not just be peripheral software that plugs into a
browser. Perhaps the Thoughtshare technology will become the core of the
browser that defines the future desktop. Are you paying attention Mr.
Gates?
Thoughtshare's implications for WAP and 3D Web
The organizational function of the Thoughtshare technology is only the
flavour of the month that has the most immediate commercial potential. The
short term marketing goal for Thoughtshare will be to make its Thoughtmaps
ubiquitous on the Internet. But Thoughtshare is destined to be more than a
flash in the pan eventually eclipsed by a new and better product created by
somebody else. It is not a product play like backflip.com and the many
other organizer utilities that have a projected life span of a couple
years. At the core of the Thoughtshare technology is some hard science that
will serve as a building block for several key directions in which the
Internet is evolving. One of these is the growing popularity of handheld
devices and the problem presented by their small screens. Thoughtshare's
ability to zoom in and out within a web of nodes and links is the
foundation needed to provide an interface between Internet content and
miniature screens. The buzzword for this application is "wireless access
protocol" or "WAP" for short. Although management's current development
efforts are geared toward a desktop monitor, Thoughtshare management has
already put a fair bit of thought into this new development direction which
remains a wide open frontier. Another Internet trend is the development of
3-dimensionality, which will accelerate as transmission speeds, compression
technologies and computing power go through quantum leaps over the next few
years. The current development strategy for the Thoughtmaps amounts to a
tree branching system that works well within the confines of a
2-dimensional screen. But the underlying CZWeb algorithms can work equally
well with a web system that is best depicted in a 3-dimensional space. As
you can imagine, technology that facilitates 3-D visualization of nodes and
links has to become an intrinsic part of any future 3-D browser. If
Thoughtshare were to lose the current bookmarking solution race it still
has the tournament prize up for grabs.
Thoughtshare as an extension of the human mind
The Thoughtshare technology has implications that go beyond representing
the Internet in a more intuitively meaningful manner. When you read some of
the academic stuff written by professors John Dill and Brian Fisher about
CZWeb, you realize that the inventors of the Thoughtshare algorithms were
thinking far beyond a system of organizing Internet bookmarks. They were
thinking about a system to enhance the human thought process, to take
complex data sets transformed into conceptual objects and present them in a
visual space that exists outside of your mind on your computer screen, but
with an interactivity that will super-charge ordinary minds and provide
tremendous leverage for brilliant minds. The tendency of the founders to
get lost in an academic debate about the scientific implications of the
Thoughtshare technology has in the past been something of a stumbling
block. The arrival of Jim Miller to make things happen in the
commercialization department will allow the founders to continue their
theorizing in a way that keeps the road wide open for the evolution of
Thoughtshare without leaving the technology stuck at the starting gate. One
area on which I think the founders will expend lots of brain power is the
use of the Thoughtshare visualization technology as a problem solving tool.
There probably isn't much commercial value in giving scientists a tool to
extend their consciousness into the 3-dimensional space of a computer
screen where they can probe and prod more concepts and structures than the
human mind can handle without external cue cards. But what if we replace
scientific research problems with data mining problems? The Internet is
facilitating the most massive data collection spree in human history. I'm
not a big fan of the privacy invasion constituted by reams of data linked
to specific individuals, but I am very interested in the trends that might
be implicit within aggregates of data. Corporate marketing strategy should
not be focused on profiling me so that they know precisely what product or
service they can pitch at me with the highest sale probability. Anybody who
thinks people will tolerate the invasion of their privacy forever is a fool
or wannabe totalitarian. A more productive focus would be to mine the data
for emerging trends so that the firm can position itself to serve that
trend while the competition squeezes the dying trend. But extracting
meaningful trends from endless statistics is hardly an analytical process.
It is more an art involving trial and error and creative pattern
recognition strategies. The Thoughtshare technology may facilitate a system
where an operator can generate multiple files from a raw data set and
massage them within a CZWeb visualization system. This is really abstract
stuff that pushes my intellectual limits, so let me leave you with my
intuition that there is something about the system created by Brian Fisher
and John Dill that could evolve into a powerful data mining tool that the
company could license as a high end product or perhaps turn into the
foundation of a data mining service business.
Thoughtshare has company-building substance
What I want my readers to understand is that the core Thoughtshare
technology is extremely rich, and has the potential to be a
company-building foundation, not just a lure for a buyout by some
overpriced technology company. It is very important to understand that the
Thoughtshare story will not evaporate just because the technology bull
market turns sour. Jim Miller has done extremely well for himself
financially, and has no need to waste his time on a piece of fluff
franchise story of the book for golf sort that can be here today, gone
tomorrow. It took a fair amount of time and effort by Meteor's Fred Fabro
to demonstrate the Thoughtshare story's potential to Miller and convince
him that here was a project on a par with a cure for cancer. One of the key
deciding points for Jim Miller was his recognition that the Thoughtshare
project has development affinities with Quadralogic's cancer phototherapy
concept. The science behind Quadralogic came out of the University of
British Columbia, and is now the basis for a company that had recently had
a $5 billion market cap. Miller sees the evolution of Thoughtshare as a
decade long project with a substantial payoff far above what most
shareholders are looking for over the next year. Fred Fabro's success in
bringing Miller on board is a huge coup for both Meteor and Thoughtshare.
Post-halt trading behaviour is unpredictable
This brings me to the question of what will happen when Meteor resumes
trading. The Thoughtshare technology is being discovered by groups who
appreciate the enormous benefits for the technology, and they are starting
to discover Meteor the stock play as byproduct of their primary interest.
One of these groups consists of academics ranging from hard scientists to
literary theorists who are looking for better ways to control their
thoughts about a problem and a way to share their thought process with
others that might contribute that spark of insight which generates the
eureka phenomenon. Another group are the consultants and professionals
looking for more effective ways to communicate their work to their clients.
Within this group is a sub-group consisting of teachers and librarians who
won't even hear about the story until suddenly Britannica.com has a
Thoughtshare download button on its site. A third group consists of
businessmen who have glimpsed the business-to-business implications of
Thoughtmaps as a sophisticated form of email that facilitates deal
negotiation and document handling. A number of Internet venture groups who
picked up the Thoughtmap concept through my ravings "get" the story to the
degree that they have already approached Meteor or Thoughtshare about
incorporating the technology into their business plans. Then there is the
less sophisticated group consisting of people like myself and most Meteor
shareholders who see the Thoughtmaps as the solution to the Internet's
organizational mess. When you get a stock play whose story is one that such
a wide range of people understands and desperately want to see turned into
reality so that they can begin to use it, then you have a monster winner.
We also have a situation where the opportunity to invest in this technology
through Meteor is pretty much still a secret that nobody but a few people
on the Internet forums is overly eager to spread quite yet. On a more
sobering note, the Thoughtshare product does not yet exist in a commercial
form, and won't be available in its first version until summer. On top of
all that, the stock has been halted for almost seven weeks for rather bogus
regulatory reasons during a period when the technology sector was red hot
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