Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Venkie who wrote (8667)	10/18/2000 9:09:29 PM
From: Boplicity	Respond to of 65232

new bottom target for the NAZ 2600 around the oct 99 low. so many people are getting demoralized that they are will want out on any rally and will walk away from the tech sector for months. G

To: Venkie who wrote (8667)	10/18/2000 10:32:31 PM
From: stephen wall	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 65232

Venkie, re: gmgc Negatives: 1) Still under the umbrella of bad financing. Floorless convertible deals with offshore hedge funds. BUT, final conversion, thru contractual agreement, Dec. 31, 2000. 2) They are shopping equity financing thru Landesburg for upt to 45M. In this market, might be questionable, but by March 31,2001, the effective end date of equity search, who knows. 3) Approximate 40M/yr burn rate for network operations. A payment due to Qwest, approximately 10M, for communications services. Qwest has provided spotty service at best. Contract under re-evaluation. Positives: 1) SR/voice portals/call centers coming out party due next year. 2) GMGC MagicTalk is the VUI for Onstar callcenter. Handles everything but emergency services. There are 2 call centers, one in Michigan, one in Charlotte, NC. It will be mandatory to move call centers to VUI for expense reasons. Think of the old telephone operators and how you couldnt scale a phone network until phone calls became automatically switched. 3) GMGC, to my knowledge, has the most advanced VUI in the market. OO design written in C++/Java and will run on all SR platforms. Nuance, Speechworks, Viavoice, etc. Important consideration in the early beginnings of this platform from customer-centric view. Implements voice-to-voice, voice-to-data, data-to-voice. Natural language processing as opposed to menu driven command and control word-mapping. 4)Onstar will mix and match live operators with GMGC's VUI thru the Sunnyvale NOC. GMGC signed up over 1M free users to Mytalk in less than a year and then dropped it because voice-ads didnt pan out. However, it did test the NOC. The network operation center provides redundant access to communication lines, back-up power, fail-safe computing power, etc and has been time tested. 5) IBM/Websphere/GMGC comarketing. Im unsure whether MagicTalk is being integrated into Websphere at this point. It is being "contemplated" by IBM. The Websphere platform includes Directtalk and Viavoice. The co-marketing will probably focus on call-centers, what GMGC is doing now for Onstar. Include in that the IBM/Sebel DB2 e-business alliance and maybe you have something. (Techguide.com has a very good NEW white paper on the IBM/Sebel alliance, if youre interested.) The GMGC sales rep is based in NC, where IBM research has a large presence(11,000) at Research Triangle and Onstar Callcenter part deux is located. 6)Virtual advisor is slated to go live at the beginning of the year and GM is betting big on telematics. How this works out I dont know. Verizon will handle personal calling and will pan out as the FCC allows Verizon long distance communications. GM claims 70% of all cellphone calls occur in the car. Think of salesforce, commuters, etc and you have a pretty big market. Onstar will be offered free of service for the first year in the new GM models. Cellphone usage payment hasnt been publicized yet, but figure some MOU model. E-mail will require a new address, for now(arggh). SR in noisy environments still has its clitches. If your wife is yelling at you, Onstar may guide you to Atlantis. No data-interative capabilities are scheduled yet, but that is plug-and-play. Ive heard GMGC's auction demo's and even seen one live at Network World. Since Ford and Qualcomm will be doing this the data will come on quickly is my guess. GMGC will receive transaction fees for that. 7) Honda and Toyota are signing on with Onstar. Toyota will not use GMGC's VUI. They have something they are using in Japan. 8) There is more but Im getting bored 9) Bottom line: They look much better than they did a year ago and SR's time is coming. Most speech translation and all command fulfillment will have to be negotiated on the back-end. No cellphone in the world can do natural language processing. Only limited vocabularly word-mapping. 10)Oh, one more thing. GMGC had about 20% institutional interest prior to the fall. I would guess its minimal now, really thru no fault of their own other than that whimsical notion of institutions called October. --------------------------------------------------------- stephen PS. Remember me? I met you at the dell shareholders meeting 2 years ago, I think it was. From South Carolina.