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

To: Elwood P. Dowd who wrote (89245)	1/25/2001 9:57:26 AM
From: PCSS	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

About 6-9 months ago GS lost their PC Sector analysts and have never picked up or reported coverage of any in this category (CPQ, DELL, GTW ..) SUNW, IBM, HWP, EMC, ++ are all covered by Laura under Enterprise Harware (EH). In fact, all her EH research reports (by company or total sector) never even mentions any non-EH companies in there ... not even in the competition analysis --- therefore, I see (and I hope(?) others see) GS/her reports as incomplete, wrong, stupid and basically mis-leading ..... IT PEEVES ME OFF Michael

To: Elwood P. Dowd who wrote (89245)	1/25/2001 7:48:19 PM
From: hlpinout	Respond to of 97611

Hey El, look who is intercepting some of those iPAQs!!! (the name was withheld in the article to protect the innocent). -- Beat reporting Chandrani Ghosh, Forbes Global, 02.05.01 In April, Robert Michels was sitting at the Rockville, Maryland, office of the Montgomery County Police Department trying to sell a wireless application that lets officers record information about evidence seized during investigations. But the cops wanted to talk about a bigger problem—racial profiling. For three years the U.S. Justice Department had been investigating the county police for pulling over a disproportionate number of African-Americans at traffic stops. At this point they had agreed to collect data about each stop. But how to avoid the cascading paperwork? Three weeks later Michels was back with a new wireless application. He'd worked around the clock with his three programmers and two part-timers to produce TrafficStop, software to load into a handheld computer for police work. With it officers simply tapped the appropriate boxes on their minicomputer screens to capture 27 bits of essential information—age, race, sex and location among them—for every incident. At the end of each day they downloaded their customized handhelds (manufactured by Compaq) into the department's central database. An instant hit. The county police department bought 1,200 Compaq units loaded with Michels' software for $380,000. "It's working very, very well," says David Linn, the department's director of technology. "TrafficStop will pay for itself within a year." Two other police departments in Maryland have signed up for $300 to $750 a pop, and 18 others are in negotiation. "We've been inundated with calls," says Michels. Not surprising, since ten states have passed laws to track racial profiling, and others are looking into similar legislation. TrafficStop apparently passes the sniff test: Both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which filed the complaint against the Montgomery County police, and the Justice Department have given unofficial approval to the software. A 27-year veteran of the software industry, Michels started Mobile Commerce & Computing in Reston, Virginia, last May, with $200,000 from his savings. After some research he settled on wireless applications for law enforcement, which relies on mobile technology and is desperate to streamline its increasingly complex reporting requirements. The company lost $150,000 on revenues of $560,000 last year. TrafficStop, Michels figures, will be a good platform from which to sell other software. In fact, he's developed 15 applications for different aspects of law enforcement. CrimeTrack, for example, allows an officer to get an instant survey of crime statistics by district. With CodeCentral you can access the text of state and municipal criminal and traffic laws. Two foreseeable problems. While Michels has no direct competition yet, Aether Systems, a wireless software giant based in Owings Mills, Maryland, is in the process of developing a similar application. Then there's the challenge of customizing software to suit the U.S.' 37,000 law-enforcement agencies. Michels is hopeful that police departments will accept standardized formats so that they can negotiate a better price. Prince George's County in Maryland is working on such a plan. Meantime, to drum up new business Michels is offering to lease handheld computers at an average of $45 a month. That's attracted the interest of the U.S. National Park Service.