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To: Bill Harmond who wrote (120066)	3/11/2001 12:06:49 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>EBIDTA is a very common and accepted benchmark. Has been for many years. Bill, thanks for pointing that out. I also noticed I put the taxes before depreciation and as you know it should be the other way around.

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (120066)	3/11/2001 12:36:33 PM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Bill, have you ever heard of TellMe? What they're are doing there fascinates me. Its also funded by Kleiner. If it was able to IPO in 98/99 I'd be all over it. Are you still holding Nuan? Not me. SPWX went too. >The Washington Post WASHINGTON - Rich Fowler turned to the Internet when his 60-year-old father had a heart attack and underwent quadruple-bypass surgery in Ohio last month. Only it wasn't the regular Web but a frontier that folks using it call the "voice Web." "My dad's a popular guy," Fowler recalls, "and the calls were overwhelming for us and the nurses at the hospital." So Fowler tapped Tellme Networks, one of a dozen start-ups that are trying to marry the telephone and Internet. Tellme lets people call a toll-free number and speak to a computer. Using speech-recognition software, it retrieves stock quotes, news and other information from the Internet and reads the data to people over the phone. Tellme also has a free service that allows individuals or groups to establish information lines that can be accessed by anyone with the right number. That's what Fowler did for his father: "We set up a family announcement line on Tellme and updated it hourly while he was under the knife." Fowler's special line is still active a month after his father fell ill, allowing friends and relatives to call Tellme, punch in or say the Fowlers' private extension, then hear the latest update on Wayne Fowler. When he's back on his feet, the senior Fowler plans to record the final announcement himself. The voice Web is a frontier that resembles the commercial Internet when it sprang to life six years ago. Both triggered a frenzied fight for control of a market that no one is even sure exists - or ever will. Several characters are reprising their original roles, reminding us how young and malleable the Internet remains. The déjà vu is palpable at Tellme Networks, which has raised $250 million to create its Internet-based phone service. "We absolutely believe this is the way the phone system will work one day," says founder Mike McCue. "In the future, you will not pick up the phone and dial a number. You will pick up the phone and say what you want." With about 10 million calls a month rolling in, Tellme has established itself as an early leader on the talking Web. Its freeannouncement service echoes the Web's first word-of-mouse marketing giveaways, such as free e-mail accounts and electronic greetings. The idea is to let church groups and soccer leagues use the free announcements to update members on meetings, which could turbocharge Tellme's growth. Much as Netscape and Yahoo! once did, McCue's company wants to challenge Microsoft to become a top toolmaker for navigating the global computer network. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that Tellme's team includes dozens of engineers who worked at Netscape and Microsoft in the mid-1990s to create the original dueling Web browsers. At the height of those browser wars, McCue was vice president of technology for Netscape, and his current business partner, Hadi Partovi, was his chief rival, leading Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. McCue left Netscape in 1998 and recruited Partovi. "It was kind of like Grant and Lee," McCue recalls. "I developed respect for Hadi." Another way the voice Web mimics the early Internet is in how slow and quirky it can be. To get a feel for this, call 800-555-TELL and ask for "extensions." Then say "Tell me my choices" to hear a list of applications that software developers have authored and posted on Tellme's network. You can join a voice-mail chat system called "graffiti." You can play the old rock-paper-scissors game with a maniacal computer. Or if you're in a bookstore, you can whip out your cell phone, call Tellme, say any ISBN number and hear book reviews from Amazon.com. Those are among the more than 200 programs people have posted in Tellme's public directory. Tellme also offers its own programs that let people retrieve stock quotes, driving directions, news and movie times - the same services offered by competitors such as BeVocal and AOL by Phone. AOL plans to charge $4.95 a month starting next month, but Tellme is taking a Yahoo!-like strategy and hopes to keep its service free. Tellme plans to make money by selling commercials on its toll-free network and building private voice applications for other companies. Hertz and Avis, for example, could let people rent cars by phone. Big telephone carriers are already negotiating to put up their 411 directories. I found Tellme maddeningly slow until I memorized a few basic voice commands. Its accuracy rate seemed uneven, even though McCue insists it correctly interprets more than 95 percent of callers' commands. My noisy car could have been the culprit; background noise interferes with Tellme's speech-recognition software. Despite its glitches and stuttering, Tellme earned a speed-dial button on my cell phone. I've been using it for weather updates on the run and wake-up calls to my house. What looms ahead seems more tantalizing because the company is offering voice-authoring tools and free usage time on its network for experiments. That's like the early Web, when search engines provided tools so visitors could create all kinds of content. Tellme's tools are based on a scripting standard called VoiceXML, a voice version of the Web's basic HTML code. Webmasters post VoiceXML programs on their sites, enter the Web address for their code at www.tellme.com and generate a free application that McCue's team calls a phone site. If a program catches on, Tellme will earn all the money from phone commercials on it, or the developer will have to negotiate a deal with Tellme. Since it posted free voice-authoring tools last fall, Tellme has seeded several new companies and sold its services to about 60 corporations. Start-up iHello is using Tellme to design voice-activated programs for mobile sales agents to call their company's databases and retrieve data by phone. "I believe Tellme's tools could enable a whole new economy or industry to develop on top of their network," says Lee An, iHello's founder. An dreamed up iHello after experimenting with Tellme's tools to create a remote auction tracker for eBay fanatics. It lets people speak the item number for an eBay auction, then hear a computer read aloud the current high bid and number of bidders. An's experiment was so popular that Tellme is negotiating with eBay to develop an official phone auction monitor and alert service. I'm not sure I like the idea of eBay interrupting me in meetings to bark into my cell phone, "You have been outbid on that opal ring you wanted. Give me another $5 and it's yours!" Tellme also is working on programs to let people hail cabs and find the nearest automated teller machine by phone. If they work, those could really get people talking.

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (120066)	3/11/2001 1:30:25 PM
From: Kevin Podsiadlik	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

EBIDTA is a very common and accepted benchmark. Has been for many years. True as far as that goes, but it is also a very abusable benchmark, inasmuch as novice investors can be misled into thinking the items being excluded are unimportant. The problem is that the figure is only really useful on a relative basis (comparing quarterly or yearly results to illustrate growth). The notion of having "positive EBIDTA earnings", while nice-looking on a press release, is not really meaningful. Doubtless many of the dot-coms that have failed over the past several months were "EBIDTA positive" right up until the end, when the "I" shut them down.