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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (26582)12/12/2005 3:03:42 PM
From: stockman_scott  Respond to of 57684
 
Bill Joy eager to invest in energy and materials

siliconbeat.com

<<...I don't think there will be one energy company that's as significant as a Netscape. [But] there may be more than a couple as significant as Google. There's an enormous opportunity for new ventures in the energy field based on new science and new technology. Beyond energy, nanoscale engineering and new chemistry, physics, and biology offer the opportunity to invent new materials we haven't seen before that can do amazing things...>>



To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (26582)12/12/2005 5:45:53 PM
From: bob zagorin  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 57684
 
i partially disagree lizzie. price to sales or revenue is a very good benchmark. companies can play all kinds of games with earnings depending on where things are in the channel; what is expensed, written off as one time charges; profit from non-core business such as investments etc. also, IT companies often show the best bottom line as their products and markets are maturing so that R&D has been written off and sales are falling to bottom line. but, if a company's top line is not growing then they have a problem with their market or their products.

i want to buy a company whose top line growth is accelerating. yes, i look at the bottom line but i look at the top line first...jmho...



To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (26582)12/12/2005 6:37:31 PM
From: stockman_scott  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 57684
 
He finds prints charming

seattletimes.nwsource.com

Monday, December 12, 2005 - 12:00 AM

With a modest piece of software that converts digital photos to handy little photo albums, Doug Rowan is rekindling a longstanding technological debate.

In an age of digital cameras, computerized editing and vast storage capacity, do we really need prints? Rowan is not only saying yes. He's taking it a step further. Paper is better, he says.

I was flabbergasted at Rowan's partiality. Here's a guy who was former CEO of Bill Gates' digital-photo company, Corbis. The whole idea behind Corbis is to create digital archives of the world's great images, because in the lexicon of the future, digital means forever. Paper, canvas and other physical media are temporal.

But people move on, and Rowan now heads ZoomAlbum, a six-person enterprise in Seattle with big things in mind. ZoomAlbum sells do-it-yourself kits to convert digital photos into flip-through albums. The kits come with software (Windows only), paper and covers.

You supply the printer and manual dexterity. The whole process takes 15 minutes or so. ZoomAlbum can use just about any resolution of image because the albums are small — 3 square inches.

ZoomAlbums make great Christmas gifts — a finished album for a friend or loved one, or a kit for the shutterbug in the family. A kit that makes three albums runs about $20 retail.

ZoomAlbum just scored a big deal with Michael's, the art-supply chain, for 90,000 orders. Rowan can't say yet who else the company is talking to, but he has several national retailers interested.

(Note: Be sure to check that your printer is on the approved list at zoomalbum.com. Some have paper-feed problems. Two Epsons worked fine for me, but both of my Hewlett-Packard printers had problems.)

Rowan, whose eyes glint with evangelistic zeal when he talks about the power of images in our lives, says the albums are especially popular with teens and 20somethings. He thinks they'll have the same appeal for seniors looking for ways to carry on the scrapbook tradition in a cybernetic world.

As for me, I had to stop him at one point and scratch my head. I do almost all my photo sharing via Web sites, blogs and e-mail. It works for me, although my wife complains sometimes that digital means never sitting in the living room flipping through scrapbooks.

A sober expression crossed Rowan's face. "I believe the only way to guarantee a photo's survival through the next century is this — paper," he said.

He has a point. Digital formats change. Storage media wear out. Remember when CDs first appeared in the early 1980s, how they were touted to never scratch, break or degrade? Does anyone still believe that?

To illustrate his point, Rowan carries around an 1870 photograph of his grandfather as an infant.

It's tough to argue with that kind of evidence. Given the rate of technological change, who really has faith that CDs and JPEG files will be around in the year 2140?
_______________________________________

Seattle freelance writer Paul Andrews has written about technology for more than two decades. He can be reached at pandrews@seattletimes.com.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company



To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (26582)12/13/2005 1:06:12 AM
From: Elroy  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 57684
 
You haven't given any explanation as to why GOOG stock is cheap, which was the discussion. GOOG has lots of potential, GOOG expenses options, GOOG is less expensive than YHOO are all fine and true comments, but that doesn't produce the conclusion GOOG stock is cheap.

GOOG trades at 35x trailing sales and 20x forward sales.

That's more expensive than EVERY tech stock in the S&P500! And you're telling me that GOOG is cheap?

Like it or not, price to sales IS a valuation metric and is useful. It compares the share price to the sales of the company - what else do you want? It's not the only valuation metric, but its certainly a common one in determining whether or not a stock is cheap.

As for earnings, GOOG trades at 52x 2006 EPS estimate of $8.54. Lets say that EPS is actually going to be $10. GOOG is still 41x than $10. That's among the 10% most expensive tech stocks that are operating at normal levels (ie, nor coming out of a downturn).

The only way to even say that GOOG is REASONABLY valued is to look at PE to Growth. GOOG's four quarter forward PE is 53x, and its EPS growth forecast for the next four quarters is 53% aboev the previous four quarters, so GOOG's PE to near term growth is 1.0x. THAT is reasonable, and perhaps a bit cheap, depending on whether you think 2007 EPS growth will be more or less than 2006 EPS growth. If 2007 is going to have higher EPS growth than 2006, then a PEG of 1x is low. If 2007 is going to have lower EPS growth than 2006 then a PEG of 1 is high.

Anyway, who's going to buy VCLK, that's what I want to know....