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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (32690)	5/23/2007 1:06:31 AM
From: Bill Harmond	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57684

I'm all for owning any commodity in short supply. Made a good percent in WFR. Own CCJ. AMSC is essentially a commodity company (high-temperature superconducting wire), maybe more like an alchemist. First Solar, too. I think the big-big money to be made now (ala Wintel in the '90's) is in platforms that are becoming centers of gravity for Web 2.0: Google, Salesforce, Apple, Baidu, Amazon. They reach critical mass, then snowball. Google could be the first trillion-dollar market cap company. It's becoming cheap at 150 billion. Baidu is less than 5 billion.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (32690)	5/23/2007 10:51:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 57684

Yesterday’s big venture news was that Google invested $3.9 million into bioinformatics startup 23andMe, which also received funding from Genetech, New Enterprise Associates and Mohr, Davidow Ventures. Why so much hubbub? Because 23andMe is co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, who earlier this month married Google co-founder Sergey Brin. This connection led to all sorts of blogosphere snickering about how the deal was a pretty generous wedding present. All of that is obviously to be expected, as Google itself seemed to acknowledge in an 8-K filing that stressed how the deal had been cleared by company compliance officers. But here’s the thing: If you strip away the Anne-Sergey thing, this is a really interesting deal on its own merits. In fact, I had drafted my original blog post on the matter before even realizing the connection, although it is prominent in the published post. 23andMe is a hybrid of personalized medicine and online informatics, with the goal of helping people identify and/or exclude health risks based on genetic information. The company’s initial rollout will be more focused on education than prediction, in order to help users better understand the more detailed information that will come in later versions. Nonetheless, you will be able to enter certain family medical histories to get a birds-eye understanding of your own risks. The next step would involve actual entry of personal DNA information, which can be most easily obtained with a swab. I initially assumed that initial analysis would have to occur in a lab, but genotyping technology may soon be robust and affordable enough to do basic runs at home. I could also envision a software-as-a-service model at medical facilities. If you’re wondering why Google would invest in such a company, think for a minute about how the Google search algorithm works. In the most simplistic sense, it tracks how popular certain search results are among users, and then re-ranks the most-clicked items as the top search results. Expect a similar sort of backend strategy for 23andMe, with genetic characteristics linked to most prevalent diagnoses.Sure there is some nepotism here, but Google makes every bit as much sense as a 23andMe investor as Genetech does. from: Private Equity Week Wire