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.

Technology Stocks : Texas Instruments - Good buy now or should we wait? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: johnny boy who wrote (3472)	4/18/1998 2:01:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6180

JB -- I tend to approach those companies I like from a writer's perspective and at times lapse into eloquence where a judge might say, "Just the facts, lady, just the facts. :)) But from what all I've read and all I've seen, it's hard not to get excited about TI ---- especially at these prices. Today's IBD (actually Monday's) has an interview with Cisco's Howard Chaney as a preview to his keynote address at Chicago's ComDex on Monday. Note the emphasis on digital technology. There are a lot of ways to play it, but the surest way is DSPs --- and I don't have to tell anyone reading this who that means. Later --- Pat <<< . . . Cisco Systems Inc. senior executive Howard Charney will discuss how the Internet can be humanized during his keynote address to Comdex/Spring '98 on Wednesday morning in Chicago. Charney has been around the networking world. He was aboard when 3Com Corp. came to life. And he founded and was chief executive of Grand Junction Networks, which Cisco bought in '95. Charney recently spoke withIBD about the issues behind his speech. IBD: What is going to happen with the Internet? Charney: The speech is about trying to give the audience a glimpse of the major trends that are going to happen over the next several years. The Internet collapses the concept of time, because we can obtain results almost instantly. It also collapses accidents of geography -meaning just because something I need happens to be far away from me, it no longer matters. I can get it. So there's this concept of time-and-place utility that the Internet is altering for us all. Now, in order to do that, there are three preconditions to making it successful. Those are ubiquity, fidelity and community. IBD: Ubiquity means giving everyone an Internet connection, but what do you mean by fidelity? Charney: If we really are to use this medium, we can't have a command- line interface. It won't work. We can't have character interface. You can't interact with the computer as a character-oriented device. We have to start thinking of ways to increase fidelity. The way that we increase fidelity is, we move to GUIs (graphical user interfaces like Web browsers) that are much more human. We're moving now to methods where we can show emotions without it looking inhuman. For example, showing video that actually has CD-like quality. Video as well as audio makes the experience seem very human. . . . When we provide higher-bandwidth connections to people's computers and when we allow audio and video to be part of the interaction, we make it MORE human, not less. . . . IBD: Community rounds out the trio. What do you mean by that? Charney: Community is what you do with that connection. We communicate. We commune. Today the simplest form is somebody sending somebody else e-mail. But the act of communing has not to do just with the visitation of Web sites, but also has to do with online transactions. In those online transactions, you're able to see a person with whom you're communicating. We talk about the future of computer telephone integration as a mechanism by which, when you enter into a transaction on the Web site and you have a question about your transaction, you click on a button. Then you actually see a person on your screen who interacts with you. This is leading-edge stuff. Most companies haven't implemented this yet. But we're really on the threshold of it being implemented. Community is the net result of what you're capable of with the technology. IBD: What's changed to make it possible? Charney: What makes it all possible is all forms of information - everything you could possibly want, including video, including audio, and all the data - is digital. This wasn't true a few years ago. Our speech isn't digital. Our speech is an analog wave form. But what we've developed is a technology where almost anything that isn't digital can be rendered in a digital form. . . . IBD: What else needs to happen? Charney: It's all happening simultaneously. There's a move to provide higher-bandwidth connections between your computer and the services you want. We need improvement in audio and other software. You would be surprised at what visiting a Web site feels like if there's audio in the background as opposed to it being quiet. In order to do that you need a higher-bandwidth connection. Attach audio and video to the graphical interface. There's work being done to take (browsers), which are two- dimensional, and make them three-dimensional. What does it take to do this? It takes higher-speed processors. We hear about 1,000-megahertz processors being right around the corner. Then it takes businesses to absorb the technology. We can just develop it. Transmitted: 04/17/98 21:15 (p0abx0cb)>>> <<<<

To: johnny boy who wrote (3472)	4/18/1998 5:25:00 PM
From: pat mudge	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6180

Check out TI's DSP representatives who'll be instructors at DSPWorld in Santa Clara next week: dspworld.com Impressive list. Pat