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

To: CanynGirl who wrote (3356)	8/6/1998 10:05:00 AM
From: JC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10081

Sierra- You are right about one thing.. that other companies have already had beta trials with carriers, starting before GMGC's. These companies could already have arrangements in the works after their beta-trials only they keep their secrets better (only one other company in this market is public-PTEK). Wildfire for one I know, as you mentioned, had one with PacBell among others. They have had alot of money pumped into them recently including, might I add, a heavy Microsoft investment. I talked to a reseller at LINX Communications that told me that Wildfire was moving to Seattle (Redmond), and working on improving their service, which is still the largest and oldest (to date). That is a lot of experience, etc. to laugh off. True they are a box-based system sold to resellers and not terribly advanced, but just having a VUI-driven product means they could feasibly iprove that product and be gasp better than GMGC some day, but I don't think that likely, but it is still in the realm of possibility. As for no one else having an NOC-based service, I know of several, and if you have done your DD on this you would know of them too. They are not all ASR or VUI driven, many just have swell 800# touch-tone driven engines and none of the advanced features like media content, or contact-dumping, but they can reply to emails using WAV's (two of the companies give you another email address.. not very helpful true, but it is there and Webley and Premiere will use your POP3 interface) like Portico, and they can handle/route faxes, calls, and have a Web interface like Portico. Thier prices range from 69$ amonth to 91$ a month for 400 minutes of usage, right in range with Portico and some have no setup costs. Those firms with NOC's (Not box-salesmen like Wildfire) are :Startouch, Webley (VUI), Accessline (They have historically sold boxes but now offer a NOC-solution), Call Sciences, NetworkMCI, and Premiere Technologies. Not all of these firms are healthy. Premiere for example just lost 75% of its stock value 32$ down to 8$ with a problem with the acquisition of Xpedite fax broadcast service, and wildfire is having problems putting their money to good use, but all the other companies are lively with good growth potential and not far behind in the development of VUI-s and other advanced portions of their offerings. I am heavy into GMGC, but I am realistic. They DO NOT have a huge jump on the rest of the market as each of these players either has a niche (Startouch works heavily with real-estate in California for example) and/or already has sales channels ie: NetworkMCI (obvious), and ESA has about 2,000 persons reselling it's product country-wide. GMGC is a superior product, with a good vision, but I think the market will be heavily saturated media wise in the next two quarters, and not by GMGC. ESA and PTEK I believe are planning marketing pushes in this quarter, and MCI already has "one-number technology" commercials airing here on the east coast. I think the market will wait until the future (read until after Q4) sorts itself out before we see the stock move quickly to the next level. I do not mean to be rude in disclaiming your notions, but I am trying to share my DD with the thread. If you have contrary info I'll be happy to hear it. regards, JC