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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ed Perry who wrote (7924)	4/26/1999 9:50:00 PM
From: flickerful	Respond to of 17679

<< Only if one accesses the emerging Ampex "video production and distribution center[s]", their products, services, brand basis and management organization, will one get a view of what the Ampex vision may come to be.>> welcome back, ed !

To: Ed Perry who wrote (7924)	4/27/1999 12:21:00 AM
From: Hal Campbell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17679

<< . They demonstrated that there are a lot off goons out there >> Hey! I represent that remark! <g> Great post, Ed.

To: Ed Perry who wrote (7924)	4/27/1999 2:41:00 AM
From: flickerful	Respond to of 17679

does this sound remotely familiar? HP (gulp) gives away big iron By Michael Fitzgerald, ZDNN April 26, 1999 12:50 PM ET Forget the free PC phenomenon. Hewlett-Packard Co. is giving away mainframes. There's a catch, of course. But the move away from straightforward selling signals that the huge computer maker is ready to shed its stodgy skin, and it may trigger a widespread shift in the industry. Nick Earle, chief marketing officer at HP's (HWP) Enterprise Computing Group, told ZDNN on Friday that the company has outlined three new sales models to its sales staff. The models include: Taking an equity stake in a company in exchange for hardware and services. Giving them the hardware in exchange for a percentage of revenues (in effect, an annuity). In some cases, acquiring the company outright. Of course, HP will also continue to sell its hardware outright. While these moves aren't quite the same as Internet service providers giving away PCs in exchange for service deals, they present a radical shift away from HP's current business model. Earle said HP developed the strategy in January and launched it in February, before finally rolling it out to its 2,500 salespeople last week during a meeting expanding on HP's new E-Services initiative. "Let me tell you, there were a lot of salespeople saying, 'Wait a minute, did he just say we're going to give away the hardware?'" Earle said. HP has devised new commission models to encourage salespeople to pursue these new opportunities, he said. Chasing the bouncing ball Driving the move is the pace of the technology business, where ever-shortening product life cycles wreak havoc on profit margins. "The hardware business is like chasing a ball down the stairs -- you can't catch up to the margins," Earle said. Analysts were impressed by the new business model. "It's really exciting," said Kimball Brown, an analyst at Dataquest. "[HP is] finally breaking out of that stodgy mode. The computer business is becoming a services business, and for HP to participate in the services side ... is logical." "It's a good model if you look at the way the market is maturing," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group. "There are a lot of companies with huge potential but not much cash. If you want to capture those companies [as customers] and grow with them, you have to be extremely flexible in the way you do business with them." "This borders on brilliant. You wouldn't expect this from HP," Enderle added. "Six months ago, we would have said, 'We can't do this,'" Earle acknowledged, noting that, so far, the nascent program represents less than 1 percent of HP's revenues. But after last week's sales meeting, "we've taken it the street. Our revenue growth and stock prices will be the measure of how it works." Examples of the deals Among HP's early deals: an annuity from Ariba.com, a business-to-business services site, in exchange for hardware and services; an equity stake in S1, a Web banking services company; and the acquisition of Open Skies, an e-ticketing portal. Both analysts agreed that there was a potential downside to the strategy. "If [the customer] goes out of business you've made this investment and lost it," Brown said. But the upside potential of having a steady stream of revenue that isn't dependent on hardware sales should help HP's revenues and stock price. "It could be the beginning of a huge trend," Brown said. "It's about time that people woke up to new ways of doing business, instead of just making Microsoft and Intel rich." zdnet.com

To: Ed Perry who wrote (7924)	4/29/1999 3:57:00 AM
From: B. A. Marlow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17679

An interesting story that's come up before: Virage (video search): Will video indexing kill off the database? By John Taschek A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Oracle's plans to kill Microsoft Windows by moving all file system activity to an Oracle8i database. But in a strange "small fish going for the bigger fish" scenario, there are some vendors out there that think their technology indirectly can kill Oracle and other databases. One of them is Virage, which ironically is a development partner with Oracle, IBM and Informix. Virage has developed a video-indexing algorithm that allows users to search through video based on defined criteria. You can see what Virage is up to at video.altavista.com. You can also see what President Clinton was up to because the Virage demo allows users to search through Clinton's 4-hour testimony using normal English keywords. Obviously, video searching has some interesting applications. Video has been moving toward an all-digital format for some time. It's ridiculous to assume, however, that digital media will remain subject to the same archaic constrictions found in the analog format, where you jog the video frames back and forth until somehow you magically arrive at the place you were searching for. Virage, with its Video Cataloger, simply reads in the video stream and extracts relevant metadata information. Each analog video source has tracks used to separate video, audio, timing sequences and captions. The Video Cataloger "ingests" these tracks and produces an indexed digital file format. This index allows users to search through the video nonlinearly. In the Clinton video, Virage indexed the captioning of the video so that users can search based on regular English words. The applications for this technology are clear: Lawyers can search through videotapes, the military can provide more effective training on complex weaponry and systems, and educational institutions can access video to enhance studying. On the corporate side, organizations can create indexed and searchable videos of focus groups, and broadcasters can provide instant video based on easy searches. Wanna replay a video of Sammy Sosa's first home run? Just search the video database, and it will play. Virage recently announced a partnership with IBM that combines IBM's speech-to-text engine and broadcast-industry- specific vocabulary with the Virage Video Cataloger. This will allow broadcasters to search not just on words, but also on laugh tracks, audience classifications and text. So where does the database replacement come in? Most organizations still do not put videos into database servers, although it's a completely viable option. Companies have been using streaming technologies such as those from RealNetworks instead. In fact, the success of RealNetworks has put a damper on competitive database offerings, such as the Oracle Video Server and the SGI WebForce MediaBase. Does anyone even remember what happened to Microsoft Tiger? Both static and dynamic file formats are moving directly to the Web server with no database middleman. So why not move everything to Web servers? Although they're not ready to handle the security and transaction processing requirements found in even the most commonplace database servers, many would argue that it is easier to add transaction support and security to a Web server than it is to fix the object-relational mismatches in a traditional database. The time frame of the death of the database is your call. But I'm not betting on this one. Web server or database: Which would you rather have? John Taschek can be reached at john_taschek@zd.com. zdnet.com The Virage Web site: virage.com Try Virage on the Clinton video: cnn.com We never run out of ideas for AXC! BAM