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Check this following latest article on copytele Magicom, The Cursive Man's Telephone If you think one Magicom telephone is awesome, think what two people with Magicom's electronic handwriting capability can do together. Put an engineering drawing onto the screen through its built-in scanner. You and a colleague next door or in the next state or next nation can use a stylus to mark up data on the special message pad simultaneously. Say you are redesigning the kitchen sink. You will be working on the sink drain while your design colleague is making changes in sink contour. There is no one bit-at-a-time ASCII driven transfer at modem speeds. Changes appear instantly, as drawn. If a third colleague is standing off to the side of the Magicom device, she or he will still see a clear image. There is no need to view the image head on. The image on Magicom's pad won't wash out in direct sunlight, either. The image is said to be so intense, so tightly compressed, as to be as clear as an illustration in a book. And if you can't puzzle out your remote colleague's squiggle, no problem. Just use the requisite two phone lines with Magicom and you are in voice contact, too. This device was demo-ed on a video played at the annual meeting of its creator, CopyTele, at a hotel at the firm's Huntington Station, Long Island base. (There will be no demos here of Magicom itself until after a formal debut in Shanghai this fall. I had the sense China will debut it in October.) The Magicom video featured a contract being revised by a woman. Her changes were stored on a message buffer until a man, working elsewhere, called back, okayed her changes and signed the deal on his Magicom pad. The video spoke of Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone in 1876 and, rather grandly, called Magicom the successor to Bell's device. Magicom does offer an impressive array of mostly familiar fax and e-mail features. In fact, it offers all the things you would like a telephone to do if only you had the technology to cram them into one compact package. But Magicom's success depends on its novel screen, which appeals to China because of the clarity and flexibility it offers for oriental ideographs. CopyTele's usually reserved chairman, Denis Krusos, seemed euphoric as he showed CopyTele's assembled shareholders the Magicom video tape and held up a mockup of the device in his hand. Magicom is a mite bigger than a lap top computer, some three inches wider and somewhat thicker. CopyTele is ramping up output of its Magicom units in Shanghai, under its joint venture deal with a government-backed unit there. Krusos was asked how many Magicoms CopyTele hopes to produce. He said that if CopyTele keeps its small plant going in Shanghai (he didn't promise this) and COPY also completes its larger Chinese plant early next year, CopyTele could produce 1 million Magicoms in 1997. At $1,000 a pop wholesale, this would hurdle the much-derided, heavily shorted company with no-sales to date into the billion dollar arena. The retail price would be "well less than $2,500." You could figure, say, $1,500. When Krusos was asked if sales next year could be as little as a few million dollars, he said cryptically, "We'd be surprised if it were this low." It was made clear that if the Chinese plants did produce a billion dollars worth next year, COPY would earn major profits. So if Magicom turns out to have the kind of appeal Krusos and his fans expect, CopyTele could be another Xerox. But wait! How many times have you heard that before? You can be sure the shorts don't expect anything of the sort. In fact, they were clearly not impressed. Neither were Nasdaq traders generally. CopyTele Shares, which changed hands at 6 before the meeting, rose 1/8 and also closed the week at 6 1/8. The stock is well off its June 17 peak of 9 7/8s, adjusted for a 2 for 1 split. By the way, a stanch CopyTele bear with a popular newsletter is said to maintain a heavy short position on the theory that CopyTele will run out of money and the stock will go to zero. If so, under the rules he wouldn't have to buy in shares he sold short. On the other hand, a COPY investor who stations his wife at the phone bank each year to get the tenor of the remarks after each annual meeting, says that, unlike prior years, callers had "nothing but positive comments." Meantime, even without sales, CopyTele is beginning to resemble a real company. Mr. Krusos, a lawyer and company spokesman, introduced his lifetime associate, President Frank DiSanto, who is the innovator of many of CopyTele's 58 patents registered in the US and in OECD nations. He proudly introduced other members of COPY's burgeoning team -scientific researchers and a key marketer CopyTele lured from Panasonic. Magicom aside, CopyTele hopes to play a role in the replacement of the 70-year-old cathode ray tube which still enjoys a $500 billion market. For a perspective, remember that, while widely used today, liquid crystal display screens have won only 2 percent of this market after making 10 fold gains. Other meeting highlights: The chairman spoke of project work at the company's new lab near Huntington Station. He spoke optimistically of COPY's progress in holographic color. He told of intense effort to develop enough speed for video transmission, also eventual removal of Magicom's touch screen for a better means of doing the same function at lower cost. Krusos noted that viewing screens are the most expensive part of any device that employs them. Magicom screens are made for CopyTele by Hoya of Japan: "Cost comes down as volumes pick up under our deal." Keep in mind that CopyTele has disappointed investors (and pleased short sellers) many times in its fifteen year history. Whether COPY will soar still isn't clear. And there is many a slip twixt the chip and the lip. For one thing, relations between China and the U. S. are tortured. So is CopyTele vulnerable to political disputes between the two nations? Krusos: "China is not adverse to an economic benefit. We provide that." | ||||||||||||||
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