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Nope, it is not old. That video is only 1.5 years old.
If you had seen it, you should not have made the comments you made, period.
If 1.5 year old product was old, every hardware and software that you are using are old and only vaporware will be new because they don't really exist.
Anything that is tested and works is at least 3 years old. There is no tested hardware product on this planet that was designed a year go!
This type of stock has a market value is not function of dilution at this point because it has no income but rather the prospect of profitability in future. So the funding that it needs to go through approvals is baked into the current stock value. The stock owners have paid to develop this product and it is the bet they made. Those who were too early made the wrong bet. But I don't believe anybody who still owns this stock is too early anymore.
As the time is ticking to product release, the market value for it will go up. FDA approval will make it go up astronomically because the FDA approval is not guaranteed but the value will go up for the bet before the approval because of the favorable factors .
The competition and those who are working to acquire it and some traders who are trying to control the movement of the stock for their own gain may knock it. Some who who are knocking it could very well be employees of competing products as well.
Before the design was frozen. The was no guarantee that it will make it FDA approval but it is now so it has a higher bet value.
Don't forget that this robot is not fiction and it is not vaporware.
Surgeons have used it. Here is a Gyno surgery with SPORT.
https://vimeo.com/235082361
You are wrong, You are just an anonymous trader and you can't use yourself or another anonymous trader as a reference for any observation.
Here are multiple references when SPORT has been used by surgeons and their testimony.
'Single Port Low Anterior Resection (LAR) Dissection using the SPORT Surgical System'
https://vimeo.com/260472173
https://vimeo.com/253691270
Gyno demo
https://vimeo.com/235082361
Nope it does not need Verb at all.
The only thing that good interface should supply is great precision in handing and maneuvering the arms as well as supplying great visibility of the surgical site with quality camera and software that prevents the shaking of the image. Quality of the robot would be about these factors and nothing else at this point.
Also read this document for SEC rules about disclosure. In my opinion, it does mean that they have to disclose it if it is influencing the stock but I am not a lawyer so be it.
https://media2.mofo.com/documents/faq-confidential-treatment-requests.pdf
I would not be so sure if I were you.
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For instance, in a 40-page patent and trade-secret licensing contract, the company might request confidential treatment only for the name of the other contracting party (if not already publicly known or previously disclosed), the term of the agreement, the exact technology covered and the pricing information (e.g., the royalty rate and any other fees). For each item requested to be kept confidential, the company must show that it has sought to keep the information confidential, that disclosure of the information would cause substantial harm to the company's competitive position and that this harm outweighs the need of investors to know the information.
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https://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/obtaining-confidential-treatment-for-information-furnished-to-the.html
The development-freeze becomes important when a product has been in development for a long time with no end in sight because typically new features or new specs keep getting added and in some cases demoralizing both the employees as well as the investors.
Termination of development is an important event because the product will be completed with no more new features and new specs.
Even though development-freeze can become very important to employees and executives, it is not a common heard term, and it is rarely something that the stock market knows anything about, unless every company's move is under microscope like this one.
In this case it has become an important milestone for this company as well as the investors because the product development has taken many twists in a long road development, and the product has changed completely overtime. With the freeze. there is a light at the end of tunnel and one can see a completed product and they will not be adding any new 'feature' or any new specs. New features and spec can lead towards making of vaporware usually because the product is never believed to be good enough for whatever reason.
It is a big deal for this company and many others spending most of their life in development phase.
I personally would have not touched this stock if they were not going to freeze it soon but they did. That is my personal perspective. I don't touch what I believe to be vaporware and there are many of them.
They have to disclose it because there has to be supplier support contracts to fix the bugs in the system. What happens if there is a bug in the operating system; who is going to be liable; who is going to fix it. The user can not fix the operating system. That is why they have to disclose it so there is a support contract.
In a typical engineering environment every software that is purchased to be installed in a product has to have support for maintenance purposes. And support is not free even with open source software. The software may be free but the support is not because somebody has to get paid to fix the thing.
It could be that you are guessing correctly and this is a special case of the first install and so there is free support. Who knows but such a thing is very unconventional.
So I give you the benefit of the doubt for now.
Wait and see!
I see. So you are wondering if Titan has got the Verb under it's hood already. And why would they keep that a secret if that was the case. Such agreements have to be signed and be made public as public companies have to disclose such an information since Verb is not an off the rack product. I will be really surprised if that was the case. Codependency in development makes everything doubly difficult in reality and not useful unless it is a critical requirement.
If they have it under the hood, we will know soon. It can't remain a secret.
Give that there has been 2.5 years worth of installations of the Verb, where are these products. Name one that has been actually released and working and has customers and reviewed. Are they all experimental ! and secret. Where is the real review of the Verb and its functionality.
You can't just install an operative system on any robot and vola either. Verb is not like an App that sits on top of operating system.
Take a common product like cell phone for example and think about it. Can one install android operating system on an iphone? Can one install iphone's operating system on an Android phone? Nope. It may be possible a little bit only and that is with massive changes and modifications and use of cross compilers etc and some features wouldn't ever work when they have completely incompatible hardware.
Now with surgical robots, there will be similar issues and these are realtime devices. You can't just install a new operating system on a robot and vola.
Could be but "developing" is not equal to "has developed" so I believe all robotic companies are developing something. "M7" from SIRI has been used by them to prototype but what it is capable of and does and how well is pretty much unknown.
No I am not helping you in spreading Verb's propaganda here on Titan's board.
You seem to have a religious conviction in that product for some reason. It is not reasoning or engineering knowledge of the product because that is not available to anyone.
There are other forms of averaging down through buying other promising stocks each time there is a hit or a market melt down.
I hope that you can recover your losses.
Don't put all of your eggs in any basket.
It is because it is owned by competitors and who is said to be producing surgical robots.
I am sorry to tell you that any real engineering expertise surpasses expertise in quoting years old PR releases and lack of product development knowledge.
I believe that I told you that we have to agree to disagree. I am not a buyer of the hype unless I see real documented product. Show me the product. Where is it.
Who is Tarek!
Some people on this board but not all, seem to have been influenced by long term PR and that is why they are are not seeing clearly. Some seem to be unaware that they are referencing PR and have yet to see a verification of Verb as a real product and what it does.
I am certain that none of you actually knows what that product does because there is no real technical reference on it other than PR. Show me the product and avoid telling me that it is a secret.
Also it seems like that some of you are in healthcare field and not quite aware of the state of technology or understand hardware and software development protocols.
When I saw that some people on the board were seeking to install an ambiguous, unknown, unverified robotic operating system called Verb on a competitor product aka Titan, it became clear to me that they are acting on something like PR rooted religious conviction rather than logic or engineering concepts and product development protocols.
Engineers are amused by this type naivete in general but even some of them may get taken for a ride because of the amount of hye that surrounds a product.
Big companies tend to produce most of the vaporware. Their big marketing departments sell it before they even have the technology. They can purchase a lot of PR for vapor. After years of announcing the ever more revolutionary secret product, they will produce something that does not live up to the hype.
Google has done it before by the way with Google' Duplex. AI is the new buzzword for vapor.
https://bgr.com/2018/05/18/google-duplex-vaporware-human-ai-story/
Mark my word... Verb is vaporware. It has a serious case of buzz word infestation and everything about it, is secret but wait it is also open source and secret at the same time! and can be installed on other machines site unseen!
This secret robot has a PR behind it that claims that it uses AI to do surgery like best surgeons while AI driven automobiles have yet to be fully functional! They also say that it will use AI to locate tumors and excise them like the best surgeons will. Wouldn't that be a good a feature for vaporware!
The PR also claims that this secret robot will also offers telesurgery and since it has this super duper AI, it must self correct for all the lag in system! How else would it be possible.
Wait with all these super and incredible attributes that are also secret, it will also be cheapest robot and it will democratize robotic surgery!
I say, don't believe any of the hype. Hold your nose, it smells like vaporware.
Next year if they produce anything, it will be a conventional light weight single handed, bed connected robot, because it is the easiest thing to manufacture.
There is apposite symmetric thing you can do. There is no one that can stop anyone borrowing money against their house and shorting any stock that they want inclusive of Titan and the risk is in fact massively more in that scenario because the losses will not be limited to invested cash.
This stock can be traded by brokers using different exchanges other than the main exchange and so the volume recorded by Nasdaq will not be accurate at all because there are many venues where stocks can be traded.
Don't count on accuracy of the Nasdaq or your broker's listed volume. They can be off by factor of 3 or more. I have noticed that my broker does not show the same volumes as Nasdaq for this stock or any other.
The volumes that I see are much higher. Whatever that means.
I think that this pretty likely in fact.
Just because you have asked, does not mean that there is a valid answer to your question. The shareholders can not predict price of shares or market conditions with any accuracy.
It is like asking why did someone who has voted for X, would not predict that Y would be elected instead. You are asking people to read the future. Neither you or anybody else can see the future or predict the markets with any accuracy. Even paid market analysts with massive data at their fingertips get it wrong all the time.
It is well known that even Einstein lost money in the stock market.
Can you tell me what will be the price of this stock at the end of this month, 3 months from now, 6 months from now, a year from now, 2 years from now and what would be your method of prediction exactly. What will be the market at those junctions and what will the competition be like.
Can you predict the price of king of medical robots, ISRG at the end of this month. What will be its marketcap next year or two years from now.
There is no way that you will know any of these answers so you should refrain from asking those questions. If anybody could predict correctly, they could become billionaires but few ever do.
Yup. That why the operator is wearing sun glasses!
There is details that are not visible such as quality and precision of components. The comparisons have to be done by specialists I think.
LOL!
To put it bluntly, it is now obvious to me that the rah rah about VERB is just pure noise. It took me only one day to figure that it is useless diversion on this board that has consumed people for no good reason.
VERB seems to be a secret product with unknown ambiguous 'open source' robotic operating system without any real documentation. Like most vaporwares, it is revolutionary! Since when open source software has been secret.
I am sorry if it is offending you if you are in which way connected to that product because I don't enjoy hurting people in any which way. However, a secret or an unreleased, undocumented product can not be hyped to be suitable to be embedded in another product as a useful feature.
Nope, they can't freeze the GUI because otherwise the company should then just shut down because then there is nothing else to do. It makes no sense. They should upgrade the software till couple of months before they start FDA approvals to make the best interface that they can possibly produce using the staff that is still working there.
Have you ever worked in a high tech company? Yes or No?
I have to see a video of a real operation where a single surgeon operates that many arms efficiently then we can talk. By the way the patient will have many holes in their body if that many arms are used and the many instruments used by many arms simultaneously can possibly get tangled if focused on a single area in the body at the same time.
Let see the video of many armed CMR's Virsius operation that has convinced you.
It could be but it takes multiple people to operate those many arms simultaneously so where is the efficiency. I would like to see a demo of a real operation using it.
No you have to show that there is a such a VERB based completed product and that it is not PR manufactured vaporware. I don't have to do a thing. PR or hearsay are not valid references. I have read about many vaporware products in my life that have yet to be fully functional or approved. Unlike Verb, Titan is not vapor so it has a real value.
It is rather easy to prove that I am right in fact. Auris is not using auditory commands and that is what Verb is about according to themselves. Where is such a thing in any spec about Auris. Why aren't they specifying Verb in their product specs.
I have no doubt that any technical person in a short time will figure the same thing. And this VERB thing had been selling wool for ages and two companies have bought into their wool.
If you look into it, you will find that they had integreded two products. The the M7 thing which allows for distance robotic operations and Verb operating system. And where are they at? and why was it a secret!? The secret is typically in the vapor.
There are a lot of incredible and good ideas that do not make it to finish line because the scope of products been mixed with grandiose expectations that turn into vaporware.
Here are some 3 references below identifying what they were working on and you if don't like my analysis so be it. We have to agree to disagree.
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Additionally, Verb Surgical’s new VP of Research and Technology is Pablo Kilroy, who worked at SRI International for 20 years.
We believe that the SRI licensed technology may be the M7 telerobotic surgical system. This system has been in development by SRI since 1998.
https://www.rbcinsight.com/WM/Share/ResearchViewer/?SSS_522561613B1ADBDE80B721B19D8A2330
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Along with Taurus, SRI also has been developing more traditional surgical robots, which could also be part of Verb’s new robotics platform. The M7 telerobotic surgical system is designed to do all kinds of crazy things, providing auditory, visual, and tactile sensation, tremor compensation, and even motion compensation for operating in a moving vehicle (!). Over the last decade, the M7 has been demonstrated in an underwater laboratory and in microgravity. The most recent look at the system that I can find is this very brief overview from SRI’s 2015 open house
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/google-verily-johnson-johnson-verb-surgical-medical-robots
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https://www.sri.com/newsroom/video/simulated-zero-gravity-robotic-surgery-demo-0
Good point.
Well it does matter because it is their competition.
Verb is not under its hood.
Hardware freeze means that the robot and its firmware or control software are frozen. What does that mean? It means that they every operation of the robot is coded in the firmware and there is nothing new to be added.
That is what it means.
There is nothing off the rack to be had. All of these companies design their own firmware and robotic control protocol.
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Due to the highly proprietary nature of robot software, most manufacturers of robot hardware also provide their own software. While this is not unusual in other automated control systems, the lack of standardization of programming methods for robots does pose certain challenges. For example, there are over 30 different manufacturers of industrial robots, so there are also 30 different robot programming languages required. There are enough similarities between the different robots that it is possible to gain a broad-based understanding of robot programming without having to learn each manufacturer's proprietary language.[1]
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VAL was one of the first robot ‘languages’ and was used in Unimate robots.[3] Variants of VAL have been used by other manufacturers including Adept Technology. Stäubli currently use VAL3.
Example program:
PROGRAM PICKPLACE
1. MOVE P1
2. MOVE P2
3. MOVE P3
4. CLOSEI 0.00
5. MOVE P4
6. MOVE P5
7. OPENI 0.00
8. MOVE P1
.END
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_software
I appreciate that but those are agreements and PR and not description of real products.
Apparently the product that uses the Verb is 'M7 Telerobotic surgical system' using auditory commands with many other features and it is and has been in development since 1998 and it is nowhere close to any approvals. They are not using it for Auris. They are probably going to shelf it because it is not a mature technology.
So the Verb thing is in fact a PR loaded pie in sky vaporware as engineers call it shrouded in secrecy because it is likely nowhere close to reality on the ground in 2019.
Apparently Versius has 5 arms!
Is this thing even practical?
Do you have any references as to what operating system Auris is using ? Wouldn't they need new approvals with any new firmware under the hood? I don't think that they can just install a new firmware after FDA approval. If that was true, all of them can play the switcheroo.
I don't believe that it is using Verb and this article is implying that.
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Johnson & Johnson’s $3.4bn move for the robotic surgery specialist Auris Health could be bad news for its Verb Surgical joint venture.
It’s official: Johnson & Johnson has agreed to pay $3.4bn for the robotic surgery specialist Auris Health, a company with which it was linked in January. Not only has the deal come in well above the mooted $2bn price tag, it also looks like an admission that all is not rosy with J&J’s existing robotic surgery project, Verb Surgical.
J&J maintained today that it was “very committed” to Verb, a joint venture with Alphabet's Verily division. But recent developments, and now the Auris buy, appear to tell a different story.
In January reports surfaced that Verb’s chief executive, Scott Huennekens, had left the company. Then comments by J&J’s leader, Alex Gorsky, during the group’s fourth-quarter earnings call suggested that the Verb programme had progressed more slowly than hoped.
Mr Gorsky said investors should expect news on the group’s robotic offering “over the course of 2020 and beyond”, but did not give any precise approval or commercial timelines, Stifel analysts noted.
Any delay at Verb could make it harder for J&J to compete against the robotic surgery market leader, Intuitive Surgical.
https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/deals/jjs-auris-buy-looks-verb-swerve
They may not have bought the robot but rather the company that makes the robot to design their new product lines and that is why they would have deleted the Verb's CEO right about then. That is what I would have done, hire a team that has completed something to create their line. It is very likely that they believe that Auris is a competent company to make them better robots but it is not that easy nevertheless. It will take another decade for them to complete any super robot.
OK. Google has a lot of cash and so does J&J but where is the product given all that massive cash. PR games are not products. I looked up the Verb surgical to see if they were hiring and what type of people they were hiring. Looks like they are hiring robotic engineers, hardware and software engineers. It appears as though they are designing their own robots and so they will hit the same potholes as any other player. Glassdoor did not have very good reviews on them doing well.
Don't be surprised if it is all hype and no content.
Money is not a fix all.
Titan has done a lot of things right to actually to have an actual working product at this point. Less is more when it works. In Engineering when people want everything but the kitchen sink in a product then the product never gets to finish line.
Well I had read about it in while back but I discounted that because the posters who was talking about it had posted under a VERB-ticker. I don't spend my life reading this board to know what people are fixated on. So I concluded they were talking about whatever that is under that ticker. The only Nasdaq stock under that ticker is what I mentioned.
There are some basic engineering concepts and when I read up on a topic, I can figure what they are talking about. I am not a lay person who is not versed in technical fields. I have had vast experience with a lot of software and hardware.
By the way, I have read that J&J is their partner but it has bought an FDA approved robot which is not a cheap thing and that is not using this Verb thing apparently. The CEO of this Verb surgical has been deleted last January and no reason has been offered. If they had a market ready product, then they would have been already selling it by now. Where is one product that is using this. I could not find any.
Perhaps verb is a great premise and if it is not there yet, it is not ready yet or they have yet to lock in the right partner themselves. Perhaps they should fund TMDI to test their engine rather than J&J. The ball would have been in their court because they have a lot of R&D money.
I see. That is a newly designed operating system and an expeculative firmware and so it is a pie in the sky thing as far as TMDI is concerned. TMDI needs a product for sale and not an experimental operating system in development at this time.
The firms that have agreements with it already have a product for sale and they dedicate some of investor's cash on perma R&D. TMDI can not do such a thing. It is needs a well tested operating system that is tried and true to be taken to FDA approvals. Once they have a product that has sales and profits, then they can develop new line of products. By then perhaps this VERB thing will be available and supported.
Even if they had a beta version in hand, it is virtually impossible that it can be plugged in now unless it has been already under the hood because at this stage it should have been fully tested.