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The most notable spike, IMO,
was the "jimc" rally of August 2000. The pps climbed from about $3.75 to $6.78 over about a weeks time. It was catalyzed by a private and widely circulated email "campaign"
that revealed inside information regarding a major bundling deal for an e.Digital DAP with HP. Additionally it also referred to the certainty of a NASDAQ acceptance to be announced in the next day or two. Public hypeing accompanied the email trying to push people into buying, or missing the boat.
Recently, right here on this board and others, there have been similar suggestions of positive inside information by posters such as acrazjo. Whether or not there will be another "eruption" it seems that the exit door will be crowded with those who have learned the lessons from history, and will be fighting to exit on each of these spikes.
IMO, Rich, if a company can't show
a profit, it shouldn't be in business, unless the purpose is to wear out one's old clothes.
IMO, chwdrhed, the "jig"
will never be up because it is too easy to push this pps up artificially, and create interest (greed) among the ever-faithful. It is an engineering design company that has no business being publicly traded with a multi-million dollar market cap, unless it is a willing participant in the monkey business that has accompanied the trading of its' shares. If e.DIGITAL were a privately held company it would be forced to generate profits or die (end of jig.)
Well, I guess
"we'll see," Todd.
"shooting out of control," Gil?
The play is over for this little run, IMO. How many many times has this SAME thing happened? Dozens? Hundreds? Here comes the dump. Just like old times!
Euros?/
We'll see?/
A million bucks!!?/
fred: Would you be good enough
to refresh my memory on that contract? I have been wondering just what a design sub-contractor to SOFTEC creating a wireless headset for HP who is the manufacturer(?) for another company, might be paid.
digichat?/
Oh, brother!
Apple said in the statement that it was "disappointed" that people had used the new feature in iTunes to copy music with strangers.
"Rendezvous music sharing...has been used by some in ways that have surprised and disappointed us," Apple said. "We designed it to allow friends and family to easily stream (not copy) their music between computers at home or in a small group setting, and it does this well. But some people are taking advantage of it to stream music over the Internet to people they do not even know."
Like, they called it Rendezvous, but they never thought that people would "meet" there.
jtdiii: Did ya' get a reply?/
Just talked to a friend in the music biz
who says that the itunes store security was cracked last week. Anyone see anything specific about this?
Is this what everyone
has been waiting for?
A Sickly Economy, With No Cure in Sight
By DAVID LEONHARDT
WASHINGTON — For much of the last month, the people responsible for the health of the sputtering economy have been performing a series of emergency procedures.
With the economy showing new signs of weakness, the House and Senate overcame sharp differences last week to pass a $320 billion tax cut intended in part to increase stock prices and give households additional money to spend. Alan Greenspan has been assuring investors that the Federal Reserve will act aggressively to prevent deflation, an unlikely but dangerous possibility.
And Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, by speaking without concern about the dollar's recent decline, has helped push it down further versus the euro, aiding American manufacturers by effectively cutting the price of their products relative to those of foreign rivals.
Few policy makers or economists question the need for action, even if some are unhappy with the particulars. After roughly three years of falling stocks and rising unemployment, another downturn could create a whole new class of problems. The already big pool of the long-term unemployed could swell. Inflation — now near its lowest level in decades — might turn into deflation, a sustained decline in prices that can set off a vicious cycle of wage cuts and unmanageable debt.
But even if tax cuts and carefully chosen words represent a sensible form of insurance, they seem unlikely to accomplish what everybody agrees is the ultimate goal: the creation of a truly healthy economy, one in which stocks, wages and company payrolls are rising, without an enormous financial bubble as a main cause.
On balance, in fact, the steps being taken to pull the economy back from the precipice may delay the arrival of one able to stand on its own. "What we're doing now is trying to create a cyclical pop with a massive policy response," said James W. Paulsen, one of the few forecasters to predict the 2001 downturn and the chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. "That may well succeed — I think it will. But very little of it will solve the problems that got us into this situation."
Instead, those problems — consumers who remain financially stretched, a corporate sector that has not yet won back the trust of many investors and a government living well beyond its means — will weigh on the underlying strengths of the American economy.
Those strengths are not small, as continuing increases in productivity and the even slower growth of Europe and Japan have made clear.
"We have in place probably the best economic infrastructure" in the world, said Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin, the director of the Congressional Budget Office. "We actually get rid of nonperforming assets."
None of that is new, however, and the economy's problems have existed long enough to raise the questions of whether slow growth is the new reality, and whether good times like the boom of the late 1990's can exist without the help of a bubble.
In Washington, the problems start with a budget deficit that is expanding more quickly than it was even a week ago. Then there are ticking fiscal time bombs like the retirement of baby boomers (which will lower the government's income tax revenues, while threatening to bankrupt Social Security) and the alternative minimum tax, a once-obscure provision that is raising the taxes of a new set of households each year.
In future years, the upshot of these trends is likely to be a politically painful choice between higher taxes and lower government benefits.
Last week's stimulus bill added to the list of tough decisions to be made another day. To hold down the cost of the plan, Congress created tax cuts and tax credits — for married couples, parents and stockholders — that expire after a few years, leaving tomorrow's lawmakers to increase the deficit further or to anger voters by allowing the benefits to lapse.
Economists overwhelmingly agree on the wisdom of running deficits during downturns, particularly one that has raised fears of deflation. "The deflation scenario is so dangerous," said J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, "we want to take every step we can to avoid it."
What makes the slump of the last three years unusual is that spending by consumers stayed strong, which means they will be less likely to supplant the government as the main engine of growth once taxes increase or federal spending falls in future years.
Consumers have typically emerged from past recessions with a pent-up desire for houses, cars and other big-ticket items they avoided buying during tough times. This time, an aggressive series of interest rate reductions by the Fed has helped make many of those items affordable even as wage gains have all but stopped, after inflation is taken into account.
In trumpeting the Fed's vigilance against deflation in recent weeks, Mr. Greenspan has ensured continued low interest rates. Bond traders now believe that short-term rates, which the Fed controls, will remain low for months, and they have reacted by lowering long-term rates. Thus, last week, mortgage rates plunged to record lows, making it more likely that the refinancing boom will continue.
"This is obviously not going to go on forever," said Jan Hatzius, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs. The recent growth of consumer spending, he added, "is sustainable as long as households are able to take more and more equity from their homes."
The one recent attempt at resuscitation that economists say is likely to bring future benefits is the dollar's decline, which has accelerated since Mr. Snow suggested he was not bothered by it. By contrast, the Clinton administration occasionally bought dollars in the currency market to bolster their value, hold down the price of imports and keep inflation low when the economy was growing rapidly.
Now, however, a little inflation does not look so bad.
Even before the dollar's recent fall, the corporate sector was the only big part of the economy that has used the slowdown to bring its debts better into line with its assets. While the market's fall brought down the net worth of consumers by 10 percent from the start of 2000 to the end of last year, the net worth of nonfinancial companies rose almost 5 percent, according to the Fed.
Pointing to benefits from the dollar's fall, many economists say they expect corporate executives will soon end their cost-cutting ways of the last three years and decide that they can profitably use new factories and new technology.
That is a reason to think the economy will improve before the year ends, as almost every forecaster is predicting. By itself, however, it might not be enough to restore the economy to full health.
Stock sales, during the
Jan 2000 "distribution" were the most lucrative deal in my memory.
Lanier, as I was told,
was going to a PDA-type device that would negate their need for the CQ mobile that eDIG had designed and "manufactured" for them via ELTEC. The tech leader in their field, (DVI?) had already introduced their PDA and Lanier was trying to stay in the game, as I observed at a Medical Conference in Seattle a couple of years ago. I believe that eDIGITAL had a bit of a problem getting all of their money for that device from Lanier, not unlike the music biz where you are always a record short of being paid by retailers.
Catalog material is
extra valuable because lots of it is public domain, or has passed through the label bankruptcies and other oddities that happen to recordings in the "biz", which all combined create "free and clear" options for the labels to exploit, without paying writer/artist or publishing royalties.
Obviously the option
to own a physical representation of the song will have a market value. At this moment, due to novelty or actual worth, that price is $.99/song. It will go down with competition and economies of scale (volume). For me, the ability to burn a CD for myself, my friend, my granddaughter, et. al., none of which have a commercial remuneration for me, is important, so the subscription model that times out is not what I want.
Really, it seems to me, when and if the "boys" get this together, the mass marketing value of internet downloads will have to do with the ability to buy the LATEST MUSIC WITHOUT EXCEPTION. Subscription services, and even APPLES' store don't allow (much) this. That's the only way the playing field will be level in the competition with hard-product sales.
Once I got the three Kings
from Napster (Albert, Freddie and BB), I lost interest in most of the other stuff available! Well, I did snag a few James Carr's, Soul Stirrers, Monks' and Birds', but I doubt any of them or their estates lost money by my downloads.
The issue will be how many copies will be permissable, I think. Pubs and writers typically like being paid a mechanical repro fee for each.
berge: Intelligent discussion in the timf style!/
The "time-out" feature
inherent in the subscription model, is exactly what consumers are against. They want to OWN the music they think they are buying, and transfer it to whatever device they like. APPLE, with a few limitations, has given the public what they desire. Now, if publishers and writers as well as the labels can agree on a macro model based on the APPLE experiment, in time the downloading of music for sale via the internet may have a chance for success.
MSFT, and their tight DRM subscription-based model with clocks, bells and whistles to alert the distributors of "violations" in an imperious system of control, will not win friends among those who account for the largest segment of music buyers.
How the mob sold stocks
A new book explains how organized crime made its way onto Wall Street through small firms in the 1990s, in part thanks to a young, connected stock hustler.
By Ron Insana
Wall Street scandals are fresh on investors' minds because the major brokerage firms recently agreed to pay fat fines over conflict-of-interest issues. But there was a completely different sort of corruption that made its way to the Street in the 1990s.
The mob moved into Wall Street.
"Every single crime family had people down there physically in the brokerage houses on Wall Street," says Gary Weiss, a Business Week investigative reporter who first wrote about mob activity on the Street in the mid-1990s.
In his new book "Born to Steal," Weiss writes about the life Louis Pascuito, a young, mob-connected, stock hustler.
"He was a very sort of non-descript fellow, and he talked in different way than I would expect -- very nice, polite kid," says Weiss. "But then he showed me this indictment that he had just pleaded guilty to, and it was quite an extraordinary document."
Stealing millions
Over the course of six years in the '90s Pascuito worked for 17 small brokerage firms and stole millions from unwitting investors before finally being arrested.
"You had these firms that today you would never hear of them -- they've all gone out of business," says Weiss. "These little firms sold stocks to everybody out there in TV land. They were cold-calling firms. And the wise guys would be right there taking money from the brokers."
Here's how it might work:
Take "a stock like Eagle Vision (EAGV, news, msgs), for example," he says. "What it did didn't matter. Did it have a legit business? Didn't matter."
A trader who worked for the mob would walk out to the floor of one of these firms and call out a price for the stock. Then the cold calling would begin.
The firm would've bought the stock for, say, 10 cents a share, but sell it to investors who didn't know better for $8 a share, $4 of which went to the broker and the rest to the firm.
Running the chop shops
Pascuito ended up making a lot of money. At one point, he was running two of these so-called chop shops that pulled in $100,000 a month.
"He had this great apartment in Battery Park City," Weiss says. "He had great cars, he had a drawer full of Rolex watches, and he would just spend every cent that he got."
And he kept giving to the crime families involved, avoiding arrest because the criminal activity was happening inside seemingly legitimate businesses. Even the FBI had a hard time finding the fraud.
"Many of the investigators were so trained on what they had seen in the past, knowing how to investigate cargo thefts, extortion, things of that nature, that when you start seeing people doing business deals where there's no illicit property on the table, it's a little disorienting," says Ed Stroz, who was an FBI agent in New York City in the '90s specializing in securities fraud.
Then there was mob's less subtle approach.
"The other way was to use a more strong-armed tactic, to come in and maybe use fear to try and get the cooperation of the people maybe you needed to execute the trades you wanted to execute," says Stroz.
Tough to prove
Take the case of trading firm Sharp Capital. "They were shorting a particular chop stock -- that stock had friends," Weiss says. "And the people who were selling the stock were not happy with the fact that they (Sharp Capital) were driving down the price. The wise guys who were behind the stock came by and roughed up the trader."
But despite the simplicity of these scams, proving they were illegal was altogether another matter.
"Many people won't admit to it in a way that will allow them to testify," says Stroz. "Some of your witnesses are not the most stellar people and are subject to challenges in cross examination."
In the end, the mob, like some of the most trusted and established firms on Wall Street, paid the price for its own avarice.
"The total aim on Wall Street of both legitimate and not so legitimate (businesses) after all is to make money, and in the zeal to make money, there are corners cut," says Weiss. "And once you cut one corner by 3 millimeters, before you know it, you're cutting it three inches and then a guy named Louis Pasciuto comes and he cuts it three feet. When you start to cut corners, that's the beginning of the end. And that's exactly what happened."
but the ODY is out of stock, hh/
50+, check yourself out
A year ago, JB's were a real big deal to you.
By: newelong
29 May 2002, 06:03 PM EDT Msg. 981590 of 1126733
(This msg. is a reply to 981532 by longtooth.)
Jump to msg. #
Longtooth ...
I don`t think e.Digital is quite as "desperate" for cash as you have indicated. If you had listened to the Conference Call on 5-9-02, you would know that Ran Furman was in the process of lining up receiveable financing ... I imagine to conserve those remaining shelf shares until a more opportune time ... sounds reasonable, no ? Also, I noticed in your previous post ...
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=EDIG&read=981412
... you mentioned A/R`s of $800,000 as 12-31-01, which obviously doesn`t give effect to the two retailers added subsequent to that date ... and with all the re-orders, I`m inclined to believe that receiveables TODAY could be fairly significant, wouldn`t you think ? Additionally, a couple more retailers WILL be announced before the end of June, or weren`t you aware of that ?
Furthermore, I should point out the fact that our own little EDIG is being charged "tier one" prices from its suppliers ... just like the "BIG" guys ... I understand it all stems from those strategic relationships and partnerships we forged ... you know, the ones announced in those "fluffy" PR`s !
Just trying to bring you up to date, that`s all.
BTW, were you lucky enough to get some at $.51, or do you still think it`ll be going lower ?!?
NEWe.LONG
PC Magazine review of the ODY1k
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1087484,00.asp
fred, ya know,
I don't see "oems," in that correspondence from headquarters.
"Digitalway (our manufacturing partner
on this product) is negotiating manufacturing and delivery terms with several companies on versions of our Odyssey 1000."
Dollars to donuts that these companies are not unlike that English online site that has been posted here. (Gottahaveit?)
They are on the same business model as the edig store, and they do qualify as companies. Smart move by Digitalway.
Hints of a Bid Forming for Vivendi Units
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
Edgar Bronfman Jr. is trying to put together a group to buy back many of the entertainment properties his family sold to Vivendi in a deal that turned sour, according to several executives close to the negotiations.
Among those mulling whether to join Mr. Bronfman in bidding for the Vivendi Universal assets, these people said, are Cablevision Systems, one of the nation's largest cable operators, and several private equity firms, including Quadrangle, led by Steven Rattner, a member of the Cablevision board. Among the other private equity firms that Mr. Bronfman has approached, the executives said, are Providence Equity; Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; and the Blackstone Group, which is said to be interested in acquiring the half-stake in Universal's theme parks that it does not already own.
People close to the negotiations emphasized yesterday that there was no firm group of investors aligned with Mr. Bronfman, who remains on the board of Vivendi Universal, and that an organized bid might fail to materialize. Mr. Bronfman did not return calls; Cablevision and Quadrangle declined to comment.
"There are people saying to Edgar that they are interested, but that is about it," said one executive whose firm was approached. "But it is an extremely low probability that the deal gets done."
Vivendi Universal, weighed down by a heavy debt load, has said it wants to sell its American entertainment assets, and next week the French company is scheduled to begin the due diligence process, by meeting with two possible bidders, NBC and Viacom.
The properties include Universal's film and television studios, theme parks and music company, which is the nation's largest, as well as the USA Networks and Sci-Fi Channel cable services.
The week after next, both Liberty Media and a group led by the entrepreneur Marvin Davis will meet with Vivendi Universal officials.
As of yesterday, however, the Bronfman group was not on the schedule.
A purchase of all the entertainment assets would cost $15 billion to $17 billion, not including $5 billion in debt. Vivendi has indicated that it would like to complete a sale by early summer. It was not clear how Mr. Bronfman would raise the necessary financing.
One person who has worked with Mr. Bronfman said that if he succeeded in reacquiring the entertainment properties, he might want to oversee the music business, which is his first love.
In 1994, Mr. Bronfman was instrumental in having Seagram, his family's business, purchase MCA Inc., the parent of Universal Studios, from Matsushita of Japan. He then arranged the sale of the Universal properties in 2000 to Vivendi, a French water utility whose chief executive, Jean-Marie Messier, was intent on converting it into a global media company. The Vivendi experiment collapsed as the Internet bubble deflated, at a huge cost to big shareholders like the Bronfmans.
James L. Dolan, the president of Cablevision and son of the company's founder, Charles Dolan, told several people yesterday that his firm was interested in acquiring Vivendi's cable networks.
Cablevision has a heavy debt burden, but Aryeh Bourkoff, a media analyst at UBS Securities, said such a deal could make sense at the right price.
Still, Cablevision has been disposing of properties lately, not buying. It has sold Bravo, the cable network, to NBC, and there has been market speculation that Cablevision might sell American Movie Classics to Viacom.
It was not clear yesterday whether Cablevision also wanted Vivendi Universal's television production business. Nor was it clear which of the parties in a possible bid wanted to take over Universal's film studio.
Barry Diller, the chief executive of USA Interactive, could also jump into the bidding for the Universal properties, some of which he earlier transferred to Universal in a complicated deal with Mr. Bronfman. But he has told his investors, who want him to focus his attention on USA Interactive's Internet operations, that he would not make a move unless it seemed "opportunistic" to do so.
Mr. Diller and his firm have investments in Vivendi Universal Entertainment. Still, several industry experts said Mr. Diller might ultimately join Liberty Media's chairman, John C. Malone, in a bid, with an eye toward taking over management of the entertainment assets.
Late last week, Vivendi hired Goldman Sachs to work with Citigroup's investment banking unit in handling the sale.
Yeah, you did/
4 0r 5 vicadin (sp)? and speaking of MIR
whatever happened with this ace?
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/boards.cgi?board=EDIG&read=980475
These are trifling numbers, 50+,
and until and unless a major manufacturer and marketeer of mp3 players licenses something from edigital, these online sales are all just pissing in the wind; and........
just to keep it straight, sport, you are assuming that they have SOLD 24 because the in-stock number has decreased by that amount; I don't make any such presumption.
hh: That's what they said about Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and all of the other three chord music that exploded on the music scene in the '50's. Kids like whatever their parents find irritating. This is what sells mass amounts of music.......irritation appeal.
"Rock," as middle agers define it
is dead; at best it has been marginalized into a category synonymous with "metal." The real power/news in popular music has been the ascendance of rap. UMG is the personification of success, these days, because they have placed the major forces in current music under their distribution umbrella. Puffy's BAD BOY ENTERTAINMENT, DEF JAM and ofcourse INTERSCOPE are the real forces in popular music. They are all RAP production companies. Take a look at the Billboard singles chart.
http://billboard.com/bb/charts/hot100.jsp
This is music that requires no big-time production. In fact rap mix tapes pride themselves in being street raw.
Must be that VAT!/
Tenderloin: $480 seems like a lot of money
for this player.
fred: If I spent $1200, or so
on three Ody's, and I found that they had "issues," as packers1 would say, I'd for damn sure report them and expect something to be done about it.
Then again, I'm not a shareholder, anymore!
Flawless when introduced, fred?
These online sales to shareholders are (once again) the beta test.
Where's the profit in a $49 device?/
Amen, Bro....
You're hittin' bullseyes, freddie. Better watch yer back.
"Since when have consumers not been allowed to order directly from e.Digital." She didn't say that, Ron. She said that consumers do not have an opportunity to try out (demo) the device before buying it, I believe.