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How's that work, when it's already a publicly traded company?
Pardon, but how do you figure NEOM is involved? The barcode says:
http://purl.us.com/009000001
Which is a simple HTTP redirector.
Er, what? The stock reverse splits, not splits. You have it splitting 100:1 here; it's the other way. Even if it were splitting, the number of shares you have to cover would also multiply by 100. Shorting could still make money if the stock goes down but the scenario is:
1) Short 10,00,000 @ $0.0036 = $36,000
2) Cover 100,000 @ $0.30 = $30,000
3) $6,000 profit
To answer your other question, debt is found on a company's balance sheet:
http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?FilingID=7150486-151966-157441&type=sect&dcn=0001144204-10-016089
The "derivative" and "debentures" lines are essentially what we would call debt. It totals over $108M. There are other liabilities, but that's the bulk of what exists as debt.
PIPE = Private Investment in Public Equity. This is when a private investment firm invests in a publicly traded company. It's "special" in that typically private investment firms exist to invest in non-public companies, since an agent is really needed to marshall the cash and manage the investment. PIPEs usually happen when a company is troubled, needs cash, is publicly traded, can't raise debt, and for which the public market is thin enough to probably not be able to sell significant amounts of new stock. So a private firm is the last resort, and steps in to make a block investment, usually on very favorable terms.
I sympathize with people who lost money and are angry here. It may be some consolation to realize the PIPE investor here is probably going to take a significant loss. Thus is the nature of risky investments. You make 10 risky investments. If 9 are a total loss but 1 returns 20x, you still make 10x your money.
It may make you less angry, when you think about the incredible terms of the investment, to realize this is a company that banks would not lend to, that public investors would not invest in. When nobody can put cash in, it goes bankrupt and you guys lose everything. It was this, or have lost everything two years ago. Might have been better!
Was any money actually invested? Look at the financial statements. The cash flow statements do show cash flow from investing activities, so yes. (Unless you think that's a fiction.) Put it this way -- would their CxO team be there unless a real cashable check kept coming? Do the lights stay on without cash to pay the bills? It had to come from outside since revenue is all but zero.
At the end of the day... several of you have continued to put money into this investment. And encouraged others to do so. The CxOs have drawn a paycheck. The PIPE investor will probably lose money -- but offset by maybe selling some shares.
So: money out of your pocket, money into others' pockets. You can be angry about it. But you should also look at all the information you had: financial statements, the reality of the industry, warnings from people like me. You made your own adult choices.
I think a lawsuit will spend more money, and again enrich a third party (lawyers), and continue to postpone any notion that you investors made a mistake and compounded it as well. Maybe you should have flung a little less mud at people like me...
Remember, they settled this case. Nobody explicitly said they were or weren't infringing, just agreed to drop it, legally. And then obtain a license to all patents anyway. The agreement apparently gives royalties on use of these patents.
One pretty simple explanation is that Scanbuy is not making money on campaigns using this IP, or is not using this IP in current campaigns. I wouldn't be surprised if they're charging nothing or next to it.
Erm, again, what profit?
It's kind of like you own a coffee shop, elliott, and last year you sold $10 of coffee each day, and your expenses were $12 of coffee beans and $100 for rent and the barista. Your gross loss is $2/day but obviously it's losing $102 per day, 'really'. (We call this operating loss or EBIT, roughly.) And then today, your price of coffee drops to $6/day and you say HURRAH, I'm making $4/day! Not quite.
Especially if that's because you bought a bunch of coffee beans last year, and they've started to go stale, so you say, hmm, this coffee is worth half as much now, so it must only be costing me half as much now! Inventory writedowns.
Operating profit is indeed better, mostly on cost-cutting. You can only grow so fast by cutting costs, since costs can't get below 0. Top-line growth (just getting more sales, money in the door) is key, and there is simply nothing of significance here.
Good news? Though net loss is way, way up, though you can attribute that to massively increased liability on convertible debt. The stock price moved up and around in 2009, making it appear to be more likely to be worth something later. That made the debt's theoretical value skyrocket.
Since the stock price has tanked and stabilized, actually, these liabilities will come down. You'll perhaps see a positive net profit next year on change in fair value as a result!
Loss per share right now is 0.03 -- or $3.00 after this 100:1 reverse split. That's a hell of a swing to predict -- loss of $60M to after-tax profit of $5-$10M? Where's this $70M coming from? With that kind of growth you'd sure get a huge P/E multiple!
Check the top of page 39. 21B shares can be outstanding can convert, on top of the existing 2B outstanding. And they will if there's anything like the success you predict, diluting ordinary shares by 11x. Still happy?
Yah but it's "gross profit", which doesn't quite mean what we think of intuitively when we talk about "profit" in normal conversation. Basically it's sales, minus the actual cost of stuff sold. It doesn't count paying salaries, office rent, etc.
Don't see it here but they're probably taking some inventory writeoffs too, which makes selling stuff look more profitable since they stuff was considered less valuable.
"Operating profit" is a good number to watch. It expresses what happened in the business, before effects related to how they finance the business. This is usually what people call EBIT.
Cash flow statement can also be handy in situations like this to understand what's really happening at a short-term micro level.
I applaud anyone who's looking at the numbers and asking what's really going on.
Profit of $336,000? what are you looking at?
The 2009 Income Statement shows an operating loss of $6.288M. That's 'real' loss, just from running the business, before thinking of interest and taxes and such. It's not due to accounting losses like depreciation or write-offs.
If you want another perspective, look at the cash flow statement. Operating activities alone burned $4.202M.
No, this is still bleeding money at an astounding rate.
(It's srowen) Yes that's dswitkin. I didn't mean to imply he'd be featured -- actually didn't know what the nature of it was, just that he'd taped some comments for the segment.
For all they talked about QR codes, they were actually showing EZcodes, MS Tag, and then finally some quite distorted rectangular QR codes. Yeesh.
They aren't payment links, but links into the Android market. The image URL is:
http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=135x135&chl=market://search?q=pname:com.leizhang.android
and from there you can see what it's pointing to:
market://search?q=pname:com.leizhang.android
These only make sense on an Android device.
I rather think this CBS story, which is quite fine, underlines the problem for a company like Neomedia. I'm not sure it's good news on the whole.
Yes, poof, download a free reader for any phone straight away! these QR codes scan instantly! Poof, go make your codes for free instantly! And indeed the whole thing's working just fine.
... so where again does the clearinghouse, the indirect, the for-pay, the proprietary stuff enter the picture? The mainstream message about barcodes doesn't seem to include this at all. And that's where, the theory goes, the money comes in the door. Getting your reader downloaded is nice and all but building and distributing reader software is a cost, not a source of revenue.
If the strategy is to profit by solving the 'problem' of fragmentation and readers and such with this clearinghouse... well, who forgot to tell CBS this all doesn't work before that's in place? Agree/disagree as you will, but a mainstream message that this all works fine now with open QR codes (which I of course have agreed with for years) sure isn't good news for those selling advertisers on a problem to be solved.
I saw this video and was going to head here to give you fans a heads up -- beat me to it.
As ever I don't know what to say with the "coincidence-I-think-not" stuff, but I know Daniel (the Barcode Scanner et al. co-author) is doing a segment for the CBS early show about barcodes, with the same reporter. That could be the reason she's mentioning BS on Android and the project's code generator.
If I may interject. Pop seems to just be saying that Google did not somehow cause this feature to be added, and that only makes sense. (They are using the QR code reader code we wrote at Google, though, but that's their action alone.) Though the founder talks about "Google partnership" that's rather stretching the meaning of the word; there's no actual relationship at all. It is clear that the Google QR codes were an impetus for adding QR code scanning to the product -- that and $5K it seems to copy and paste in some open source code.
we all happy now?
Nope, that is what Barcode Scanner is. cloud3 is correct. It is not a new name. The project has always been 'zxing' (I didn't name it) and the client for Android has always been Barcode Scanner.
Um, where do you see any mention of readers at all?
Moen: look at what these terms mean. The claims outline a process that is very roughly this: scan barcode, read index, look up pointer in a remote database from that index. The pointer is not the question -- it's the existence of the index. There is no index in this code that is resolved against a database to get the pointer. The pointer is in the code itself.
I'm curious where you saw the code? surely this is at best a typo. At least you do see it is a direct code.
Works for me, takes me to the Babe Ruth museum. I am in the UK
LSL77 said, look, Google recommends barcode scanners and they don't even talk about their own zebra crossing project. I corrected this by clarifying that Barcode Scanner *is* the client from zebra crossing.
Neomedia does not patent this. It is direct linking. As you say it works fine with NeoReader -- or with any other reader. It'll work without an internet connection. Try it. This proves it does not involve a lookup, which means it is not covered by the 048 patent.
Moen -- just click the link. It takes you to a page about an Indian restaurant directly. I am not sure what problem you are seeing but you are incorrect here.
Sorry are you talking about these codes?
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/explore-whole-new-way-to-window-shop.html
It encodes:
http://www.google.com/m/place?cid=5246521125511575215
This is quite plainly direct. I needed no server to decode this, which alone means this is not indirect encoding nor covered by 048.
I switched off all internet on my phone and still decoded it. How?
You seem to be saying, well, there's a barcode here and an ID so it's indirect. This is exactly the sort of misconception that needs to be cleared up.
Nope, it's a URL in the QR code, which stands alone. It is the content itself and no resolution process takes place to decode to get that URL.
The IP does not somehow cover "using IDs on the internet"
You've stumbled into a good point, and are correct, but I did already note this -- didn't explain myself well I guess. We are talking about which platforms are going to generate the most barcode scanning activity -- right?
So we aren't actually talking about the number of phones out there. A phone without an internet connection or camera is irrelevant when talking about barcode scanning.
A phone that can barely scan codes might get used a very little bit for scans. I'd guess these are the phones that don't browse the web much (or see ads much).
But stuff like the iPhone can scan barcodes and access their services easily. And that goes hand in hand with being generally internet connected and easy to use.
So ad traffic is, in my view, a better proxy when reasoning about the "barcode scanning market share". You can accept or reject that as you like, preferably offer a better proxy. But asking how many devices are out there just isn't the right question.
The Getjar numbers are obviously unrepresentative, since virtually no iPhone or Android device would go there for apps, since the platforms have their own market.
Always good to understand the biases in the data you're looking at, since no data source will perfectly answer a question.
http://metrics.admob.com/
Think you should read this, as market share as defined by ad requests is a pretty good proxy for amount of activity from phones that would care to use barcodes: internet connected smartphone.
The iPhone dominates. The first two Android phones added up to about 5% already. All SE devices together didn't even add up to that.
Where are your numbers from, or is there a source?
This is tongue in cheek I take it but I do want to caution people about reading too much into this --
NeoReader is a fine app for the platforms it was built for. QuickMark is better in general, on Symbian and iPhone (native clients). Barcode Scanner obviously wins on Android, rather by default. The 3GVision readers are great (inigma, kaywa) but they have an ad-based model that you really can't recommend. Scanlife doesn't work at all since it won't read direct codes. There are a number of others that don't do well, at least when we looked 2 years ago.
I suppose it isn't that surprising the software is named then. This does not equal partnership. This does not equal interest from biz dev. This means someone did some homework in the tech writing. I stand by my point that there is no reason to believe the interested parties at the company have changed their assessment of Neomedia from the time of the proper meeting with actual Neomedia employees -- fragile company, bad finances, no real ability to execute, pursuing an uninteresting model. "IMHO"
This link just confirms the company has some decent software in its IP, which is true and is something. That can't be bad and adds a small bit of legitimacy. Hopefully it helps them sell a little services work.
But if you want to read otherwise into it, you're entitled, and entitled to put more money into it!
Probably because Neomedia hasn't been able to develop a reader for Android, Scanlife doesn't work, and Barcode Scanner is the #8 app in the world. If you RTFA you see they actually do recommend it for the platform it was built for. Have you ever actually tried it? :)
LSL77: That's what Barcode Scanner is. :)
I understand the security argument, and think it's a nontrivial one. However any reader is going to show you the URL you're going to before heading there, which rather defeats this scenario. However the user is still paying less attention to the URL than in the scenario that the user must type it in.
But users click on links all the time on the internet, and nothing's collapsed. Heck on the internet I can make a link that *says* foo.com and links to evil.com. Worse problem, in theory.
I don't think this changes between direct and indirect.
I do agree that the value proposition is not so overwhelming that every brand will think of this as must have. Evidence: look at the last 15 years. However I don't think you can say "it just saves 6 keystrokes". It's a no-click, 2 second action, or about 100 and a minute to enter a URL. That is a vast difference in barrier to resistance.
Would you click an ad on the web if it took even 10 seconds to complete? if it involved typing? Sounds comical right? that's the size of the difference. Google spends millions trying to deliver ads and results faster by 100s of miliseconds just because it makes enough difference.
EDIT: Nope, there is such a mention!
http://www.google.com/help/maps/favoriteplaces/business/barcode.html
I guess I'm surprised they'd make any particular mentions. It's hardly an endorsement tho..
Original...
I think they're referring to this page I wrote:
http://code.google.com/p/zxing/wiki/InterestingLinks
Which is not Google and not a recommendation.
I can't find any such recommendation:
http://www.google.com/search?q=neoreader+site:google.com
Bad info as far as I know.
SE goes with a little of everything: Symbian+UIQ, their own proprietary OS, Java ME, WinMo, and now Android. The Xperia pictured is running Android and Barcode Scanner.
Sure, why won't SE be paying? I've not heard of a preloading deal like this where the app vendor was getting paid. I do not know this for certain; just offering my experience.
Neoreader doesn't exist for Android. Right now it can't be installed on new SE Android smartphones. Search the Android market to confirm. It would have to be built. I guess I'd be surprised if they bother -- with what resources?
The PR doesn't say anything about installing on existing handsets, and I don't know they could do that if they wanted -- what capability would SE phones have for this?
The Getjar metrics already linked to show that Nokia and SE dominate Getjar traffic, in contrast to more general market share stats provided by, say, Admob. Here's another random source claiming SE is at 5% in early 2009: http://www.cellular-news.com/story/40796.php
I guess they'll have to build it -- could be so indeed. You see what happened to Scanlife though...
Well, I suppose I'd point out SE is launching new handsets with Android, not Symbian et al., so...
Neither of us had any Symbian dev experience, nor experience developing for SE's own OS, nor much desire to. We never created a proper client for those devices; Barcode Scanner would run on their Android devices, and apparently they aren't using Neoreader for these new devices?
The J2ME client would have run on their phones -- I had a K800i and it worked alright. But the native clients are always better.
I have been summoned for comment I take it. My take: this can only be good news for the company. I'd offer a few points to temper the enthusiasm that 'this is it', but it is in no way bad:
- Sony Ericsson won't be paying for this -- well, I'd be surprised. Let's wait for the 8-K if there is one.
- Remember, you need close to 100% penetration before running campaigns with closed codes makes sense, and that's where money comes from
- This is for new phones, not existing phones; current SE phones already have different readers if they have one at all
- Getjar is a somewhat distorted view of market share for these purposes. SE and Nokia still don't have a credible app store, so Getjar is their market. Not surprisingly they're most of the traffic. See how the iPhone is 0.1% of the market -- does that make sense?
- Admob stats paint a different picture: http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Oct-09.pdf SE dropped from 5.5% to 4.7% in just the last month. However I think this data too is biased towards smartphones, which are far more likely to browse the web and see ads. But then again those are people
- This won't include SE's upcoming smartphones, like the Rachael, since it runs Android: http://www.pcworld.com/article/181143/android_gets_a_facelift_with_sony_ericssons_rachel.html
Koko the point is, how on earth would they know? What about this bunch of dots says "secure" to you versus another? Even if this point had merit, I'm not sure how it becomes a selling point. Can you 'educate' the public?
Will advertisers accept that a third party might shut down their links if they don't like the target? what if someone 'reports' a legitimate gambling site? is there arbitration? who pays for all this?
We already operate in an "unmanaged routing" world where nobody controls clicking of links in general. Why is it somehow essential in this universe? Why is it that Japan has been using this just fine for over a decade without a traffic cop?
It says they offer both, and:
The short answer is that Direct Encoding is the only practical way to go if you truly want to create a personalized dialogue with the recipient in your one-to-one commuications such as transpromo or direct mail.
Sure, anyone with an agenda -- there's a word you guys like -- is prone to inflate some claims and hide counterarguments to further that agenda. That's why you should avail yourself of multiple 'agendas' and verify claims on your own.
What do you think might cause such biases, things like a financial interest?
There you go, good find. This doesn't come up on a search for "NEOM" -- sounds like they could use a better search function. ... to trot back to the point: someone pointed to this board saying, look, you can't find a symbol change to NEOME here. It's a good point, but, sounds like you can't find much of anything here.
What about an indirect barcode suddenly enables collection and transmission of this information? Recall that the point of this mechanism is that one just encodes a simple ID number in the code. What about that vs direct reveals anything about the user?
This is a function of the reader app, not the code. And as you'd expect, anything a reader app can do for indirect codes it can do for direct.
It's funny, right now I can log in to Admob and see location / language / other info about people clicking through my mobile ad campaign. Obviously that's all just URLs. So this must work with direct too, since it's working right now. So, what exactly is this advantage again?