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Good Work Grasshopper! eom
Way OT Old DD: Photon Switch On Leading Edge Of More Powerful Computers
(kind of what I was brainstorming about a few years back with my friend fwiw.....Neom is right in the ballpark imo with their contribution to the "new paradigm" and "continuing evolution" of the transistor....what they are doing, so many broad ranging applications and potential "touch point$$$" within every global industry, organization and institution imaginable...jmho....if all goes according to what we think it will...GOD'S SPEED AHEAD!!!
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/11/011120045133.htm
This is very reassuring and nice to know there are so many interesting personalities/shareholders on board and that we all can learn from and who offer so many unique talents in helping us understand just what it is we think we own as we evolve along with this trend and unique company poised to leverage their proprietary tech to capitalize on the mobile phenomenom(gasping for breath).....Makes our challenge to connect the dots that much more rewarding...Thanks again to all the longs and fwiw, since everyone is fantasizing about profitability from this investment, one day at a time and fwiw, I'll chime in and simply say that I'd be happy to pay off my house and keep learning about investing...I also would like to have JP and us all think someday about scheduling a yearly "investment club retreat" meeting for our board memmbers. We would have a good excuse to get together and share ideas, investment strategies and success stories in some place laden with palm trees, casino tables, Golf Courses and umbrella drinks ...
Have a good weekend all and looking forward to the weeks and months ahead!
SonOfGozilla
Way ot dd notes from a few years back: ok, found his original notes I think,very dusty so not sure if this all makes any sense, but good for a Sunday afternoon read fwiw... anyway, thank you XX for letting me borrow and also to lesnshawn for turning me onto this NEOM....:
Ok, here we are with our Visual Google software (referring to an article XXXXXXXXX posted a while ago), which is a search engine that search on images instead of words. Now, using conventional semiconductors based computers, we will endup comparing digitalized pictures, bytes by bytes, and we will basically be using a variety of well known pattern recognition algorithms, and this is will endup being very very slow. This is because our current computer paradigm has been suited for business purpose, dealing with numbers and words, not with entire pictures! We adapted pictures and sound to it, however, we just adapted! This is where the optical computer comes in play, causing a paradigm shift.
In an optical computer, the images would not be digitalized, and will be kept in pure optical form, then the pattern matching will be done later between light patterns. Once we reach that degree of opticalization (a word I just found) of computer, than our visual pattern search will largely outperform any of the conventional computers. Now, the real challenge is the media that will hold our optical patterns, which has to be completly not mechanical (because way too slow). For example, say our media is a kind of gaz that is able to retain light patterns (sound like a memory cube...LOL), then we will be able to search through these
light patterns at near light speed and not be restricted to those very slow disk technology, because these are after all mechanicals. These optical computers will be used first as visual search engines,mainly for military and later for the public. After all this is where the Internet came from, the military, namely the US army.
Today, we are using optical components and adapt to very old
computer models that are suitable to the semiconductors paradigm. In the next 5-10 years, I believe we will transit into a totally new hardware computer model that will be pure optical. The main problem for such optical computer is the current I/O paradigm that we are using, which is very very slow. By seeing what IBM and Corning are trying to do, they seems to challenge that I/O problem (computers interconnection), and this is probably the most complicated problem. Because hard disk and stuff like that will gradually disapear from computers, and only the DVD technology will be left for optical computers, and this stricly for archiving purpose. Therefore, the main I/O operations we will have, will be between computers.
********************************
article about Visual Search engines, not sure of the year, I think 2002 or 2003...anway, glad I was fishing in the right hole and glad I was directed to neom by a friend....one can not escape fate as Merlin once told King Arthur, lol...eot
Sailing the Sea of Images
> Could Visual Search Engines Be the Web's Next Frontier?
> Commentary
> By Michael S. Malone
> Special to ABCNEWS.com
> Oct. 16— The Internet may be a landscape of words today, but its
> destiny is to become an ocean of images.
>
>
> The trick will be in the navigation.
> You don't have to be a dedicated Web surfer to understand why
words
> (and numbers) dominate the Net. A picture may be worth a thousand
> words, but the data density of those thousand words is a heckuva
lot
> lower than for that picture.
>
> Thus, you can not only download most of a book before you can
> receive a single, photographic quality image, but you can also
start
> reading the text from the start, while the image is still just a
few
> thin stripes.
>
> A decade ago, when transmission speeds were still measured in
> thousands of bits per second, the Web was all words. Those of you
> readers who were online in those days remember how thrilling it
was
> to even see a picture forming on the screen — and then how
> frustrating it was to wait while the damn thing froze up
everything
> else for 10 minutes while it downloaded one pixel at a time.
>
> Of course, that is no longer the case. As bandwidth increased, so
> did the graphic complexity of the content. These days, the Web is
a
> panorama — some would say a wasteland — of images, from movie
stills
> to porn to pictures of auction items and book covers to spam. As
> broadband has reached America's homes in the last two years, it
has
> brought in its train simple video, from brief movie trailers to
> extended cartoons.
>
> Looking ahead, you can already predict the future: full-length
> downloadable movies available in near real-time (killing the video
> and DVD industries), online television, and do-it-yourself FX,
> simulations and animation.
>
> That's the predictable future, the usual extrapolation of
technology
> from the present, paced by Moore's Law. More bandwidth equals
> prettier pictures and longer movies.
>
> Transforming the Language of the Web
>
> But there is a second track in the history of tech. This is the
> long, and usually unpredictable, chain of technological
> discontinuities; the new inventions and products that seemingly
come
> out of the blue and turn everything upside down.
>
> The transistor, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor, disk
> memory, the calculator, the PC, desktop publishing, the router,
the
> Web, the search engine, and others, each, in some measure,
radically
> transforming the world around us, while creating vast new
> industries. In retrospect these breakout technologies may seem
> inevitable, but almost no one (except for their inventors,
> sometimes) sees them coming.
>
> I can't help thinking that the Web itself is due for just such a
> discontinuity. Sure, on-demand movies and online TV are incredibly
> exciting; but they are nevertheless logical extensions of the
> present at the application level. Real transformations take place
> not on deck with the tourists but down in the engine room. Real
tech
> breakthroughs take off the panel and mess with the wiring inside.
>
> What that says to me is that the next great shift for the Internet
> will be in the language of the Web. By that, I mean the words,
> because for all the pictures and videos, the Web remains a word-
> driven medium.
>
> A Digital History, Frame by Frame
>
> For the last couple of years, I've been gathering clues that this
> transformation to a true Visual Web is already under way. Just
this
> week I ran across just such a glimpse of this future.
>
> On Monday, Reuters carried a story announcing that Britain's
> Independent Television News (ITN) had put on the Web all 3,500
> hours, and 75 years, of British Pathe newsreels, covering every
> major news event from the Boer War to Swinging Sixties London.
>
> Better yet, using digital technology, ITN had scanned and copied
> every frame of these 35mm films — thus producing a database of
more
> than 12 million historic photographs. (You can visit it, even
order
> images, at www.britishpathe.com — but wait a few days, the crush
of
> the curious appears to have slowed it to a crawl.)
>
> ITN bills the site as "the world's first digital news archive." I
> think it's more than that: it's a glimpse of what the Visual Web
can
> be, and how far we still have to go to get there.
>
> The power of the Pathe site is self-evident the moment you see it:
> just type in a term, say, "The Beatles" and up pops a score of
> newsreel films; the Fab Four receiving an award, in concert,
> returning by plane from their U.S. tour, etc. You can watch the
> newsreels, or step through them frame by frame (or every fifth
> frame, or whatever you like), pick out the one you like, then blow
> it up or buy it.
>
> It's amazingly cool. What do you want to see? Titanic survivors,
> train wrecks, the British fleet, Marilyn Monroe? Here you go:
> hundreds of images of each for your inspection. They'll even sell
it
> to you in Powerpoint format.
>
> The Race Is On
>
> Yet, for all of its appeal, the Pathe site is also desperately and
> frustratingly clunky. Why? Because even though we now have
billions,
> and soon trillions, of images on the Web (think: every picture and
> movie ever made) we still have no visual grammar to find them.
>
> Sure, on the Pathe site you can call up a newsreel showing the
> Rolling Stones in concert, but to get that perfect image of Brian
> Jones, you are going to have to search through all the frames.
>
> Until we find that new methodology, until we develop a visual
> grammar for the Web, the next great transformation of the Internet
> will have to wait. This is the great Longitude problem of
> Cyberspace. Want to make a billion dollars? Then come up with the
> visual equivalent of Netscape Navigator, Yahoo! Search or best of
> all, Google.
>
> What the world needs right now for the next stage of digital
culture
> is a technique to rocket across the Net in search of a particular
> image or video clip. Perhaps the search will be prompted by a
> drawing or a digital photograph — and the search methodology might
> range from simply looking at color or form, to some incredibly
> sophisticated heuristic. Whatever it is, this visual search engine
> must be fast, intuitive and affordable by the general public.
>
> A few years ago I came across a start-up team that had developed a
> rudimentary visual Google, but the team fell apart. I suspect some
> of the big companies are already working on this problem, as are
> some universities. Still, my gut tells me that the solution will
> come from some lone inventor with a wholly new approach to the
> problem.
>
> So, the race is on. Create a visual search engine, copyright it
(or
> better yet, patent it if you can), license it and then sit back
and
> rake in your billion bucks — and immortality.
>
> Oh, and if you got the idea here, be sure to send me my 10 percent
> commission.
>
>
> Michael S. Malone, once called "the Boswell of Silicon Valley,"
most
> recently was editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as
> the nation's first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose
Mercury-
> News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big
Score:
> The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to
become
> a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised
> business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was
> raised.
Hyperlinking the World
By David Pescovitz, Thu Jan 13 08:45:00 GMT 2005
While most of us snap silly candids with our cameraphones, computer vision researcher Hartmut Neven is leveraging the ubiquity of digital cameras to google the world.
For computer vision researcher Hartmut Neven, the proliferation of cameraphones is an opportunity to put his life's work into every consumer's pocket. Neven, the head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, has developed image-recognition software optimized for mobile phone microprocessors. His technology, sold through start-up Neven Vision, already powers gimmicky MMS services from Vodafone Japan and NTT DoCoMo that automatically overlay special effects like tears or a halo on cameraphone video images. The Los Angeles Police Department is testing the same underlying facial analysis technology in the form of a digital "mugshot book." Officers on the streets point a camera at a suspect to see if his or her face matches anyone in their rogues gallery.
Neven's eyes are on the future though. His long-term goal is to bring biometrics to the mobile masses and hyperlink the world through a system best described as "a visual Google."
TheFeature: What do you mean by "visual Google"?
Neven: You take a picture of something, send it to our servers, and we either provide you with more information or link you to the place that will. Let's say you're standing in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. You take a snapshot with your cameraphone and instantly receive an audio-visual narrative about the painting. Then you step out of the Louvre and see a cafe. Should you go in? Take a shot from the other side of the street and a restaurant guide will appear on your phone. You sit down inside, but perhaps your French is a little rusty. You take a picture of the menu and a dictionary comes up to translate. There is a huge variety of people in these kinds of situations, from stamp collectors, to people who want to check their skin melanoma, to police officers who need to identify the person in front of them.
TheFeature: But how do you seed such a massive database of objects?
Neven: The key is to start with well-defined segments where the cost and effort of building the database is not that large. A nice rollout example would be a movie guide. If you see a billboard of a movie on a bus, you take a shot of it and then are routed to a relevant site where you can download a trailer or get show times. All we would need are images of a couple hundred billboards. The same is true with the Louvre example, where a collection of images already exists. With our technology, it doesn't take an expert to train the system to recognize an object.
TheFeature: You're planning to roll out the first version of this system in a year or so. What will it look like at the beginning?
Neven: Mobile advertising is a natural place to start this and get the kinks out. You could take a picture of the new BMW and automatically be entered into a sweepstakes. An advertising campaign would create awareness about this technology so people would learn how to use it.
There's a big leap between an automobile ad campaign and a visual database of the world though. Pulling off a visual Google is certainly a huge endeavor. We haven't fully explored scalability. We can comfortably do 100,000 objects, but can we do a million? For example, comparison shopping is an attractive application. A lady sees a handbag she likes but she wants to know the price of that handbag at other stores or see similar handbags that may be available. If you have hundreds of handbags that are only differentiated by small features, the system isn't good enough yet to discriminate.
TheFeature: What are the other technical challenges?
Neven: If you have millions of objects in the database, you can't search through every one of them looking for a match. The search strategies have to become smarter. You have to find effective ways to prune down your search early on so you're only comparing the photo you took to the most relevant sets of objects. Also, you eventually need to think about smart balancing between processing on the phone and the server. As the discrimination needs increase, you must account for finer image details. That would require sending a higher resolution image to the server, which could be expensive and clog the system. I think it would make sense to put more of the intelligence on the handset to do some pre-processing. That way, the handset would only send the necessary image features to the server where the recognition process would be completed.
TheFeature: You're also looking at ways to use your technology for secure mobile commerce.
Neven: Yes, the goal is to use cameraphones to accurately identify humans as well as objects. Right now in my laboratory, we have a working version of a single image multibiometric system. It fuses classic facial feature comparison with iris scanning and skin texture analysis. Your skin texture is like a fingerprint for your face. Our system can create a very high quality biometric signature without expensive sensors or cameras.
TheFeature: Is there really enough demand to justify a biometric system in every phone?
Neven: I think one huge application is enough to justify it. We're working with smart card vendors and credit card companies on a solution that allows for more reliable authentication of users. Take mobile banking, for instance. The system would take your picture and provide access to the banking site or not. It adds a second layer of security (above passwords). Access control is another application. At a locked door, you'd be prompted to authenticate yourself with your Bluetooth-enabled phone.
There's a formidable infrastructure out there of modern multimedia cameraphones. It's perhaps the most popular consumer device ever. Now we can inject machine vision into that infrastructure to enable new services.
"Visual Google"
(Ps, trying to dig up some old notes from a brainstorming investment club session with a good friend of mine who is a brainchild when it comes to software and other computer related stuff and tech stuff imo, but it had to do with this "visual seach engine" and was from a few years ago when we had conversations around Optical Computers, etc...anwyay, interesting I found some notes and ended up with a start, after, you guessed it, I ran a dd search, lol)....facinating stuff...
November 23, 2004
This was developed by Hartmut Neven, a researcher here at USC's ISI lab in Marina Del Rey - we should propose some content and user studies??:
Neven has applied for a patent to cover the use of image-recognition software on mobile phones and has started cutting deals with various companies. Vodafone Japan and NTT DoCoMo offer wireless video-messaging services powered by Neven Vision technology. Vodafone's MovieMask, launched in July, recognizes your changing expressions as you look into the camera and adds the appropriate special effects, like tears or sparkles. DoCoMo introduced a similar service called Face Stamp in November. Neven Vision expects at least three European cell phone carriers to make the technology a standard feature next year.
Meanwhile, the company is developing a security application that would use biometrics - facial features, skin texture, and iris pattern - to authenticate purchases made via cell phone.
And this fall, after two years of development, the company is rolling out its most ambitious service, what Neven describes as a "visual Google." The company has tweaked its facial analysis algorithms to identify anything from a Coke can to the Mona Lisa, barcodes to kanji. By linking this object-recognition software to a database of images, Neven aims to build a search platform for phonecam users. Don't know what something is? Snap a pic and the service sends back a match within 10 seconds.
The technology will debut next year in ads that offer, say, $1 million to the millionth person to submit an image of a can of Coke. Travel guides are next: Snap a picture of the Pantheon to learn its history, or click a road sign you need translated from German to English. "The system hyperlinks the visual world," Neven says. "Eventually every building and object will be in the database."
http://interactive.usc.edu/archives/003168.html
DD: Search Engine 101: Search Engine Watch Site Map
Everything about search engines and more is available at Search Engine Watch. This site map lists all the pages within the site.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sitemap/article.php/2148801
Sunday Coffee Read: How "search" is redefining the Web — and our lives
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002259118_search01.html
By Kim Peterson
Seattle Times technology reporter
After years selling another baker's pastries, Wendi Chocholak thought her birthday and wedding cakes were good enough for her to start her own business and succeed.
She was wrong. The people who tasted Chocholak's chocolate-raspberry and hazelnut mousse creations raved, but her Seattle business, Madeleine's European Cakes, didn't grow enough to pay her bills.
By last August, her dream was looking bleak, and so a friend suggested she try advertising on Google. Now, whenever someone searches there for Seattle wedding cake, they come across her ad. She pays a few cents each time someone clicks on it, and she gets four times the customer inquiries as before. It's enough to give Chocholak hope that her struggling company is going to make it.
When search engines can change the lives of pastry chefs, a technology transformation clearly is under way. These online guides were once merely the means to a destination, the robots that could quickly fetch a site from the Web haystack.
Now, they are the destination itself, and crucial to fulfilling a basic human need — the quest for information. For many, they have become the first stop in a discovery, the jumping-off point for an increasing number of tasks — such as finding a decent wedding cake in Seattle.
"We have invited them into our lives," said Danny Sullivan, founder of the Search Engine Watch site. "Originally, we turned to them just to locate stuff on the Web. We continue to do that, but they're going through a metamorphosis into being our trusted guide to everything."
Search: The engine for change
Today
We have invited search into our lives, and search engine companies have responded by giving us more of what we want — and taking some information in return.
Coming Monday
Microsoft's MSN division went from zero to search engine in less than two years — a remarkable achievement. The division did it in typical Microsoft fashion, devoting enormous resources and effort to catch up. The engine still hasn't beaten Google, though. Will it ever?
Coming Tuesday
The Puget Sound has been involved in search development since nearly the beginning. A look at the work being done in search by local people and companies.
Share your thoughts
What's the best search engine out there? How do use use search? How do you want search to improve?
Related links
Search Engine Watch
John Battelle's Searchblog
InsideGoogle
Yahoo Search's blog
MSN Search's blog
The Google Blog
Three quarters of U.S. Internet users, or about 120 million people, have used engines, searching an average of 38 times a month. As the technology has taken off, its influence has rippled through other industries.
The online Yellow Pages business is growing each year, while sales in the printed directories have flattened. At the same time, search technology has revolutionized advertising to the point where the businesses are questioning the value of print newspaper ads or television commercials.
Search also has an impact at a personal level. Nosa Omoigui quit his job as a Microsoft researcher to build a search engine for medical researchers. At chef Tom Douglas' radio show, Google searches help the production staff build entire shows around such topics as Hawaiian vanilla and Chinese New Year food. A Web log that Seattle structural engineer Matthew Powell started about the San Antonio Spurs basketball team got an audience of hundreds after being included in Yahoo's search results.
As a business, search brought in $4 billion in sales last year, and will become a bigger cash cow as its power and influence grows. And in the process, the easy reach of so much information will continue to provoke concerns about privacy and security.
Search companies are building precise profiles of users in order to sell ads. They know what city you live in, what you search for, the sites you click on and some of the other things you do online.
They know what people want to read about and the places they want to go. They're getting an unprecedented look at the collective wants and needs of the online population and they see trends long before nearly everyone else.
They own a growing archive of the human race.
Second only to e-mail
The idea of Web searching has been around for as long as the Internet itself, but only in the past several years did it catch on with the mainstream. Now, it is the second most popular activity online, after e-mail.
Some search for answers to their health problems, or for advice on running a small business. Others find driving directions, track the whereabouts of former lovers or get help translating foreign languages.
And with the high-speed Internet connections in most offices and nearly 40 percent of online U.S. households, these searches take just a fraction of a second.
If only searching were that easy. In developing its own search engine, Microsoft found that people search an average of 11 minutes before they find what they are looking for. See how long it takes to find the top five university marine-biology programs, or the store with the cheapest tires in Seattle. You searched for java, but did you mean coffee, the island or the programming language?
That's the tough stuff. Search-engine companies are scrambling to figure out how to find better answers to questions and combine searching with new technologies. Experts say we'll look back years from now and chuckle at our half-baked methods of finding information.
Search is just beginning.
Conceived 15 years ago
The first search engine was created in 1990 by a college student in Montreal and named "Archie" — a variation on the word archive. There wasn't even much of a Web at that point, and Archie was mainly used to dig through public file-exchange sites.
Three years later, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a program to measure the size of the new World Wide Web by exploring its nooks and crannies, crawling from document to document and cataloging its findings. That technique is still used today, as search-engine software robots constantly crawl the Web to find sites.
The technology picked up steam at universities. A group of Stanford students in late 1993 started working on what would become the Excite Web directory. Two others soon would launch a Web site called Yahoo!
Up to this point, search engines were tracking only chunks of a Web site. To be truly effective, these engines had to be able to search all the text on an entire page. That next generation of search engines was born in 1994 at the University of Washington, and Puget Sound has remained a powerhouse of search development since then.
Brian Pinkerton, a UW computer-science student, created in his spare time a simple program called WebCrawler to search for information on the Web. The program went live in April 1994, and became so popular that the UW's computer system sometimes slowed from the traffic. By November, it had received its 1 millionth query, a slightly alarming request for nuclear weapons design and research. It was snapped up a year later by America Online.
Search engines were popping up all over the Internet by the mid-1990s, but the technology industry mostly had no clue about how to make money on this phenomenon.
Bill Gross did. An Internet visionary and the creator of technology incubator Idealab, Gross founded a search-engine company called GoTo on the idea that advertisers would pay to list their sites in search-engine results.
Gross' idea was openly mocked in the technology industry. "Was he out of his mind?" asked a 1998 article about Gross in Red Herring magazine. "Who needed another search engine?"
As it turned out, the advertising model was worth more than the engine. GoTo went on to become Overture Services, and in 2001, as companies toppled like dominoes in the dot-com crash, Overture posted a profit and sales soared.
Search as a business was born. (Yahoo, by the way, bought Overture for $1.6 billion in 2003.)
"Suddenly search went from this checkbox feature you had to have to actually being the cash source for the center of your site," said Rich Skrenta, a former director of Netscape Communications' search business and the founder of Bay Area online news service Topix.net. "Today, the model [Gross] invented is basically the engine behind Google's billion-dollar quarter."
Clean, simple, inviting
Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., hit the $1 billion quarterly sales mark in 2004, just five years after its official launch. Its search engine won fans immediately upon debut because it served up relevant results in fractions of a second and had the minimalist appeal of white hotel sheets — clean, simple and inviting. Google's vault into the spotlight was perfectly timed to two important events: Mainstream users began discovering search, and competitors, distracted by the dot-com bust, lost their focus on quality.
Other search engines stopped improving their results, and the blinking and sparkling banner ads on their Web sites screamed for too much attention. Google produced answers fast, showing some unobtrusive ads along the way. That wasn't a bad tradeoff for users.
"We were finding things before Google came along, but they definitely raised the bar and raised the expectations of what we could get out of search," said Sullivan at Search Engine Watch. "They made it more manageable."
Google is the most popular engine today, home to 35 percent of Web searches. It receives hundreds of millions of requests every day, and studies them so thoroughly that it puts out a regular update of user patterns. Popular queries last week included Earth Day, new pope and the NFL draft.
Google did its part to popularize Web search — becoming a powerful brand name in the process — but it was the high-speed Internet that helped turn searching into one of the hottest areas in technology today. With a fast connection, the search engine is always there, ready to ask the question Microsoft once used in television commercials: "Where do you want to go today?"
If we increasingly live in an "always on" world, and if our every task starts with a question, then every task could start with search, said Mark Anderson, a Friday Harbor technology forecaster. Search moves to the front of how we think and work, he said, and its impact becomes staggering.
"Huge," he said. "That's where the big money is. The number of eyeballs goes up hugely, and all the money comes from eyeballs."
Search engines are going after more eyeballs by adding their own content, and now offer users street maps, phone numbers, weather forecasts and even answers to algebra problems. Many also offer separate search-based shopping and news services.
Google is digitizing books from five library systems, and now lets users search through "Pride and Prejudice," "War and Peace" and other books. Microsoft's MSN division has added its Encarta Encyclopedia to its search engine, so that it can give a fact-based answer to questions like "Where do aardvarks live?" and "What is dew?"
And Web users add more public information daily. A group of University of California researchers estimated the size of the public Web at least tripled from 2000 to 2003, when it contained 167 terabytes of data. That's equal to about 560,000 sets of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
Others learning about us
A Web that size is bound to capture some details some people don't want online. Credit-card numbers, phone numbers and addresses have turned up in search results. A Seattle man's spicy online personal ads from 1996 are easy to find nine years later.
Expect more of the same as the Web grows and as search-engine companies branch into new business areas. They're learning more daily about the things we buy, the topics we discuss over e-mail and the friends in our inner circle.
Amazon.com, a company that already keeps vast records of consumer searches and purchases, launched its A9.com search engine last year. It could easily start advertising based on customers' A9 searches, but it said it won't cross that line.
There are no plans to tie a person's search history on A9 to Amazon's retail side, said Udi Manber, A9's chief executive.
"A9.com makes information from users available only to them," he said.
Still, the distinction between searching and other online businesses is growing increasingly blurry. Amazon and the major search-engine companies own at least one of the following:
• Social networking sites, such as Google's Orkut, where people meet each other and discuss their goals and interests.
• E-mail and online blogging programs, such as MSN's Spaces, where people keep online diaries, photos and links to favorite songs.
• Instant messaging applications, such as MSN Messenger, in which users chat with others on their contact lists.
• Digital photo services, such as Yahoo's Flickr, which allows users to organize their photos and share them with others.
"One disturbing aspect is that these profiles are being built up," said Jason Catlett, the founder of New Jersey-based privacy-protection company Junkbusters. "If the average person was confronted with a history of his search queries and surfing records, they would be horrified and say, 'I want this destroyed.' "
Google began testing a program last month that will show users their past searches. The program, called My Search History, shows a user's search queries, the date and time of the queries and the results that were clicked on. Google shares that information among all of its services.
Can we trust search engines with so much information, with knowing so much about us?
"I don't know," said Sullivan at Search Engine Watch. "I think that's what we're all going to be discovering now."
Next stop: the cellphone
So where does search go from here? Some experts say the technology will jump digital boundaries from the browser to other platforms. Its next stop is the cellphone; in the future, television.
Search will play a huge role in cellphones and mobile devices, said Jim Voelker, chief executive of InfoSpace, the Bellevue company that is launching a mobile search engine this year.
"It's going to become very easy to get any kind of information and data you want where you want it," he said. "The device increasingly knows where you are and what you like to do when you're there."
John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired magazine whose book on the search industry is due out Sept. 12, said he expects that search and TV eventually will merge. The things you search for, the Web sites you visit and the history of programs you watch could influence which ads come over your TV.
"There is just this boatload of data about what people want sitting on search engines and [Internet service providers]," he said. Television companies are willing to spend huge sums to find out what people want, and the two industries could combine resources very quickly.
Google began moving video into its vast grid last month. The company accepts video uploads from users, and plans to eventually allow people to view, search and buy them. Google is encouraging television producers to upload as well.
In other words, search is becoming a media business. That much was obvious in March, when Microsoft unveiled an ad-selling platform for Internet-delivered TV. The technology would show ads precisely directed at the people watching them.
That same month, the Ask Jeeves search engine found a suitor in none other than IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Expedia and the Citysearch portal.
In a conference call announcing the $1.85 billion deal, IAC Chairman Barry Diller said his company would create an "echo system" to send Web traffic back and forth between Ask Jeeves and all of IAC's other properties.
"We began to be convinced, like most everybody else, that search, global search, is the gateway to everything," he said. "As far as I can see, there is no impediment to its growth."
Kim Peterson: 206-464-2360 or kpeterson@seattletimes.com
Google not really the exception to the rule
Posted on Sun, May. 01, 2005
Google, however, shows how companies can benefit on those rare occasions when paradigm shifts are real. In this one, advertisers are spurning traditional media such as newspapers and TV to move to the Internet. And Google has a peerless search engine to draw viewers to those ads.
When soothsayers talk about the future, best take their words with a grain of salt.
Here, for instance, is what I said last May when search engine Google was planning to go public at a price as high as $135 a share, an astronomical figure relative to the company's earnings:
"Google appears to have set a high price based on ample evidence that investors are drooling over the stock. But investors don't drool forever, as we saw when the tech-stock bubble of the late '90s burst in 2000... .
If I were buying Google shares, I said, "I wouldn't bet more than I could afford to lose."
I wasn't the only skeptic, and Google eventually went public in August at a more modest $85 a share.
But it turns out the worriers were wrong.
On April 22, Google shares soared 5.7 percent to a record $215.81 after the company reported a nearly sixfold increase in first-quarter profits, with sales nearly doubling.
There is a lesson here that also applies to the stock market's wild swings in the past couple of weeks: For all our research and analysis, predicting whether stocks will go up or down is about as scientific as flipping a coin.
This isn't a new lesson, but we need to relearn it over and over, else we get carried along as the crowd chases one fad after another.
Keep in mind that stock prices are mainly governed by the pro traders who do most of the buying and selling. About two weeks ago, these wise heads looked at sour economic and inflation news and drove the Dow down 4.8 percent in six trading sessions.
Then on April 21, they focused on some surprisingly good corporate earnings news and gave stocks their biggest one-day surge in two years - more than 2 percent.
If pros could forecast companies' long-term performance, they could calculate appropriate share prices, and shares would just stay there. But the pros can't do that - there are too many uncertainties, so stocks whipsaw. Ordinary investors can't, either.
Another Google lesson: From time to time there is a breakthrough company that justifies investors' enthusiasm.
But these are the exceptions that prove the rule: Most "paradigm shifts" are mere wishful thinking. For every Google, IBM or Microsoft, there are dozens of once-hot stocks that crashed.
Back in the late '90s Internet bubble, investors convinced themselves that shares in profitless tech companies should sell for sky-high prices because, in the paradigm shift called the "New Economy," earnings and sales figures no longer mattered. That was wrong, and the bubble burst.
Google, however, shows how companies can benefit on those rare occasions when paradigm shifts are real. In this one, advertisers are spurning traditional media such as newspapers and TV to move to the Internet. And Google has a peerless search engine to draw viewers to those ads.
But unlike the Internet high-flyers that tanked a few years ago, Google has delivered good earnings and sales. Investors evaluating the stock don't have to rely on new-fangled gauges such as "hits" and "page views."
Sure, Google is trading at a price about 85 times the past 12 months' earnings, well above the stock market's historical average of around 15. That makes Google risky.
But the company has a track record of stupendous earnings growth and it is the premier player in an international market with lots of room to grow. And the P/E is a more modest 55 if you use analysts' earnings projections for the rest of this year - especially since past forecasts have been low.
So Google may be, in many ways, the perfect stock: Its product is on the cutting edge, yet investors can focus on old-fashioned data they can understand - earnings and sales. A number of analysts have said Google shares could go to $250 or higher by the end of the year.
I still wouldn't pour money into Google unless I could stomach a big loss. But that's nothing against Google - it's a good rule with any stock.
After all, the analysts are often wrong. And Google has raised investors' expectations so high it will be easy to disappoint them.
Jeff Brown is a business columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. E-mail him at brownj@phillynews.com.
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/business/11535138.htm
Advertisers spend billions seeking online customers
Sunday, May 01, 2005, 12:00 A.M. Pacific
By Kim Peterson
Seattle Times technology reporter
Matthew Powell grew up in Texas and remained a die-hard fan of the San Antonio Spurs even after his career as a structural engineer brought him to Seattle.
He's very opinionated about the NBA team, and in January he started a Web log, a personal online diary where he posts his reflections. He attracted enough of an audience after search engines picked up his blog that he started advertising on his site through a Google program called AdSense.
Google now places advertising directly on Powell's page, based on the content there, and gives him a few cents whenever someone clicks on one of those ads. So far he has made about $7.50.
"I have a good job that pays me good money, and here I am writing for a blog and making a tenth of a cent for every hour I put into it," he said. "I enjoy the absurdity of things like that."
Powell has become a minipublisher, and in his own small way is part of an advertising industry that has been revolutionized by search engines. Paid search advertising has grown from nearly nothing a few years ago to a $4 billion business last year, and is expected to approach $7 billion or more by 2008.
Across town, Brian McAndrews works the big-money side of search advertising. He's chief executive of aQuantive, a Seattle-based digital marketing company that spent $87 million last year as the largest buyer of search-engine advertising in the country. The company, which buys the ads for paying clients, made a $26.5 million profit last year on $158 million in sales.
As search engines have grown more important, McAndrews said, aQuantive's customers are asking for more help advertising on the keyword-based bidding system used by Google and other companies.
The system is fairly simple. Advertisers write their own ad text and choose what search phrases the ads should be associated with. A real-estate agent in Bellevue might pick Bellevue home prices and Bellevue real estate.
Then the advertisers set the maximum amount they would pay each time their ad is clicked. Generally, those willing to pay the most rise to the top of the advertising windows on search-results pages. Google ads appear across the company's network of Web sites, including blogs like Powell's.
The system opened up advertising to the little guy. Small-business owners can spend $30 a month and see what happens. The blogger with a passion for basketball can get a cut.
"Search did bring more people online because it was a way for people to quickly understand intuitively how online advertising could work," McAndrews said.
The field is growing more complex, and even becoming the target of fraud. In some instances, people are clicking excessively on ads, leaving advertisers to pay for those superfluous clicks. In other cases, some Web-site owners with ads on their pages are themselves clicking on the ads to gain more income than they really should.
Microsoft and other search engines are improving their ability to target advertising. Microsoft is developing its own version of Google's system, and plans to use it to sell ads for television and other platforms.
Microsoft said it will target its ads so precisely that advertisers could even sell to men or women in specific age groups and salary ranges. It plans to buy data from the Experian credit bureau to help make those assessments.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002259129_searchsidebar01.html
Weekend Reading For Joedimaggio
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/invest/forbes/P114177.asp
Verizon Wireless Cuts NYC Wi-Fi
http://www.internetnews.com/wireless/article.php/3501611
bonus dd: http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3501691
The height of technology
Verizon trains a force to install its ultra-fast fiber optics
Thursday, April 28, 2005
BY TOM JOHNSON
Star-Ledger Staff
Inside an unimposing office building in a South Plainfield industrial park, Jeffrey Batiste is busy training some of the next generation of telecommunications workers.
He barely can control his enthusiasm.
VERIZON'S EARNINGS TOP FORECASTS
PAGE 25"You have to compare this to other major milestones within the industry," says Batiste, a 10-year veteran in charge of training for Verizon in New Jersey. "This is as significant as when they began stringing wires across the country or bringing a telephone into every home."
About 160 people each month are being trained to install the company's ultra-fast communications network for homes and small businesses. The work force is crucial to the nation's largest local phone carrier's aggressive goal to replace its old copper phone network with fiber-optic cables.
The cables, consisting of hair-thin strands of glass, are capable of transmitting voice, video and data signals at speeds far exceeding today's copper-cable standards. The network is Verizon's move to sell the triple play of television, phone and fast Internet access being marketed by cable television companies.
In New Jersey, Verizon plans to spend $200 million this year and hire as many as 500 workers to build out the network. Verizon also has hired at least three outside contractors who likely will hire hundreds more workers.
"Before we were just connecting phone wires to the house," Batiste says. "Now, we're building a new network into the home. There's so much bandwidth here that we can't even fathom what we are going to do with it all."
In the beginning, though, the workers get an old-fashioned introduction into the telephone worker's day. They start with a two-week course in telephone-pole climbing.
Then follows an intense course teaching them how to install the fiber optics. The service, available to only about two dozen towns in the state, is dubbed FiOS, short for fiber-optic service.
The first main component, optical line terminals, are located in the company's central switching offices, which typically serve between 10,000 and 15,000 homes, Batiste says. The terminal serves as the point of origination for the fiber-optic transmissions coming in and out of Verizon's national network.
The optical signals are then sent to an optical fiber distribution hub where the signals are split off to serve multiple customers. The 4-foot aluminum encased hubs are sometimes mounted in the neighborhood they will serve or put atop a telephone pole.
Each hub is capable of serving between 216 and 432 homes, Batiste says.
From there, the signals are sent to an optical network terminal mounted on the outside of a customer's home where the light signal is converted into a dial tone, and data or video feeds run into the homeowner's premises. A battery backup will provide power for voice service during any loss of electrical power.
Inside the home, Verizon workers will connect the network to the customer's computer, television and phone, a process that will take about two hours. A router will allow it to provide Internet access for as many as four personal computers, Batiste says.
The toughest part of the job will be mounting the optical distribution hub atop the pole. Hovering above the ground, the workers will use special tools to splice the cable into as many as 12 different ports. The splicing job is supposed to be completed within 2 1/2 hours.
The workers Verizon is hiring need not be college graduates, but they must pass a written test. All will be union workers represented by International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and earn between $31,800 and $60,000 a year.
So far, the workers in training aren't finding the task daunting, says Tom Sak, a retired Verizon worker who helps train the workers. Only two of the 170 or so workers who have gone through the course failed it, he says.
"It's intimidating at first, but once the instructors teach you how to do it, it goes pretty smoothly," says Anthony Chen, a 23-year-old Belleville resident who was talked into applying for a job as a facility technician by his brother-in-law, who works for Verizon. "I'm very excited about the technology and the capabilities of fiber."
Verizon New Jersey President Dennis Bone says installing the fiber-optic network has endured some hiccups. Verizon New Jersey isn't alone in trying to build a communications network, so the company has been held up because of delays in obtaining equipment to do the job.
Verizon could use more of the high-tech tools to splice the cables and the trucks that take fiber off the spool and attach it to the existing network. "This is a huge logistical problem," Bone says.
By the end of the year, Verizon hopes to wire up to 70 towns in 10 counties, a rate the company hopes to duplicate next year, Bone says. It will probably not offer video programming to customers until next year.
Verizon is signing up customers for the high-speed data service.
Waqas Haque, a 32-year-old computer consultant in Old Tappan, called the company seeking to change his existing phone lines and was told about the fiber-optic service. For someone who often works out of his home, the service has proved valuable.
"This costs about the same as my cable modem did, but it is faster," says Haque, who is paying $49.95 a month for the service. "I can certainly see the difference, especially when I'm downloading files."
Tom Johnson may be reached at tjohnson@starledger.com or (973) 392-5972.
FAT PIPES
Verizon is installing a fiber optic network in New Jersey.
M ain components:
Optical Line Terminals: Located in Verizon's central switching office, this equipment is the traffic cop for fiber-optical signals coming in and out of the company's national communications network.
Optical Splitter Hubs: 4-foot-high aluminum boxes mounted atop a telephone pole or on the ground, these hubs will be where the optical signals from fiber link are split off to serve individual customers via individual strands of fiber.
Optical Network Terminal: These small medicine-cabinet-sized terminals will be mounted outside homes and businesses. This is where the optical signal is converted into voice, data or video feeds into the customer's house or business.
Fiber optic cable: Connecting the components is cable that is less than half-inch thick, which can send optical signals of light at great speeds via 216 hair-thin strands of glass.
Customer options
Verizon is initially installing the fiber-optic network in 24 towns: Allendale, Alpine, Closter, Demarest, Franklin Lakes, Harrington Park, Mahwah, Northvale, Norwood, Oakland, Old Tappan, Ramsey, Rockleigh, Westwood and Wyckoff in Bergen County; the city of Passaic; Ewing, Lawrence and Pennington in Mercer County; Mendham Township and Rockaway Borough in Morris County; Tinton Falls in Monmouth County and Evesham and Medford in Burlington County.
The company plans to announce other towns shortly. By the end of the year, it hopes to wire 70 communities in 10 counties around the state.
Customers interested in the service should call (888) GET-FIOS (888 438-3467).
Source: Verizon Communications
Who's Going to Win
The Living-Room Wars?
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB111392360478310765-qq9uDXlRc8UIzZu2qtMj_s_HuNI_20050526,00...
hi, morning cupcake....imho and fwiw, it did a lot to scare longs away, really pissed me off actually....wish I had cash to buy more....nite nite//
I Have The Name For This One
BlankXXX & XXXX & XXXXXX Neomedia Entertainment Group LLC, Inc as another possible incubator group...
5. YAHOO!
Next Stop: Hollywood
Last year: 7
Fastest revenue growth: 119%
Ten years after two Stanford engineering students undertook a quixotic effort to categorize every page on the Web, Yahoo! is set to storm Hollywood. It has revenue: $3.6 billion in 2004. It has eyeballs: 345 million pairs every month. It has broadband partnerships with reality TV kingpin Mark Burnett and Entertainment Tonight. CEO Terry Semel has hired ABC exec Lloyd Braun, the guy who green-lighted Desperate Housewives, to cook up compelling shows. Can he direct Yahoo! to Wisteria Lane?
Challenge: Keep at least one eyeball on Google. Yahoo! is still an ad-driven Web portal at heart.
Opportunity: Create content. Yahoo!'s numbers make TV's sweeps-week audience look tiny.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/wired40.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
sog, What A Post, lol, I see "search" as a common Theme...wonder if anyone caught on yet????
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/wired40.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/wired40.html?tw=wn_tophead_6
The Internet's librarian turns out to be its biggest power broker. Fueled by $3.2 billion in 2004 revenue, Google fulfills 200 million searches of 8 billion Web pages a day, determining which sites are seen and which remain buried. And new initiatives keep coming: local search, maps, movie showtimes, searchable television content. A recent post on Slashdot.org puts it neatly: "In a few years, you'll be driving your Google to the Google to buy some Google for your Google."
Challenge: Retain valuable employees. Now that the fortunes have been made, workers may have little incentive to stay.
Opportunity: Wrest screen real estate from Microsoft. Desktop search is just the thing to capture the first parcel.
State Bill To Limit RFID
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,67382,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
Virgin President Zack Zalon on Digital Music
http://www.betanews.com/article/Virgin_President_Zack_Zalon_on_Digital_Music/1113448288
Wireless World: Satellite Cell Phones
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/satellite-biz-05zza.html
Infinity Plans FM Radio Broadcasting for Mobile Phones
By Jennifer LeClaire
TechNewsWorld
04/18/05 9:37 AM PT
Infinity said for radio station operators, Visual Radio can increase listener loyalty and advertising revenue. For mobile carriers, Visual Radio provides an opportunity to increase data services usage and revenue, as well as average revenue per user.
Citrix's remote access solution, GoToMyPC®, allows business users and individuals to achieve instant flexibility. GoToMyPC customers have secure access to email, files and network resources from home or on the road from any Internet-connected computer or wireless device. Learn more.
HP and Infinity Broadcasting today announced they will work together to deploy Visual Radio to U.S. listeners. But analysts are skeptical that carriers will grab hold of the concept.
Developed by Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and offered by HP, Visual Radio allows listeners to tune in to local FM radio via their mobile phones while simultaneously receiving interactive information and graphics that are synchronized with the broadcast.
Leading the Effort
Users can view the title and artist of a song playing, check upcoming concert dates, purchase ring tones or other content from the artist, and participate in radio station promotions.
"Mobile phones are the most widely used portable device and we're thrilled to be leading the Visual Radio effort in the United States in concert with HP and Nokia," said Joel Hollander, chairman and chief executive officer, Infinity Broadcasting. "Partnerships that afford us the opportunity to integrate our content with new technologies and serve our listeners with an additional interactive environment are central to Infinity's long-term growth strategy."
The Revenue Streams
Infinity said for radio station operators, Visual Radio can increase listener loyalty and advertising revenue. For mobile carriers, Visual Radio provides an opportunity to increase data services usage and revenue, as well as average revenue per user.
But IDC analyst Lewis Ward told TechNewsWorld that he's not sure if there's enough incentive for carriers to deploy such a phone.
"Sprint is monetizing radio today with MSpot, which is satellite radio, for US$5.95 a month," Ward said. "But the iPod phone is not out there because operators can't figure out how to make money on it. This is an interesting announcement, but there's a lot of work to make sure the necessary business models are in place."
Behind the Curve?
Outside of the United States, radio station operators such as Virgin Radio (UK), SBS stations such as Kiss FM (Finland), The Voice, Mix Megapol and Rockklassiker (Sweden), and FFH Hit Radio (Germany) are already creating Visual Radio content to deliver it to listeners with Visual Radio-enabled Nokia mobile phones. HP is betting the U.S. will follow suit.
"Broadcasters and content creators are embracing new technologies and business models that enable them to reach listeners in new ways," said Shane Robison, chief strategy and technology officer for HP. "Infinity's adoption of the Visual Radio service in the United States is evidence of the exciting possibilities that lie ahead for the radio industry."
A Matter Of Clicking Your Fingers
http://www.smh.com.au/news/Technology/A-matter-of-clicking-your-fingers/2005/04/29/1114635747953.htm...
Nokia Enters Music Cell Phone Fray with N91 Model
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/1190030BR4B7.xhtml
Yankee Group analyst John Jackson said despite some past failures at mixing music and other media with mobile phones -- Nokia's lackluster NGage phone and gaming device, for example -- all of the major handset makers and wireless carriers are gearing up to sell and support music phones.
Citrix's remote access solution, GoToMyPC®, allows business users and individuals to achieve instant flexibility. GoToMyPC customers have secure access to email, files and network resources from home or on the road from any Internet-connected computer or wireless device. Learn more.
Mobile handset giant Nokia (NYSE: NOK) this week officially joined the music phone race whereby technology companies are hoping to produce hits by combining mobile phones with iPod-type music players.
Nokia, which enters the fray with its N91 handset featuring a 4 GB hard drive and room for 3,000 songs, said its device will offer users a connected music device that features over-the-air access to operator music stores.
Analysts said efforts such as Nokia's -- as well as that from Motorola (NYSE: MOT) , which has partnered with mobile music leader Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and its iPod/iTunes -- represent a mix of technology and business strategy. Although there is likely some appeal for the music phones, which nearly all handset manufacturers are working on, it will be difficult to find the right product, price and service model that has mass appeal, Yankee Group analyst John Jackson told TechNewsWorld.
"One interesting thing about the rumored iPhone device is that it represents multiple brands and multiple business models," he said, referring to Motorola's yet-to-be-unveiled model. "Obviously, it has the potential to capture the cachet of iPod, but at the same time, the go-to-market strategies of multiple parties need to be aligned to make that happen, which is a difficult thing."
Feature-Filled Phones
For its part, Nokia, calling the new, music-optimized N91 a "connected mobile jukebox," highlighted the device's capacity and connectivity, indicating it could deliver more than 12 hours of playback via headset or accessory headphones and speakers. Supporting MP3 , M4A, AAC and WMA digital music formats, the music phone can connect to other PCs, the Internet, and other N91 handsets through a variety of connections including WCDMA, wireless local area network (WLAN) and Bluetooth wireless, Nokia said.
With standard mobile phone functions, a 2-megapixel camera, e-mail, browser and video support, the N91 will allow users to purchase and download music through wireless operator services and manage collections and playlists, which can also be shared.
"The Nokia N91 delivers both a fantastic music experience and cutting edge phone features," said a statement from Nokia music vice president Jonas Geust.
Betting on Business Model
Yankee's Jackson said despite some past failures at mixing music and other media with mobile phones -- Nokia's lackluster NGage phone and gaming device, for example -- all of the major handset makers and wireless carriers are gearing up to sell and support music phones.
"It's a manifestation of what you can expect much more of as the market matures and demands less segregation [among devices]," he said of the N91. "On the device roadmaps of every vendor, we see this."
The analyst said creating the hardware devices themselves does not present a major barrier to service adoption. Business model and hitting the right market sweet spot are what represents the biggest challenges, according to Jackson.
DataComm president Ira Brodsky told TechNewsWorld the music phone is a natural fit for the mass market, but he stressed the importance of getting the device and service model right for consumers, who are notoriously finicky about handsets.
While he called music phones proof that third-generation wireless or 3G had finally, truly arrived, Brodsky questioned whether there was the network capacity to support users if they were to popularize a music phone device and service.
"I think there definitely is a business model they can succeed with," he said. "The challenge is providing the right device and service that works right. It's amazing how hard it can be, especially when engineers are willing to put up with something that consumers will not."
Carriers Confused
Gartner analyst Michael King indicated that the idea of a mobile music platform in a phone that the user takes everywhere makes sense, but there are still a number of questions around the download and distribution model for music phones.
"The carriers haven't figured out what role to play," King told TechNewsWorld. He said it is those companies that will ultimately shape the business models and services around music phones.
King, who questioned whether Nokia could maintain its well known durability in a music phone with a hard drive, added that mobile phones will be carrying and playing tunes, but will not necessarily be the primary device for doing so.
"I do think, in the long term, phones will become a channel for musical content, but I seriously doubt that it will ever be the main channel for music," he said.
Survey: TV for Mobile Phones Set to Reach Masses
Thu Apr 28, 2005 12:22 PM ET
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - About 125 million consumers will be watching television on their mobile phone in five years from now, a new survey found on Thursday.
Mobile television is not yet commercially available, but trials are carried out around the world, and consumers are expected to be able to pick up the first TV phones by the end of the year. Handset makers will sell 130,000 TV phones this year, rising to 83.5 million by 2010, research group Informa said.
Mobile TV signals will be handled by special chips on a mobile phone that sit alongside the chips that process the mobile phone's calls, music and streaming video clips.
The difference between TV and streaming video services will be that the TV signals are broadcast to all users at the same time, while streaming video will be delivered on demand by mobile operators.
Mobile TV images are also expected to be of higher quality than mobile video streams.
"The degree to which these networks will become either competitive or complementary will ultimately determine the fate of market," analyst David McQueen said in the report.
Well-entrenched TV viewing habits and the fact that in North America and Europe the vast majority of people already carry a mobile phone will fuel the market.
Nokia has said it will introduce a mobile TV phone in the first half of 2006 and expects volume sales as early as in the second half of 2006. Samsung Electronics from Korea has also showed its first TV phones.
Chip makers such as Dutch electronics firm Philips and U.S. mobile technology company Qualcomm are scrambling to get energy-efficient chips out before the end of the year.
Lesnshawn (POUNDING MY FIST): The "lightbulb moment" for Burgess was the realization that there are a billion cell phone users around the world. "To me, that's a confirmation of the significance of the mobile phenomenon," he says. "Not to be thinking of that as a sustaining channel of news and information would be a mistake."
500 Channels On Your Cell Phone?
http://www.cableworld.com/cgi/cw/show_mag.cgi?pub=cw&mon=050205&file=500channelson.htm
Cable....hmmmmmmmmmmm, I can also think of another possible think tank idea for yet another division/operating group as part of the neomedia technologies incubator businesses overall operating strategy, etc...
A good read fwiw: The Next Global Stage: The Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World
by Kenichi Ohmae
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/013147944X/qid=1106634741/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-289317...
I wish I had more time for reading...anwyay, got to get back to work, have a good weekend, and thanks lesnshawn and others for the morning food...it helps keep my Neural synapses stimulated and healthy)
Introduction
Ideas do not emerge perfectly formed. They are awkward amalgams of experience, insight, hopes, and inspiration. They arrive on stage, blinking under the bright lights, hesitant, unsure as to the audience's likely reaction. They evolve and develop, alert to changing reactions and circumstances.
I have been rehearsing the arguments that form the backbone of The Global Stage for over two decades. My previous books, including The Borderless World and The Invisible Continent, examined many of the issues I am still exploring. Ideas, as I say, do not emerge in a state of perfection.
In its genesis, The Global Stage has been shaped by two forces.
First, bearing witness to changing circumstances. Over the last two decades, the world has changed substantially. The economic, political, social, corporate, and personal rules that now apply bear scant relation to those applicable two decades ago. Different times require a new script.
The trouble is that far too often we find ourselves reading from much the same tired script. With the expansion of the global economy has come a more unified view of the business world. It is seen as a totality in itself, not constricted by national barriers. This view has been acquired, not by the traditional cognitive route of reading textbooks or learned articles. Instead, it has come directly, through exposure to the world, frequent travel, and mixing with the world's business people. Paradoxically, perhaps, this breeds a similarity of outlook. Opinions and perspectives are shared; the type of developments in the political and economic worlds that are held to be important are shared too. With shared outlooks come shared solutions. But a common view of the world will not produce the unorthodox solutions and responses required by the global stage.
Over the last 30 years, I have traveled to 60 countries as a consultant, speaker, and vacationer. Some countries, like the United States, I have visited over 600 times; Korea and Taiwan, 200 times each; and Malaysia, 100 times. Recently, I have been averaging six visits a year to China and have started a company in Dalian, as well as producing 18 hours of television programs seeking to explain what is really happening there in business and politics. I also spend a lot of time on the Gold Coast in Australia and in Whistler, Canada. Of course, as a Japanese national, I live in Tokyo and travel extensively within Japan.
As you can see, I believe that nothing is more important than actually visiting the place, meeting with companies, and talking to CEOs, employees, and consumers. That is how you develop a feel for what is going on. For some of my visits, I have taken groups of 40-60 Japanese executives so they can witness first hand regions that are attracting money from the rest of the world. I have taken groups to Ireland to see how cross-border Business Process Outsourcing is reshaping its economy. I have taken them to see Italy's small towns that are thriving on the global stage. We have also visited Scandinavian countries to find out why they have emerged as the world's most competitive nations and Eastern Europe to see how they may be positioned in the extended 25-member European Union. The group has also visited China and the United States twice, as well as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Korea, and Australia.
The executives who join me on these trips change their views of the world. Even in the days of the Internet and global cable news, walking around, listening, looking, and asking a question is still the best way to learn. Seeing what is happening in the world first hand changes perspectives. Having witnessed the global stage, executives then begin to read newspapers and watch television with different eyes. Gradually, their views broaden and they feel comfortable in their roles as actors on the global stage. It does not necessarily come easily. New skills are required.
The second defining force behind The Global Stage is that, over the last 20 years, I have witnessed some of the pioneers of the global economy first hand.
One of the first business leaders to be sympathetic to the notion of the truly global economy was the former CEO of Smith Kline Beecham, Henry Wendt. He saw cross-border alliances as a potential savior for the American pharmaceuticals industry and recognized that internationally based strategic alliances would become important, if not vital.
Henry realized that there were three dominant markets in the world – the US, Japan and the Far East, and Europe. No single company could deal with and service all these markets effectively, no matter how powerful and dominant it might feel. No corporation could hope to cover a market of 700 million people that had a per capita GNP income in excess of $10,000.
Companies traditionally used a marketing strategy that depended on a sequential penetration of each market, whether it was a region or a country. Once you established yourself and your product in market A, then (and only then) you moved on to market B. But Henry Wendt proposed that when you have a good product you have to adopt a sprinkler model, penetrating various markets simultaneously. One way to achieve this is through strategic, cross-border alliances.1
Henry Wendt entered into negotiations with Beecham, a company with a particularly high reputation in R&D, and a strong presence in Europe, and in time these negotiations led to a merger. Not only did he opt to go down the merger path, but also, with powerful symbolism, he moved the company's corporate headquarters from Pittsburgh to London.
Henry Wendt had foresight and vision. His notion of cross border alliances was truly innovative. In those days, such alliances and mergers were difficult since each large company was embedded in its domestic markets. These companies were also under the thumb of their respective domestic governments, with which they were closely linked and with which they closely identified. It is very difficult to abandon your home turf. (Witness the more recent outcry about outsourcing.) For one thing, there may be government resistance (as we have seen in merger talks across Germany and France). There are also media commentators, like mammoths or dinosaurs stuck in a freezing swamp, who describe such moves as unpatriotic and unprincipled. They tend to report on one or other side "winning" in any merger – witness Daimler Chrysler.
In a world where borders were weakening, cross-border alliances were the only way for a company to survive and prosper. In the pharmaceuticals world, drugs were becoming more standardized. The important and potentially profitable compounds and formulas became less distinct. This was accompanied by an astronomical rise in the cost of R&D. New regulations piled on both costs and delays. Yet the amount of money invested in R&D only had an indirect link to the level of success that could be achieved. A company could build up the best-equipped laboratories, staffed with the optimal mixture of experience and youthful brilliance. This never guaranteed success. There was still an element of chance whether the right leads would be pursued and the breakthroughs realized.
The dilemma is that when the R&D is successful and a super drug is born, you may not have adequate sales forces in the key markets of the world. So, the amortization of R&D money is less and, at the same time, you may have to keep expensive people in the field even when you don't have drugs to sell. This is the problem with industries like pharmaceuticals where high fixed costs demand size to justify them. That is why you need to seek strategic alliances and, sometimes, to go one step further to total cross-border mergers. In the mid-1980s, examples were few and far between. But now we see examples of cross border alliances and M&As almost daily in banking, airlines, retailing, power generation, automobiles, consumer and business electronics, machinery, and semi-conductors.
Size and capitalization did play a part. A medium-sized pharmaceuticals company might well spend $1 billion in R&D and have no results, but a larger company might be able to sink $3 billion, maybe more, into R&D. It could afford to miss the target more often and still remain profitable. Cross border alliances allowed more companies to do this. It was only possible, though, once they saw beyond their home markets. Today, the concept of cross border alliances is no longer a novelty. Henry's path breaking role deserves recognition.
Another early pioneer of the global economy was Walter Wriston, former chairman of Citibank. He saw globalization as an imperative, not because of management or business theories, but because of technological breakthroughs. He prophesized that competition between banks would no longer be based on banking services, but on acquiring better technology. Effectively, the company able to make decisions quicker, often in the fraction of a nanosecond, would be the winner.
Walter Wriston understood the future shape of banking – and of the global economy. It was to be based in a world without borders; it would float around decisions made in a split second, maybe sometimes by non-humans. Technology was to be the key to success in banking, and so the person at the helm of Citibank had to be technology savvy. But his vision left him in a minority. Twenty years ago, most top bankers were traditionalists. They saw relationships of trust and confidentiality forged among business and governmental hierarchies as the key to success, rather than technology. Technology was all very well, but it was for whiz kids, not bankers.
John Reid, Wriston's handpicked successor as head of Citibank in 1984, was not a product of the traditional east-coast banking establishment. Reid was a technologist. An MIT graduate, he had been working in Citibank on ATM applications and other electronic banking projects. At the time of his appointment, he was virtually unknown within the corporation. Some even greeted his appointment with the question: "John Who?"
Walter Wriston defended his decision by saying that it was very hard to teach technology to an established banker, but relatively easy to teach banking to a technology specialist. As for relationships, these would develop over time. Under Reid's stewardship Citibank became the largest bank in the world. Along the way, he astutely led Citibank through the Latin American financial crisis.
Yet another business leader who was ahead of his time was Akio Morita, co-founder of Sony. The original business was called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo or Totsuko – TTK. This name, even in its abbreviated form, was too difficult for western markets. So Morita came up with the four-letter "Sony" to represent the quality of sound from his transistor radios. For Morita, the world was one big market with few or no barriers. He thought big, but was no megalomaniac. He famously advised companies to Think Globally, Act Locally. This philosophy was christened "glocal" by the Japanese magazine, Nikkei Business, and led to the coining of a new word, glocalization.
These visionaries shared many of my views about the then emerging global economy – explained in such books as Triad Power and The Borderless World. I was fortunate enough to exchange views with all three of them and many others in the mid-1980s and beyond. However, discussions on the importance of the region state proved more elusive and troublesome. I had to wait until the developments within China post-1998 to gain any sort of useful practical perspective on this issue.
Some Stage Directions
In The Global Stage, with these intellectual antecedents in mind, I begin by looking at the state of the world and how we make sense of it. Part One looks at some of the areas of explosive growth (The World Tour) and identifies some of the characteristics of the global economy. It then looks back at the birth point of this new era (Opening Night). The section ends with an examination of the failure of traditional economics – and economists – to make sense of the global economy (The End of Economics).
In Part Two, I examine the major trends emerging on the global stage. In the opening section (Play Makers) I explore the development of the nation state and the dynamics of what I call the region state, the most useful and potent means of economic organization in the global economy. I go on (in Platforms for Progress) to introduce the idea of platforms, such as the use of English, Windows, branding, and the U.S. dollar, as global means of communication, understanding, and commerce. Finally, I explore what parts of business have to change in line with the emerging economy. These include business systems and processes (Out and About: BPO); and products, people, logistics (Breaking the Chains).
In Part Three, I provide analysis of how these changes and trends will impact on governments (Reinventing Government), corporations, and individuals (The Futures Market). I look at some of the regions which might be the economic dynamos shaping the world beyond the global stage (The Next Stage). In the final section, I re-visit my book, The Mind of the Strategist, and think through the need for changes in the frameworks we use in developing corporate strategy on the global stage.
The Global Stage makes sense of the world as I see it. Twenty years ago, globalization was a term, a theoretical concept. Now it is a reality. The Global Stage is part of a process of understanding the new rules that apply in this new world – and often there aren't rules to adequately explain what we now experience on a daily basis. It is not an end-point, nor is it a beginning, but I hope it is an important step forward for companies and individuals, as well as regional and national leaders.
Kenichi Ohmae
Tokyo
September 2004
1 I explored this theme in Triad Power – The Coming Shape of Global Competition (1985).
walden
It's also fun to take those speculations, connect the dots and make it all a reality and prosper financially...It's also so easy to sit here and play Monday Morning Quarterback/analyst like some of us do knowing hindsight is 20/20 and speculation is always easy to do on a bulliten board, lol....but at the end of the day, we al know management is positioning for the future and placing a structure around their plan to leverage their products, technologies and services against the "everything mobile" phenomenon that is upon us.....and imo, no one could have said it better than you here: [b}"...Bottomline, the future of everything mobile is moving in the direction of NeoMedia..."....and taking it one step further, imo, neom strategy is starting to unveil itself with their announcements to date.... As Keinichi Ohmae once said: "...Strategy takes shape in our determination to create value for our customers..."....Neom Management imo is practicing this important "Outside-in" philosophy in trying to get their company off the ground, they truley have the technology/key enabler in Paperclick that will create value for their customers for many many years to come...all jmho....NAVIGATION NAVIGATION NAVIGATION = TRANSPARENCY, EFFICIENCIES and customer value-added benefits, etc etc...and it's fun to be in at this stage and watch the movie be filmed...
Have a good weekend.
sog
lenshawn...(and NEOM Management),
Forward-looking upstream thought.....
My gut/intuition and my 15-20 or so years experience working in and with various CPG/Retail/tech type industries and their multiple channels of distributin (and seeing firsthand the multitude of technological key enabler platforms come and go based on the accepted technological platforms that were commercial ready and accepted at the time and marketed/sold to the companies to use them to increase productivity and sales) tells me I can smell an entire Neomedia Technologies CPG Solution type Incubator Division being formed/explored as part of their business model in due course...of course if things go well with their baby steps they are taking now to structure the foundation and platform of which to grow their business groups, etc....This Division (have no idea on a name yet)would create a market or enter a market with their key enabler technologies that addresses some of what we are speculating about in this particular tangent...something like that...Have to give more thought as things evolve in the next few weeks/months but as a "plausible hypothesis", it makes sense to address as a "forward looking upstream" possibility...
Have a good day,
Sog
Cut and Paste's: A SMART SHELF at Metro Group Future Store’s Essen warehouse. Future Store uses RFID at shelf level for most products, letting the company record movement of product for real-time inventory, anti-theft portals, and portable self-scanning.
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I believe that everyone will look at transactions in their operations differently,” said OCI’s Mr. O’Connell. “You’ll be able to use the tag as an inventory tracker, reconciliation/quality tool, and volumetrics tool. The clock stamp with every case or pallet scanned gives you a really good time- and productivity-tracking system that can be used to develop new and more accurate work and process standards within your operation, and externally for delivery and shipment lead times.”
RFID Future Store
“We’ve has been involved with RFID since 1998 and are piloting projects with Procter and Gamble and Germany’s Metro Future Store,” said SAP’s Mr. Domski. The Future Store (www.future-store.org) is a visionary project that showcases RFID used at shelf level for most products. The Rheinberg store features a smart shelf that records movement of product for real-time inventory, anti-theft portals, and portable self-scanning. The store’s source warehouse in Essen monitors inventory via RFID in order to more accurately and quickly replenish its stock.
Mr. Domski noted that RFID’s impact will proceed from the explosion of information available. “Companies are looking at it in terms of high-level consumer response. Once people learn how to leverage this information, they’ll use it to fine-tune promotion planning, and enable an adaptive supply chain for further visibility and more responsive replenishment.
“The big question on everyone’s lips, is what is the business case? Our challenge is to work with our customers to identify new workflow enabled by RFID. For example, if an incoming pallet [equipped with an active tag and temperature sensor] moves out of temperature parameters, it can notify the system.” noted i2’s Mr. Parthasarathi.
In the long view, after the blood, sweat, and tears of working through the issues pioneering deployments, RFID is one more, very powerful tool for supply chain automation,” concluded OCI’s Mr. O’Connell. “It’s not a panacea, and it will take a few years to outgrow the hype.”
From Here:
http://www.scs-mag.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=490&Itemid=87
dd and side comment: I better upgrade to premium so I can spell check as I long for the days when I wasn't so lazy as to pick up a hard bound Websters Dictionary to spell check and learn...lol...Damm that spell check invention, lol...anyway, meant to add these dd links (and EDI) to previous email fwiw:I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day)
1.) Consumer Packaged Goods: Leaner and Meaner
Deb Navas, Editor at Large
March 29, 2005
Lean, demand-driven manufacturing is the goal, and it’s about to get even leaner with RFID data collection in the wings.
http://www.scs-mag.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=490&Itemid=87
2.) You'll Be Upgrading
Big retailers want tech-savvy vendors
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_11/b3924425.htm
It's not the kind of mail any business owner likes to receive. Late in 2003, Greg Kieler got a letter from Lowe's Home Improvement requesting that Worktools International, the $8 million specialty paintbrush company of which he is co-president, adopt a new electronic product-data system. That would let Lowe's and other retailers more easily track inventory. Worktools' deadline: April, 2005. Largo (Fla.)-based Worktools doesn't have an IT department, and none of its 40 employees has real computer expertise. But Kieler didn't have a choice. Lowe's is his largest customer. Advertisement
Kieler hustled. "We started right away, knowing that we'd have a huge learning curve," he says. He hired consultants that had worked with Lowe's. They upgraded Worktools' software, charging a $1,000 set-up fee and $125 a month in ongoing support. Worktools will also pay $600 a year to have its products listed in UCCnet, a registry run by the Uniform Code Council. When Lowe's goes live with the system, Kieler will be ready. "Now we hopefully have an inside track on making Lowe's happy," he says.
Worktools isn't the only small business receiving nerve-jangling letters. Mega-retailers are pressing their suppliers to make fast, often expensive, technology upgrades -- or risk losing their business. Lowe's, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Wegmans Food Markets, Office Depot, and AutoZone are among those aiming to link members of their supply chain electronically, eliminating paper invoices and tracking documents. The first salvo to smaller vendors appears to have come from Wal-Mart, which sent an April, 2003, letter to about 20,000 suppliers, saying it expected to receive all product data electronically by January, 2004.
Other big retailers were quick to follow suit. Home Depot notified vendors on Feb. 18, 2004, that it plans to eliminate all manual processing of product data by 2005. "This project will take considerable time and resources within your company," the letter warns. "If you have not already started, we urge you to get involved today." And a June 7, 2004, letter from Office Depot alerts vendors to the company's plan to adopt UCCnet by July, 2005.
The letters are peppered with terms like "suggest" and "request," but make no mistake -- they're nothing short of mandates. Wal-Mart spokesman Gus Whitcomb doesn't say the company will drop businesses that don't comply. But, he says, vendors "have to consider if they can get a competitive advantage on someone else who might be a supplier to Wal-Mart." Lowe's spokeswoman Chris Ahearn is more direct: "At some point everybody will have to be part of the system."
Even for tech-savvy entrepreneurs, the requested upgrades are seldom quick or painless. But those doing business with the retailers -- or hoping to -- have little choice. "The bottom line is that [suppliers] are going to have to automate to stay in the game," says Gene Alvarez, vice-president of technology research services at the Meta Group in Stamford, Conn.
Retailers are pushing three initiatives. Electronic product registries assign each item a 14-digit code, then include it on a global list accessible to retailers. Vendors pay to get their wares listed. The UCC charges sliding-scale fees: Companies with less than $1 million in sales pay $100 a year, while those with $100 million pay $7,500.
Electronic data interchange (EDI) lets suppliers and customers communicate directly electronically. Expect to pay $4,000 to $10,000 in set-up fees, plus a few thousand in annual support, says Adam Eiseman, CEO of New York consulting firm The Lloyd Group.
The use of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) is less commonly requested, at least for now. The tags incorporate a sort of souped-up bar code that transmits information, aiding in inventory tracking. Meta Group's Alvarez says the system can cost up to $70,000 to implement.
Of course, retailers' requirements differ. Some retailers insist only on electronic purchase orders. Others want everything from shipping notices to invoices handled online. "Retailers have manipulated the standard to meet their own needs, thus destroying it," says Carl Lehman, vice-president of enterprise applications at Meta Group. Retailers including Wal-Mart ask suppliers to use AS2, an EDI standard that is relatively easy and inexpensive to implement.
Retailers aren't leaving their vendors completely in the cold. Wal-Mart has a support desk to answer questions about UCCnet and is providing technical assistance to those installing RFID, says Whitcomb. Others provide a list of third-party vendors familiar with the technologies. But some require that businesses work only with vendors on that list, so entrepreneurs don't have the option of looking for lower-priced or more conveniently located services.
The upgrades that one retailer requests can often help in dealings with others. Josh Simon, IT manager of Budge Industries, a Lansdale (Pa.) company that makes automobile covers, tries to ensure that any new systems can be used with multiple customers. Since 2003, the $15 million, 60-employee company has spent about $7,000 to make upgrades requested by Wal-Mart. "It has made my life easier," says Simon. "It really helps us organize our products."
Bay TravelGear, a $60 million, 80-employee luggage maker in Scottsdale, Ariz., began installing AS2 in December, 2003, at Wal-Mart's behest. "It actually saved us money, so our EDI guy is trying to get as many customers as possible switched to AS2," says applications manager Kevin Silacci. He hopes to use the system with Target soon. Don't worry: Silacci doesn't have time -- yet -- to make sure his suppliers are using it too.
3.) http://www.consumergoods.com/cgt/pages/archives/articles/art_mar05_2.shtml
4.) Tech Awards - Supermarket News http://www.supermarketnews.com/images/techawards_2005.pdf
lesnshawn
WARNING: These are raw and unspell checked "mind dump" notes on current thought process around retail....
I think I am getting it pondering over my old track record notes I am starting to "dig up" in my off hours.......
This is huger than humongoues, lol, imo, in that all the longs here are thinking all over but at the end of the day, logistics/supply chain/ECR/Continuous replenishment is what drives retail here in the US and abroad...anyway, "stay with me"..lol...now, no one is EVEN ADDRESSING yet in the "street" "big Boy/GAl Retail ie Wal Mart Dagastino, BBY, Tarjet, Victoria Secret on and on" world, how sudden this migration to an ubiquitous always connected to your own wavelength type of thing with various devices (ie cell phone)putting companies like MSFT out of biz as the pc is a dinaseaur imo now or will become one...just look at the the recent Nokia stufftht came out, soon, true convergence (see intels gamble)will happen like we have been thinking about for years imo and like Wofin stated, can come into mainstream like WILDFIRE much like Ipod...soemthing like that...anwyay, need to digest for a few days/weeks but maybe x-tra capacity is initially for logistics on the "supply chain front to back visability end for all the beancounters much like SAP"..Iow, SAP is a dinasauer imo and when the power of what we are all studying comes about, key enablers like Paperclick, and other companies like NEOM will all of a sudden have the average jo schno like us powered and wired to do incredible analysis of whatever we wish wihtout having to "search" but instead have a "navigation" system do it for us based on our specific "requirements"...cuz at the end of the day, like P&G Gurus would say, it's all about technology, but more importantly, ALL ABOUT TANSPARENCY and getting or "navigating" the right product or service to the consumer at the right place at the right time...soemthing like that...these are all "raw" though processes but again, if history proves that neom is all about "navigation" vs, "search"....and if these patents are validated or applied to any of the thought process around "navigation:" IO am still trying to increase my knowledge base on....your $XX hypothetical rhetorical summation (lol) will pale in comparison imo to what true shareholder value of this company is all about....
RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW...Van Hager...lol
Anwyay, thanks and have a good evening/morning!
sog
Power Lunch Comment To persistent
As I finish eating here, I hate going into cyberspace and admitting I probably made a bad call to a zillion people)...but "for the record" I must apologize, I was caught up in "irrational exuberance" this morning and looking back in hindsight, it was a bad comment, thanks for pointing this out...
As I mentioned to a friend recently, this is all so very intoxicating for all, including myself and over the course of the the past week (while working my tail off at the dream day job of mine), for myself, I dove in and had to go "into the desert" to ponder and reflect why I went "almost all in again with another otcbb" listed company by accumulating my goal of 75,000 shares in a period that is very uncertain for many and tight financially for me to boot...but I have come out unscathed, more confident and more mindful than ever about my decision and also aware at how emotions are flying over here of late so will contain my "irrational exuberance" more in the future as to not erode the integrity of true Technical Analysts/chart readers....and fellow longer longs dd and commentary....
IN any event, I again feel like I am in a close encounters of the third kind movie scene pulling all the pieces with others together, lol....my "gut" and self dd/intuition, along with so many's hard work here has me preety much "convinced" now of my corredt decison I made to be here in body, mind spirit, and shares of neom...I can justify and sleep good at night now knowing that I feel at ease with the the decision I made to wade on my surf board out with complete strangers in NEOM waters and along with them, now as a shareholder, await that "big wave" to catch for the ride of a lifetime...
In closing, I am at peace now, because I know my "risk-rewared" analysis is complete and this is my one shot this decade (yes, I'll admit, maybe there is or will be another or two, but I can not afford anymore of what I have in here or any other fwiw) at catching that big wave with my fello neom longs...as if you didn't know already,...and like all, friggin waiting for that anticipated string of news is like watching a pot of water boil at times, lol...
Main thing is, I will tone down the "irrational exuberance" in posts like the one this morning, nothing wrong with admitting to my fellow family of longs that I made a bad call so there you go! Over and done with and time to move on, and get back to work...and on one last note, CAN YOU FEEL, SMELL AND ALMOST TASTE IT BABY, BRING IT ON, BRING ON THE NEWS, I'm JONESING!!!!lol...ok, I'm pretty convinced it is only a matter of time and holding them tight!
Have a great wekend all and thanks again for your hard work and for having me aboard.
sog
I love the smell of Bollinger Bands Pinching in the morning!
Ok, have a good day!
sog
Intel puts focus around Napa
3/30/2005 2:55:43 PM - Dual-core chips to include enhanced graphics wireless features
by Vawn Himmelsbach
SAN FRANCISCO — Napa doesn't only refer to California's famous wine region — it's also the name of Intel Corp.'s next-generation mobility platform.
An extension of the Centrino\Sonoma technology, it will roll out in early 2006.
Napa will contain three enhancements, said Mooly Eden, general
manager of Intel's Mobile Platform Group: Yonah, Intel's first mobile dual-core CPU, as well as Calistoga (which will provide enhanced graphics) and Golan (which will provide better wireless access).
Napa will continue to focus on the "four vectors" of Intel's mobility strategy, he said, which includes improved performance (through Digital Media Boost), a smaller form factor (through Advanced Thermal Manager), longer battery life (through Smart Wireless Solutions) and wireless connectivity (through Dynamic Power Coordination).
Mobility is driving the requirement for more performance, said Sean Maloney, executive vice-president and GM of Intel's Mobility Group.
"Our strategy is to extend this to a range of different processors," he said. Phones are getting smarter, he added.
According to research firm IDC, sales of data phones are overtaking voice phones. Intel, for its part, is ramping up handset processor volume, taking a "top to bottom" approach in GPRS/EDGE/w-CDMA handset platforms.
Intel will target the low-end consumer space with its Hermon platform, while targeting higher-tier consumer and digital enterprise markets with the PXA27x and Hermon platforms.
In two or three years it's likely that users will be able to jump on and off high-speed networks, said Maloney. Intel's Centrino technology is moving toward a mobile environment where phones and notebooks are "aware" of each other's presence, he said, providing "one-button connect."
So what's next? "What you can do is deeply affected by how much bandwidth you have," he said.
Wi-Fi disappoints users when they lose the signal away from the hot spot. "You have to get coverage," he said. "It's the lesson of the cell phone industry."
Wi-Fi is the first global wireless networking standard, he said. But it has its limitations: Each hot spot typically provides network access for distances between 100 and 300 feet. Wi-Max, on the other hand, is expected to eventually provide mobile wireless broadband connectivity with a radius of three to 10 km, providing an alternative to cable and DSL for last-mile access.
Wi-Max will be the first global mobile broadband standard, said Maloney. "We need to be able to get a signal wherever we are." Some see this as hype, but Maloney noted there are 244 members in the Wi-Max Forum.
Computer Dealer News, March 18, 2005, Vol. 21. No. 4
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&lid=1&sid=58487&adBanner=Wireless#
Good afternoon to you and I agree alexandre...still have lots of dd to catch up on this upcoming month, but to me, on the speculative surface, one would have to make a strong argument that a Google would be very interested in our story/patents abilities and they have the cash to burn (and burn and burn and burn)...although on the flip side, 20% from a msft,yahoo, virgin type or even an intc would make an equally compelling argument.....ugh, the suspense is killing us, lol...are we all to confident???lol...NOT!
Have a good day....
sog