Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[SPIN]

news search from last 30 days.

includes some stuff already posted (i cut the really repetitive stuff).

WIRELESS DATA NEWS

July 16, 2003
SECTION: Vol. 11, No. 14
LENGTH: 651 words
HEADLINE:
WDN's Executive Decisions
BODY:
 
HWG Adds Clout In Mexico
 
       If you're adding a telecom law affiliate in Mexico, you can't reach much
higher on the experience and stature scale than the Harris Wiltshire & Grannis
firm's recent move. Washington, D.C.-based HWG entered into an affiliation
agreement with Carlos Casasus, who from 1996 to 1998 was the first chairman of
COFETEL (Comision Federal de Telecomunicaciones), Mexico's mirror agency to the
Federal Communications Commission.
       Casasus also is CEO of Corporacion Universitaria Para El Desarrollo de
Internet A.C., a non-profit in charge of Mexico's Internet2 Project. He will
provide telecom regulatory advice to HWG clients in Mexico. HWG--with operators
AT&T Wireless Services and T-Mobile, and technology providers Microsoft, Cisco,
Intel and Hewlett Packard among its clients--will provide advice on U.S. telecom
law to the clients of Telecomunicaciones y Educacion Interactiva, the consulting
firm Casasus heads in Mexico City.
       Casasus also has served as undersecretary for Communications and
Technological Development in Mexico's Ministry of Communications and
Transportation and on the Planning Committee for the Development of Mexico City.
Previously in the private sector, Casasus was CFO of Mexico's largest telecom
operator, Telefonos de Mexico, and he taught business policy at the Instituto
Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico.
 
Centennial's New Caribbean Chief
 
       Centennial Communications' [Nasdaq: CYCL] John A. de Armas moves from
near-paradise to paradise with his transfer from Centennial's Coral Gables
Operations in Miami to being president of its Caribbean operations. De Armas
joined Centennial in February 2002 as president of Centennial Dominicana, and he
moved to executive vice president of its Caribbean operations, in October.
       Centennial's wireless operations cover some 17.1 million people in its
U.S. and Caribbean markets, and it serves nearly 930,000 actual subscribers. Its
Caribbean integrated communications operation owns and operates wireless
licenses for markets with approximately 11.1 million people in Puerto Rico, the
Dominican Republic and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and provides voice, data, video
and Internet services on broadband networks in the region. Welsh, Carson
Anderson & Stowe and an affiliate of the Blackstone Group are Centennial's
controlling shareholders.
       De Armas previously was president of Home Shopping Network's Home
Shopping Espanol division, where he developed and launched markets in Mexico,
Puerto Rico and the top 20 U.S. Hispanic markets to reach an audience of more
than 40 million.
 
Upaid Goes For R&D Experience
 
       Mobile payment authentication and authorization service provider Upaid
named wireless R&D veteran Pat Nunally to head its new business unit for
Intellectual Property as senior vice president, patents and intellectual
property.
       Paris-based Upaid, founded in 1998 to provide prepaid telephony
technology, offers a service that solves the connectivity problem banks,
operators, merchants and card associations face when seeking to offer wide-scale
mobile payment and roaming services to their customers. Its proprietary
technology enables multiple parties to plug into its centrally hosted
authentication and service delivery centers to offer customers mobile payments
and roaming.
       Nunally has 20 years experience in wireless and intellectual property
development, including leading IBM's wireless patents portfolio development, and
directing the development of wireless and transaction processing technologies
for multiple companies. He co-founded and was executive vice president of
engineering for Wave Interactive Networks (now Wave Systems), and he also served
as CEO of Gruppe Telekom, which was acquired by Philips.



New Media Age July 24, 2003

Copyright 2003 Centaur Communications Ltd.  
New Media Age

July 24, 2003
SECTION: Pg. 18
LENGTH: 1459 words
HEADLINE: PROFILE GEORGE POLK: One for the road
BYLINE: Polk,G; Managing director The Cloud
BODY:
After years of searching, George Polk of The Cloud believes he's finally found a winning wireless concept. And it could soon be coming to a pub near you. Profile Justin Pearse.
What do yachtsmen, travelling salesmen from Northampton and the man leaning against the bar in your local pub have in common? They're all targets of George Polk's vision to bring Wi-Fi Web access to every corner of the UK.
Polk is wirelessly enabling everywhere, from pubs to marinas, enabling visitors to sit down, open their laptop or PDA and get surfing without a cable or modem in sight.
With The Cloud, part of gaming machine giant Leisure Link, Polk is creating the first truly nationwide Wi-Fi wholesale network, on top of which service providers like BT and the mobile operators will offer branded consumer services. The huge real estate available to Polk, through the vast number of pubs that have Leisure Link machines installed, forms the bedrock of this network. BT Openzone is the first service provider to sign up; commercial services launched last week. The Cloud has already installed 1,500 sites and is opening new ones at the rate of 200 a week.
All of which is a long way from studying ancient Mongolian history at Harvard. But Polk has been searching for the perfect wireless business for years. Now he's convinced he's found it. And he's excited. Understandably, as Wi-Fi is without a doubt one of the hottest areas in the wireless world today.
Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) is shorthand for a wireless local-area network, which provides Internet connections up to 10 times faster than a standard dial-up at a range of about 300 feet. Sounds great, but surely your local pub isn't a natural habitat for Web surfers?
It's a question Polk is getting used to and immediately fires back his own: "If you were a travelling salesman in Northampton with a spare half an hour between meetings, where would you go to access the Web?"
It's a good point and suddenly the pub is looking like a pretty good bet.
"I've tested it and it's really not such a surprising thing to people in the pub," says Polk. He turns the question on its head by pointing out that when you become a Wi-Fi user you travel to the nearest Wi-Fi location to use it, rather than suddenly logging on simply because you find yourself in a hotspot.
"Whether people become wireless LAN users in the first place is the bigger question," he says. "If they do, they'll be happy to go wherever you can use it. When they become used to it, it's very irritating not to have it."
You can tell Polk's thought about this. But then thinking is something he does a lot of. Indeed, for a good part of his career he's been thinking about and searching for the best way to apply wireless broadband technology to a compelling consumer business.
A watchful eye
His first, slightly unusual, exposure to wireless took the form of a company dedicated to electronic monitoring of criminals placed under house arrest, developing a radio frequency monitoring system to tell whether someone was at home.
"The idea was to take people out of the prison system and get them back into the community," explains Polk. "To be successful we had to change the way the criminal justice system thought about punishment. I spent four and a half years travelling around the US spending a lot of time with a lot of bizarre but very interesting people."
This was then sold to a company called Detection Systems, after which Polk took off for a year in Central and South America, becoming a UN election observer in El Salvador along the way. He still devotes a large proportion of his time to voluntary work. "I come from an old politically involved family in the US - there's a president in my family and my father worked in the White House under President Kennedy - so there's a tradition of public service."
Returning from South America, Polk joined a friend's telecommunications company, Geotek. "He was trying to develop a new cellular technology, the equivalent of GSM, from scratch and at the same time trying to buy radio licences in the US to become a nationwide cellular operator. Just one of those tasks would be too much for one company to do, so it was extremely exciting."
Ambition proved too much for the firm and Polk got out a year before it went bankrupt.
"It was a large experiment for its day," he says. "We raised and spent $800m GBP 501m . It was a fascinating learning experience and it got me very interested in wireless data."
He then spent a year thinking about and looking at different opportunities to build a wireless broadband company. "I had capital to do things but I couldn't find an interesting business. Having had the Geotek experience I was very sensitive to the problems of bringing a new technology to market."
Having failed in his hunt, Polk spent two years at Global Wireless Holdings, funded by the Sorus organisation, which builds wireless businesses in emerging markets.
"Then I spent a very happy year thinking about wireless broadband and doing a lot of non-profit activities before becoming entrepreneur in residence at iGabriel, where I became a little more structured in my quest to find a business I thought made some sense."
Propitiously, this is when he was approached by Leisure Link. The company had come up with the concept of utilising its real estate by adding Wi-Fi to give extra value to existing customers.
"In my view this was very unlikely to work," says Polk. "So we came up with the idea of a neutral network you could bring branded service providers into - the people with existing customers and strong brands."
The model is simple. The user subscribes to the service via a service provider like BT and the revenues are then shared between it, the hotspot owner and The Cloud.
Of course, there are others eyeing the UK's potential Wi-Fi real estate, not least T-Mobile and BT itself. "But the problem is that players like this only provide their own branded service, and hotspot owners don't want to restrict their venue to one service. So we have a pretty compelling proposition against them," claims Polk.
Another big difference, he says, is that The Cloud, compared to a company like BT, doesn't buy sites. The site owner has to make an investment to deploy the equipment.
"It's very important that the hotspot owners have some investment in making this a success, because in the end it's they that have to promote the service," he says.
Fighting the competition
This argument that potential competitors such as BT and the mobile operators would do better, both for themselves and hotspot owners, to run services over a neutral network such as The Cloud does make a lot of sense. However, surely there's another threat to Wi-Fi networks in the form of 3G - high, if not as high, wireless bandwidth that's not tied to a particular hotspot.
"The problem is that no one really knows when 3G is going to work," says Polk. "There's nothing surprising about that to me, having been through the Geotek experience. It takes a long time to learn how radio technologies behave. 3G worked in the lab a few years ago. Now you see the first deployments, and if you're in the optimal situation and it's a good day it works. But not very well. I was with the head of one of the carriers the other day and he said he saw 3G as a 2005 product."
It's this timescale that Polk sees as the window of opportunity for Wi- Fi to establish a foothold in the UK. "You'll have a large installed base of Wi-Fi users by 2005 and to migrate these people to 3G it would have to have coverage everywhere. It'll probably be 2007 before you have coverage everywhere. I think it's unlikely that either will end up stealing each other's market."
Whatever the outcome, Polk is adamant he's found the winning wireless broadband concept. So next time you fancy a pint but find all the tables in your local covered in laptops, you'll know who to blame.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Name: George Polk
Title: MD, The Cloud
Age: 40
Education: 1981-86: AB in History with honours, Harvard University, US.
Career: 1986-87: financial analyst, mergers & acquisitions, Merrill Lynch Capital Markets, New York; 1987-88: assistant to the chairman, Merrill Lynch Capital Markets; 1988-90: co-founder and VP of corporate development, Wave Systems Corporation; 1990-93: founder and president, EP Systems Corporation; 1994-95: VP of business development, Geotek Communications; 1995-97: senior VP of international networks, Geotek; 1997-98: recovery consultant, Geotek; 1998-2000: president for Latin America, Global Wireless Holdings; 2000-02: entrepreneur-in-residence, iGabriel; 2002-present: MD, The Cloud.




HEADLINE: Wave Systems Continues Meteoric Rise

DATELINE: Boston

BODY:

Shares of Wave Systems (WAVX) are once again among the most actively traded issues in the pre-market this morning. Mostly small retail orders are driving the issue still higher ahead of the open following a remarkable 167% gain recorded in Thursday's regular session.

WAVX is active on all the major ECNs this morning.

http://www.midnighttrader.com



July 31, 2003 Thursday

LENGTH: 161 words

HEADLINE: Wave Systems Recording Aggressive Upside on Cubic Collaboration

DATELINE: Boston

BODY:

Wave Systems (WAVX) is recording aggressive upside movement on Instinet today, rising 49% on 51,380 shares.

The company announced with Cubic Defense Applications, the defense segment of Cubic Corp. (CUB), a strategic partnership where Cubic will integrate Wave's EMBASSY technologies into a new line of versatile smart card readers. The readers will be offered in several form factors, such as standalone Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices, trusted computer keyboards, and proximity door access devices.

The companies said the secure devices will satisfy the new requirements of several U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and General Services Administration, and will be offered to the intelligence community as part of a new trusted Infrastructure concept addressing multilevel security solutions. The devices may be used for both physical and logical access.

http://www.midnighttrader.com



HEADLINE: Wave Systems surges on hook-up w/ Intel
DATELINE: NEW YORK
BODY:
 - Wave Systems'  shares rallied more than 20 percent to $2.72 on strong, early volume of 4.3 million. The company got a lift from news that it has agreed to work with Dow component Intel  on the development and deployment of computer security applications. The deal calls for Intel to bundle Wave Systems' software and services with a future Intel desktop motherboard targeted for 'trusted computing platforms.' Intel shares tacked on 2 cents to $24.91.
This story was supplied by CBSMarketWatch. For further information see www.cbsmarketwatch.com.
For more information and to contact AFX: www.afxnews.com and
www.afxpress.com




HEADLINE: Reporting season breaks for the weekend - UPDATE 2
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
BODY:
 - Shares of Wave Systems rivaled some of the biggest names in technology in after-hours trading late Friday, and they continued to move higher.
Wave Systems'  stock has soared in the last two days after the developer of computer security technology agreed to work with Dow component Intel  on the development and deployment of computer security applications.
The company's shares rose $2.63 to a 52-week high of $5.04 in midday trading Friday and closed with a 62 percent gain, at $3.64.
Wave Systems' stock rose 10 cents, or 2.7 percent, in late trading, to $3.75.



HEADLINE: Reporting season breaks for the weekend
BYLINE: Carolyn Pritchard, CBS MarketWatch.com; mailto:[e-mail]; Carolyn Pritchard is a reporter for CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco.
BODY:
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) -- Shares of Wave Systems rivaled some of the biggest names in technology in after-hours trading late Friday, and they continued to move higher.
Wave Systems' (WAVX) stock has soared in the last two days after the developer of computer security technology agreed to work with Dow component Intel (INTC) on the development and deployment of computer security applications.
The company's shares rose $2.63 to a 52-week high of $5.04 in midday trading Friday and closed with a 62 percent gain, at $3.64.
Wave Systems' stock rose 10 cents, or 2.7 percent, in late trading, to $3.75.



HEADLINE: Update: Wave To Provide Security Tech For Intel Mobos;
Wave Systems will provide security software for Intel motherboards, as part of a deal the companies signed Thursday.

BYLINE: Mark Hachman, [e-mail]

BODY:
The deal does not appear to commit Wave to selling Intel actual TCPA-compliant modules for its boards, however. The Tructed Computing Platform Alliance, later renamed the Trusted Computing Group, has designed specifications for a semiconductor which serves as an encryption-decryption module for security applications.
A spokeswoman for Intel said the software will accompany a single motherboard released later this year for the busines market. No additional details were avaialable, she said. "Wave believes that a portfolio of services will make trusted computing an important part of the personal computing market going forward," said Brian Berger, senior vice president, Global Business Development, Wave Systems, in a statement. "It is our job, to work with industry leaders like Intel, to help identify and develop those services that will bring the most value to the enterprise - as trusted hardware is deployed and a more secure computing environment becomes a reality."
The trusted modules are generally considered to be the first step along the road to the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), the Microsoft initiative formerly known as Palladium. NGSCB would use a "nexus", a form of OS kernel, in conjunction with a hardware component to encrypt and decrypt data within a PC.
Since the Intel-Wave deal does not specifically include Wave's modules, the implication is that Intel will either develop modules itself or jump straight to LaGrande, a comparable security technology that will be built into the Prescott processor. The deal calls for Intel to use Wave's Embassy trusted computing software.
Intel executives have said that LaGrande will be simply enabled in the first Prescott chips, and not necessarily turned on. NGSCB, meanwhile, is officially a part of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system. A client version of Longhorn is due in 2005 or later; a version of Windows server running the Longhorn code base is due in 2006.
"Wave helps fill a critical requirement for trusted computing services," said Michelle Johnston, acting director of marketing for Intel Desktop Board Operations, in a statement. "We believe the Embassy Trust Suite software will provide good value for our customers looking for trusted computing applications."
Executives at both Intel and Wave did not return calls for comment by press time.



HEADLINE: StreetInsider.com Inc 
  StreetInsider.com's August stock contest has started
BODY:
StreetInsider.com ( http://www.streetinsider.com) is pleased to announce that its August 2003 stock contest is underway. The prizes for this months winners will be as follows:
- 1st Place: $1000 cash
- 2nd Place: Free StreetInisder.com Premium membership
- 3rd Place: Free StreetInisder.com Premium membership
"We are looking forward to a very successful August stock contest," said President/CEO Lon Juricic. "With the markets showing signs of life, investors have renewed interest in the equity markets. Our stock contest not only provides investors an opportunity to win prizes, but allows them to practice their investment skills in a simulated environment without the risk of loss.
StreetInsider.com's stock contest is free to join. The August contest starts on 08/01/03 and ends 08/31/03. Members can join the contest any time before the end of August. Members start with a fantasy portfolio worth $100,000 and can trade stocks as often as they like to win prizes or to touch-up on their investment skills.
Today's Moves of Note:
- Wave Systems (NASDAQ: WAVX) is up another 30% this morning, on the heels of a large gain yesterday, after the company announced an agreement with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) that will help enable both companies to accelerate the development and deployment of trusted applications and services for safer computing on personal computer platforms.


SHOW: NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT (NBR 6:30 pm ET)

July 31, 2003 Thursday

Transcript # 073100cb.118
SECTION: BUSINESS
LENGTH: 4060 words
HEADLINE: Nightly Business Report
GUESTS: Ethan Harris, Lionel Barber
BYLINE: Paul Kangas, Susie Gharib
BODY:

Wave Systems Corp. Class A (WAVX) stock moved up $1.41, a mere gain of almost 168 percent. And the news? The company has entered into a development pact with none other than Intel. Keeping pretty good company, apparently, is what investors saw.

SPIN

PS CPA - apology appreciated & accepted.