Another premise that falls under the category of Walk Before Trying to Run. They are not competitors of any note at this juncture, therefore any thoughts of them being acquired would fall strictly under the heading of a pre-emptive action. You'd have to ask yourself why someone would acquire a company barely walking and not wait until there is proof positive they can even keep up a mild jog, much less run.
Since companies usually acquire other companies based on their pre-existing intrinsic ability to either immediately contribute to their bottom line or to fuel their organic growth that seems unlikely since INXR does not to date have any revenues of note to contribute to an acquiring company and they have not yet evidenced the ability to grow their bottom line. To suppose they can is merely an assumption and certainly not a given.
But to suggest further as you have that an acquisition would be to take out a competitor then you are posing an interesting question perhaps. To answer that you need to ask:
Who is INXR competing with?
Data Providers - To compete with AlphaTrade and MicroCap and take away their market share you need a product that offers more since you are coming late to the market. iFinix does not have any features to distinguish them and be considered a competitive threat to these companies.
Brokerages - Most people already get their data free. Once the large discount brokers offer pink sheet data they will remove the one distinction AlphaTrade and iFinix can offer for a price and therefore eliminate all competitive advantages providing pink sheet data provides. This is coming. Therefore innovation is required. INXR promised these innovations early in 2007 and have not delivered anything except a bare bones L2 & TS module. Only MicroCapFeed has a differentiated package for the penny stock market and iFinix has no ability to replicate their far more advanced data services. Any talk of iFinix being a broker or providing brokerage platforms remains to be seen. Any announcements to that effect will be viewed with skepticism due to past failures to deliver on promises plus no one would sensibly bet on their success until they can prove trading with their products provide the "rock solid" transactions their "rock solid" data feeds did not for many people who tried their RealTime product.
The future of the brokerage industry will continue to show brokers providing ever evolving robust investing analytics and data tools. For free with an existing account. Competition has to be dazzling to even compel a profitable subscriber base to pay additional monthly dollars for any financial services.
Since reliability is the core of any data provider, iFinix seems unlikely to inspire fear in any other provider looking at them as a competitor. The window of opportunity to impress users was there and it may already be too late. A competitor is not going to buy out a struggling operation out of fear of their success if they feel they may fail anyway.
Since a pre-emptive buyout presupposes there is something that distinguishes the buyout target and makes them uniquely threatening or useful to your business model it is clear that thus far there is nothing unique or distinguished about iFinix product, neither from a competitive threat viewpoint nor from the outlook they could help someone else grow their business. INXR product has no killer app characteristics that sets them apart, certainly not the claim of 6 decimals when the markets only trade up to 4 decimal points.
There is no reason to fear INXR as a competitor thus there is no reason to buy them out for that reason.
