Replies to post #15653 on ANTs Software Inc. (fka ANTS)

[Rbb1822]

Buyants, keep posting. You know more than I do. The more people understand the history here, the more intrigued they will become about the future prospects. The CFO name you were looking for is Dave Buckel. It's hard to know where to place blame for the financing difficulties. Apparentley the company never anticipated the software problems(not smart) and if things had gone as planned Fletcher would probably be the only institutional investor. The original terms were pretty good. And the enactment of the "down round" protective clause probably happened naturally, but....if Fletcher had anything to do with helping it along, Frank should do everything in his power to set it right. And I'm pretty sure Fletcher was considered before Dave came on board. I still really want to know exactly what went down in regards to the ACS's problems. How can a product get to the point of being inside IBM hardware, winning awards, IBM putting on road shows for the product, glowing comments by IBM bigwigs, and then about one years later it comes to a screeching halt because of some undetected problems??????

If you go way, way back some interesting history come to light. Chopp days.

http://www.secinfo.com/dV3p8.6hp.htm

"On May 9, 1986 the Company was advised that a class action suit had been
filed against the company for $400,000,000.00 by a shareholder. Subsequent
events determined that the action had been initiated by the accountant of an
ex-IRS attorney by the name of Alexandr Laurins. Mr. Laurins in association with
Lawrence Merryman, an attorney from Orange, California and Nash Dowdle, an oil
promoter from Midland, Texas had decided that the plans of Chopp to build a new
supercomputer were a pipe dream and in fact part of a stock scam. Unknown to the
company Mr. Laurins was already under investigation by the FBI and the SEC for
among other things, selling $150,000,000.00 of non-existent shipping containers
as tax shelters.

The class action mentioned above became the center-piece of an Investment
Advisory Letter, called the Durant Livermore Cutten & Bliss Report which was
mailed to all of the shareholders of the company whose names had been listed
with the SEC when the company had filed its SEC 12(g) exemption, as well as
brokers all over Canada and the U.S. The newsletter was in fact prepared and
distributed by Laurins from his office on Union Street in San Francisco, and was
filled with lies and mis-information about the Company. Laurins printed 10 or 11
issues up to June 30, 1986.

Laurins, Merryman & Dowdle had made illegal short sales of approximately
100,000 shares of the company for approximately $ 1.25 million, without
borrowing the shares to offset their short position. The stock price did not go
down as they had anticipated so they manufactured the bogus newsletter to help
things along. This all became apparent when the Secretary-Treasurer of the
company was approached and was advised by Mr. Dowdle that the matter could be
resolved if a meeting could be arranged between the Secretary-Treasurer and the
three conspirators. It took about three weeks to arrange for a meeting in San
Francisco to take place on June 26, 1986.

Once the meeting had been arranged the Company's attorney contacted the FBI
and arranged for the Secretary-Treasurer to be wired, but only after convincing
the FBI that the only purpose of the meeting was to attempt to extort the
100,000 shares that the three were illegally short. The meeting took place in
the Presidio where Laurins, Merryman and Dowdle did, in fact do exactly that.
The entire conversation was recorded and was the basis for the Company being
awarded a $30,000,000.00 RICO award, jointly and severally against the three
conspirators. Unfortunately the court system moved very slowly as the case did
not come to court to be resolved until September, 1990. The victory saved the
reputation of the Company, but legal fees ate up everything recovered to date. "

[MikeHawk01]

Thank you very much for all that background. Much appreciated!

[grawsha]

You are our mentor, buyants.

[Rbb1822]

Buyants, this is somewhat academic, but I can't help it. I'm Ants obsessed. I have a bad case of ACD. I'm a little unclear on the transition point(ACS/ADS). 4Js bought and rebranded the ADS as Genero. Now they have had the time and money to develop this, but it isn't setting the world on fire. I always thought the biggest reason for it not selling well, although some information about Ric disputes that a little, was the time and money to do migrations. Why most companies out there are loath to change databases. Because of the time you're down and the money you have to throw at programmers. As you pointed out, going to a relative unknown with an uncertain future sure didn't help. What I'm really curious about is this line.

"They finally realized that in their efforts to process data going to other databases in the ANTS database, they had actually developed"

What exactly do you mean by that? If you're saying what I think you're saying, I'm unfamiliar with that story.