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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 367.0/January 9,
2009
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Gilder: The Cornucopian Realm of Bioscience
- Friday Feature / AMD & Otoy Set Big
Plans For Gaming On a Cloud
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Karlgaard: The 1970’s Little
Depression
- Readings /
The Week / The Cornucopian Realm of Bioscience
GEORGE GILDER,
Gilder
Telecosm Forum (1/02/09): Perhaps
the most interesting man I met in Israel on my recent trip was Martin Gerstel.
Alone on the cover of Business Week when he graduated from Stanford
Business School in 1968 (as the nation's most promising MBA student), he
founded Alza Corp. with Alex Zaffaroni and built it into a major pharmaceutical
devices company. It was sold in 2000 to Johnson & Johnson for $14B.
In 1993, he moved to Israel, the home of his wife, and discovered a cornucopian
realm of new technologies, leavened by the arrival of a million highly educated
people from the former Soviet Union. He resolved on Compugen (CGEN) as the most promising. It came public as CGEN in
2000 with a valuation of close to $400M.
At the first of the year, with the valuation down to $14M, he returned to the
company to become its CEO. This guy is for real. He is convinced that CGEN has
technologies that are unique over the entire span of the biosciences--that most
of the rest of the industry is working with erroneous models. CGEN has created
unique in silico computer models of the genome, the transcriptome, the
proteome and what they call the peptidome (peptides or protein fragments that
are critical for modulating what are called the GPCR receptors in the body).
Rather than discover through experiment the peptides that modulate these
receptors as the rest of the industry does, Compugen's algorithms predict and
select them. Half of all drugs operate by impacting GPCRs. The issue is sorting
out the peptides that modulate GPCR receptors in the body. The CGEN algorithm
working on the model of all the peptides in the peptidome found some 30 that
according to the model would address the body's receptors. Gerstel reports that
the results are in and that of the 30 peptides found by the model 8 were
validated.
Gerstel told me: “The average in the entire industry is two a year. We found 8”
in one processing of the peptidome through the algorithm.
At its present price, one thirtieth of its IPO, with a significant new positive
development, I believe CGEN is worth investigation. I am certainly not an
expert in this field. So take this report with the appropriate discounts.
To read more posts by George Gilder and
the Gilder Telecosm Forum members,
login with you subscriber password at www.Gildertech.com
today.
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The Gilder Telecosm Forum To
learn how to join this powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and
thinkers online daily to debate, discuss, and decode new and emerging technologies
and share valuable and actionable investment advice, visit www.Gildertech.com today. |
Friday Feature / AMD & Otoy Set Big Plans For
Gaming On a Cloud
DON CLARK, Wall
Street Journal (1/08/09): Advanced Micro Devices Inc. announced
plans to build a massive supercomputer to process and electronically distribute
games and other complex content to users -- avoiding the need for specialized
hardware and software that adds to the cost of computers and other devices.
The supercomputer, assembled using AMD chips, will be
operated by Otoy, a closely held
company that develops software and special effects for movie studios and game
developers, the companies said.
AMD's announcement, during a keynote speech at the
Consumer Electronics Show here, is the latest extension of two hot trends in
the computer industry. One involves the extension of graphics chips to take
over general-purpose calculating tasks that are more typically done on
microprocessor chips. AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., is the only company that makes
both graphics chips and microprocessors using the technology called x86 that is
the standard in most PCs.
The other trend is called "cloud" computing,
which refers to using centralized servers and the Internet to handle chores
that were once done on personal computers.
But most gaming software typically must be handled on PCs
that come along with chips known as GPUs, for graphics processing units.
Executives of the two companies demonstrated that servers
equipped with Otoy's software and AMD microprocessors and graphics chips can
render game images and compress them to be sent over the Internet to users --
and allow a user play the game in a Web browser, without installing special
game software.
"If we can put a
game like this in the cloud, we can put any application in the cloud,"
said Jules Urbach, Otoy's chief executive.
Besides PCs, software rendered using the new
supercomputer could be delivered efficiently to a variety of devices such as
smart phones, set-top boxes and notebooks that can't easily take advantage of
graphics chips, said Dirk Meyer, AMD's chief executive.
The supercomputer, which AMD calls the Fusion Render
Cloud, is expected to have more than 1,000 graphics processors and be installed
in the second half of 2009 by Otoy, which is based near Los Angeles and is
known for work such as creating three-dimensional animated models of well-known
actors for use in movies.
Mr. Urbach said his company would offer rendering
services with the system to gaming and media companies, and might also offer a
service to stream content to users. Other potential kinds of content would
include "virtual worlds," a category of Internet service that lets
users wander among simulated three-dimensional environments, the company said.
Financial details of the partnership weren't disclosed.
Besides the collaboration with Otoy, Mr. Meyer discussed
a series of partnerships with other companies, including the use by Dell Inc.
of a set of chips called dragon in a PC for gamers that carries the unusually
low starting price of $999. But he struck a sober note at the beginning of his
speech about the potential impacts of the recession on the chip industry.
"The industry really has to consider some serious change," he said.
Read the complete article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123145280284365779.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
__________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / The 1970’s Little
Depression
RICH KARLGAARD, Forbes.com “Digital
Rules” blog (1/07/09): On Monday and Tuesday, I did one of those brutal
out-and-backs to New York to give a lunch speech at Needham & Co.’s annual
growth conference. Attendees were entrepreneurs, CEOs, venture capitalists,
private equity managers and the like. Some 1,200 people jammed the Palace
Hotel.
My speech was about the
1970s. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and I
hear echoes of the 1970s. Then, stocks fell 45% from tip to toe from early 1973
to late 1974. The crash was foreshadowed by spikes in oil and gas prices. Easy
credit and the Nifty Fifty bounce in big-cap stocks in 1972 had created scores
of bloated conglomerates. Political uncertainty and fear were off the charts,
as Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in November 1973 and Nixon in August
1974, while the Vietnam War was heading for its final, ugly conclusion in April
1975.
The 1970s turned about to be
a good decade for start-ups, which had learned to use new technology and also
survive lean times. FedEx, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Apple, Genentech,
Oracle and others were born in the 1970s. That will happen again. Growth
companies that can exploit cheap technology and learn to stay alive during
periods of deflation, inflation and delusion will lead America out of today’s
muck.
One of the few good things
about a San Francisco to New York quick round trip is the time it affords one
to read. I spent both flights plowing through The
Snowball, Alice Schroeder’s definitive biography of Warren Buffett.
The chief criticism of The Snowball is its length–almost 1,000
pages–but I liked its rich detail. I especially liked how Schroeder got down
the tenor of the times: Buffett’s youth in the 1930s and 1940s, life in Omaha
in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the social turbulence and market turmoil of
the late 1960s.
About the 1970s, Schroeder writes:
By October 1975, [Berkshire Hathaway] had
been cut in half after trading at $93 just two years before. … The world
continued to end. … The U.S. economy was by then in so much trouble that New
York City was almost bankrupt; the country was in a mood of such profound
pessimism that it affected people’s judgment.
The pessimism, then as now,
was unevenly distributed. The year (1975) that gave us the fall of Saigon and a
collapse in confidence also gave us the birth of Microsoft. The next year we
elected one of the feeblest men to ever hold the office of presidency, a man,
Alice Schroeder writes, "who wore Mister Rogers sweaters to promote energy
conservation." But we also got the birth of Apple and Genentech.
Berkshire Hathaway, as you
might have heard, recovered too.
Post your comments below. How
does the pessimism of 2009 rank with other sour years: 2001, 1990, 1982,
1973-75? Something else to think about: The most dangerous words in investing
are said to be “this time it’s different.” This is usually said as a warning
against excessive optimism during bull markets. Doesn’t it also apply to
excessive pessimism?
Post Your Comments Here:
http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2009/01/the-1970s-littl.html
__________________________________________
Readings /
Chips drive Hollywood closer
to its most special effect
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_11346361
Bringing 3-D Home
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/21937/?a=f
Abolish the FCC
http://www.disco-tech.org/2009/01/never_thought_of_the_federal.php
Qualcomm Could Shine at CES
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2009/01/07/ces-qualcomm-broadband-tech-wire-cx_ew_0107qualcomm.html
Palm Phone Aims for Comeback
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123145605472366021.html
Recession Slams Global Semiconductor
Sales
http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=169909
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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