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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
(emailed weekly,
from Gilder Publishing,
for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 325.0/January 25,
2008
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Intellectual Property and Patent Power (Telecosm Video)
- Friday Feature / George Gilder: This
is Good News
- Friday Blogger Bonus / No Reason to
Panic
- Readings /
The Week / Intellectual Property and Patent Power (Telecosm Video)
John
Thorne, VERIZON Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, speaking at
TELECOSM 2007:
Our host George Gilder has done more than anybody else to work out the amazing
possibilities of Moore’s law. Clearly, George is right. Something very
important is happening. We are living in a time of exponentially increasing
rates of invention, as well as exponentially increasing rates of adoption.
The products themselves are becoming increasingly more complex. A single cell
phone carries within it, thousands of patents-worth of innovations, with an
exponentially increasing number of circuits packed tighter and tighter
together. It’s hard to say where one patented invention ends and the other
begins. These are “hair-splitting questions,” but the circuits we are talking
about are actually much thinner than a human hair.
So
what happens when an exponentially increasing number of complex products run up
against the exponentially increasing number of patents? That’s an impact
event…a seismic collision…
In
East Texas, a large fraction of new federal patent cases are heard. At first,
it might surprise you to learn that East Texas is a magnet for this kind of
lawsuit. Texas, after all, is widely rated as having one of the healthiest
civil justice systems in America, with a proposition 12 that passed by the
voters in 2003 to cap the pain and suffering medical damages. This was a great
achievement, but it also means that a lot of plaintiffs’ attorneys who enjoyed
doing business in Texas are now looking for something to do.
The
idling of plaintiffs’ attorneys is part of a growing national trend. With class
action lawsuits being tightened by Congress, judges applying more scrutiny to
securities and anti-trust cases, greater scrutiny being applied to scientific
claims, Bill Lerach being fitted for an orange jumpsuit…there are a lot of
plaintiffs’ attorneys in need of fresh cases.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys are nothing if not entrepreneurial. Denying them one type of lawsuit has energized them. So in one East Texas venue, a city of fewer than 20,000 souls named Marshall, one U.S. District Court has become a central patent clearing house for planet Earth.
In
one recent case, a Japanese plaintiff with a patent related to optical disk
drive recognition sued a Taiwanese device maker. That’s in Marshall, Texas!
Home of the fire ant festival….
View the complete video: http://www.discovery.org/v/35
SPECIAL OFFER
|
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 / This is Good News
Gilder
Telecosm Forum Member (1/21/07): The New York Times reports “Overseas Investors Buy Aggressively in U.S.” (LINK: http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=5328)
“Foreign
investors are buying at a record pace, taking advantage of American duress and
a weak dollar…”
George
Gilder (1/21/07): This is good news. Bad news would
be foreign capital spurning U.S. markets.
Foreign investment is less than one fifth of the total in public markets
and helps sustain stock market prices, which were on a long-term upward trend
of appreciation that exceeded the foreign inflows until the Squanderville
chorus of trade gap fetishists began trashing the dollar.
For centuries, these guys have always believed that a trade gap means the
dollar is massively overvalued. But foreigners cannot use the same dollar to
buy both our goods and our assets. Given a choice, I would rather have them buy
our assets, which means a larger commitment to the U.S. economy and its
prospects than merely buying our goods. After all, they buy an apple or a side
of beef and they eat it. They buy a jet or a turbine and they keep it. But when
they buy a factory, a skyscraper, a film studio, or a golf course here, they
tend to renew it, and we still keep it and benefit from it.
To
read more posts by George Gilder and the Gilder Telecosm Forum members, visit http://www.gildertech.com/ and log on
today.
________________________________________
Friday Blogger Bonus / No Reason to Panic
Brian Caulfield, Forbes.com (1/23/08): Tech
is standing firm. The stock market's gyrations Tuesday were disconcerting, but
hardly reason to declare a state of emergency.
Earnings
season is just beginning and technology companies are keeping a tighter eye on
their own bottom lines than they are Wall Street's yo-yo behavior. Growth is
still one of the talking points: even Apple (AAPL) and Intel
(INTC), which were more cautious in their outlook, see growth ahead of them.
The stock market pummeled them all the same.
Two
other tech bellwethers that have reported earnings so far, IBM (IBM) and
Texas Instruments (TXN), were downright upbeat about the coming year.
IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge talked of "maintaining"
IBM's momentum, while Texas Instruments Chief Executive Rich Templeton reported
the company expects "year-over-year growth to accelerate" in the
current quarter.
Of course, signs of trouble abound, too, if you look hard
enough. Apple shares plummeted more than 11% in after-hours trading Tuesday,
despite yet another strong quarter, when the company's earnings guidance
disappointed investors, sparking fears of a slowdown among consumer gadget
shoppers. Yet Apple always low-balls guidance.
A
better indicator of how technology companies feel about their prospects is
their projected capital expenditures. No one's publicly calling for cuts in those
budgets yet--at least not more than they were already trying to. Intel, for
instance, is halfway through a two-year diet of trying to whittle down capital
expenditures by $1 billion…
And even if the economy softens significantly, not all tech companies will
suffer equally....
Read
the complete column:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/01/23/economy-technology-outlook-tech-enter-cx_bc_0123techeconomy.html
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Readings /
Qualcomm Lifts View on Full Year Revenue
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120112962913611477.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
Wireless Boosts
AT&T Results
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120116233777213087.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
Bush’s Big Boo-boo
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/global/2008/0128/009.html
Weakness at Yahoo Doesn’t Bode Well for Google
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/01/weakness-at-yah.html
Via Technologies Has Head Start
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120114288614212347.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news
Semitool Predicts An Upturn
http://www.fool.com/investing/high-growth/2007/11/16/semitool-predicts-an-upturn.aspx
__________________________________________
Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
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