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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -
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for friends and subscribers)
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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 281.0/February 2,
2007
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HEADLINES:
- The Week / Corning is Booming
- Friday Feature / The Coming Exaflood
- Friday Blogger Bonus / In Praise of Amateurs
- Readings /
SPECIAL
OFFER
|
Outpacing the Market for
Over 10 Years… |
The
Week /
Corning is Booming
February 2007 Gilder Technology Report excerpt.
Corning (GLW) is
booming better than during the Boom. And for this leading glass house, the past
is the future, at least if you’re looking for more new records during the
coming couple of years as sales of catalytic converters for diesel trucks begin
to ramp, as fiber products rejuvenate, and as liquid crystal display (LCD)
glass goes everywhere. Free falling prices of LCD color televisions are
propelling Corning’s glass-substrate business faster than anticipated. Since
it’s the world’s premier process company (see
August 2006 GTR) and can manufacture LCD substrates in huge volumes,
demand elasticity probably benefits Corning more than its pigmy competitors.
Corning’s leading-edge generation-8 glass capabilities continue to ramp, and
the company shipped several million square feet to Sharp’s gen-8 fab, still the
only plant able to handle those newest substrates, large enough to cover a
king-size bed. Flexing its muscle at the Consumer Electronics Show in January,
Sharp unveiled a prototype 108” LCD set. Jumbo sets not only consume a lot of
glass, their panels must be made from the largest substrates sizes, where
Corning excels.
An
overwhelming success has been Corning’s unique extra green (environmental)
glass, which it can’t produce fast enough to fill requests. The company expects
to convert all capacity to the new glass by the end of this year. As a bonus,
Corning believes that this glass is improving its customers’ yields.
Find out
why, at $21, this stock is trading at a bargain.
Read GTR Tech Analyst Charlie
Burger’s complete Corning analysis, plus his recent NetLogic (NETL) update, by subscribing to the Gilder Technology Report
today. Visit www.Gildertech.com.
|
The Telecosm
Lounge |
Friday Feature / The Coming Exaflood
Bret
Swanson, Wall Street Journal commentary (1/20/07): Today there is much praise
for YouTube, MySpace, blogs and all the other democratic digital technologies
that are allowing you and me to transform media and commerce. But these infant
Internet applications are at risk, thanks to the regulatory implications of
"network neutrality." Proponents of this concept -- including
Democratic Reps. John Dingell and John Conyers, and Sen. Daniel Inouye, who
have ascended to key committee chairs -- are obsessed with divvying up the
existing network, but oblivious to the need to build more capacity.
To
understand, let's take a step back. In 1999, Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com for $5 billion. Broadcast.com had
little revenue, and although its intent was to stream sports and entertainment
video to consumers over the Internet, two-thirds of its sales at the time came
from hosting corporate video conferences. Yahoo absorbed the start-up -- and
little more was heard of Broadcast.com or Yahoo's video ambitions.
Seven
years later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Like Broadcast.com,
YouTube so far has not enjoyed large revenues. But it is streaming massive
amounts of video to all corners of the globe. The difference: Broadcast.com
failed because there were almost no broadband connections to homes and
businesses. Today, we have hundreds of millions of links world-wide capable of
transmitting passable video clips.
Why
did that come about? At the [Gilder/Forbes] Telecosm conference last October, Stanford
professor Larry Lessig asserted that the previous federal Internet policy of
open access neutrality was the chief enabler of success on the net.
"[B]ecause of that neutrality," Mr. Lessig insisted, "the
explosion of innovation and the applications and content layer happened. Now .
. . the legal basis supporting net neutrality has been erased by the FCC."
In
fact, Mr. Lessig has it backward. Broadcast.com failed precisely because the
FCC's "neutral" telecom price controls and sharing mandates
effectively prohibited investments in broadband networks and crashed thousands
of Silicon Valley business plans and dot-com dreams. Hoping to create
"competition" out of thin air, the Clinton-Gore FCC forced telecom
providers to lease their wires and switches at below-market rates. By
guaranteeing a negative rate of return on infrastructure investments, the FCC
destroyed incentives to build new broadband networks -- the kind that might have
allowed Broadcast.com to flourish.
By
2000, the U.S. had fewer than five million consumer "broadband"
links, averaging 500 kilobits per second. Over the past two years, the reverse
has been true. As the FCC has relaxed or eliminated regulations, broadband
investment and download speeds have surged -- we now enjoy almost 50 million
broadband links, averaging some three megabits per second. Internet video
succeeded in the form of YouTube. But that "explosion of innovation"
at the "applications and content layer" was not feasible without tens
of billions of dollars of optics, chips and disks deployed around the world.
YouTube at the edge cannot happen without bandwidth in the core.
Read Bret’s Complete WSJ Commentary:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116925820512582318.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
|
The Gildertech Blog, http://blog.gildertech.com/ | Logon
now to see what’s new. |
Friday Blogger Bonus / In Praise of Amateurs
Tom Bethell (1/30/07): Economics has no
shortage of technicians who take refuge in mathematics. But unlike string theorists,
say, or literary deconstructionists, economists must contend with the real
world. They face competition, too. Journalists are much involved in writing
about markets, and often they lack specialized degrees. A famous editor of The
Financial Times, Sir Gordon Newton, stopped hiring economics graduates after he
learned the hard way that they were incapable of writing plainly.
A
noteworthy intrusion into the professional bailiwick occurred with the rise of
supply-side economics in the 1970s. True, the movement did sport a few
professional economists, notably Arthur B. Laffer and Robert Mundell, but it
owed its influence to the support of politicians and journalists, notably
Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Robert Bartley, Jude Wanniski, and George Gilder. All
were generalists.
Read Bethell’s complete commentary:
http://www.american.com/archive/2007/january-february-magazine-contents/0116-in-praise-of-amateurs/
____________________________________
Blogger Bonus II / Implications of iPhone and Apple TV
Remember the "teleputer"? That's the device
that George Gilder predicted
years ago. Now that we've had a look at Apple's forthcoming iPhone, it
looks like Gilder's vision may come true. What will the combination of an
iPhone and the planned Apple TV
mean for consumers?
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1977/implications-of-iphone-and-apple-tv
____________________________________
Readings /
The Heart of Capitalism
http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2007/01/gilders-10-laws-of-telecosm.html
Evolve or Die
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/01/31/tyco-citigroup-americanexpress-ent-manage-cx_el_0131collection.html
Google Keeps On Growing
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/01/31/google-youtube-earnings-tech-cx_rr_0131google.html
How
To ‘Solve’ The Budget Deficit
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTE4ZGE5OTM5OTc5NjQwNTg5ZjMzOGM3MGE1NzMwNjQ=
Personal
Accounts, Not Tax Increases
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MTE0YjlhNjYwYjQwNjk4MmQ0ZTc2NmQ3MzM3MjVlNGQ=
The
Coming Exaflood
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3869&program=DI%20Main%20Page%20-%20Article&callingPage=discoMainPage
__________________________________________
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