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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 342.0/May 23, 2008

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HEADLINES:

-  The Week / Steve Forbes: We've Seen This Movie Before
-  Friday Feature / EZchip Brings Video Processing to the Line Card
-  Friday Blogger Bonus / China Begins Telecom Industry Overhaul
-  Readings /

Telecosm 2008 Begins ON tuesday

The 12th annual gilder/forbes telecosm conference
Hosted by George Gilder and Steve Forbes | May 27 – May 29
The Sagamore Resort | Lake George, New York


Featuring: Qualcomm, EZchip AT&T, NVIDIA, Equinix, Alacritech, EMC, OToy, Seldon Labs, IBM, Micron, Semitool, LSI Logic, NetLogic, Cavium, RMI, PhotonIC, ElementCXI, Luxtera, Infinera, USVO, A.viary, Lightwave, Nyquist Capital, Anadigics, Audience, Foveon, Arasor, Synaptics, Peregrine, Provigent, SemEquip, Achronix, Nemertes Research, and more ….
 
register online today: www.TelecosmConference.com

 

The Week / We've Seen This Movie Before

Steve Forbes, Forbes.com (5/23/08): Inflation is a destructive distorter. It fuels speculation and hoarding, as well as misdirects investment into normally uneconomic activities or stops the flow of productive investment altogether as people and businesses clutch their cash. The political mood sours as prices go up and particular industries are harshly hit.

 

We now see all of this unfolding. The dollar debasement that the U.S. Federal Reserve began in 2004 and exacerbated in the aftermath of last summer's credit crisis is wreaking the havoc history told us it would. The world, as the media constantly report, is experiencing a shortage of food, and even when food is available, the rising prices are rendering it unaffordable to the poor.
President Bush has announced an emergency food-aid package for hard-hit parts of the world.

 

Rants against speculators are growing louder and shriller. Oil's current crazy prices are not because of supply and demand; with the slowdown in global economic growth, oil inventories are doing quite nicely. So suspicion of market manipulation grows.

 

The airline industry, despite usually loaded planes, is drowning in red ink because of rising fuel costs. To break even, major carriers will have to cut their capacity by 20%. The auto industry is reeling. Buyers are suffering from gas-price sticker shock and are sitting on liquid assets until they get a better fix on where the economy is actually going.

 

The U.S. Congress is full of proposals to tax windfall profits. On Apr. 30 the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page headline about how "big agriculture" is making money hand over fist while the specter of hunger and malnutrition stalks the globe. Food shortages are being blamed on our binging on corn-based ethanol. But almost every other food commodity price is far, far above what it was last summer. The political mood will get uglier when higher energy costs are passed on to U.S. consumers in higher electricity bills this summer.

 

Amazingly the roles of the Fed and other global central banks in all this are almost entirely ignored….

 

Read on:
http://www.forbes.com/business/global/2008/0602/009.html

HEAR STEVE FORBES SPEAK AT TELECOSM 2008.  REGISTER ONLINE TODAY: www.TelecosmConference.com

 

FRIDAY LETTER BOOK OF THE MONTH

Lawrence Solomon’s The Deniers and already a #3 Amazon bestseller in Canada and leaping list-wise in the US. It tells the story of "The World Renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud."

 

Covering the range of global warming claims, from the famed "hockey stick graph" to a predicted rise of mosquito borne diseases, the book is fascinating and even profound on the flaws of computer modeling, the irrelevance of consensus to science, the crippling effects of excessive specialization, and the mounting evidence of a coming cooling trend. It ends with a cogent explanation of how carbon taxes and offsets devastate the environment. -- George Gilder

Hear lawrence solomon speak at Telecosm 2008.
register online today: www.TelecosmConference.com

ORDER YOUR COPY
(for Lawrence to sign at Telecosm, the evening of May 27):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0980076315/gilderpublish-20


Friday Feature /
EZchip Brings Video Processing to the Line Card

EZchip Technologies Ltd. (a LanOptics Ltd. company), a fabless semiconductor company providing Ethernet network processors, today disclosed that its NP-4 network processor, now in design, features support for the enhanced transport of video applications. Integration of video support into the network processor facilitates moving the video processing functionality in switches and routers from a centralized services card onto each of their line cards. The net result is a significant boost in the switch/router’s performance and its support for video applications, while freeing the services card processor for other tasks. EZchip will discuss the NP-4 applications support and its focus on video processing at the Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2008 Conference, May 27-29 in Lake George, NY. 

 

“The NP-4 marks a paradigm shift in the role network processors will play in networking systems in the years to come,” said Eli Fruchter, President and CEO of EZchip Technologies. “In addition to providing flexible layer-2 switching and layer-3 routing functions, it will offer applications aware processing. EZchip's NP-4 will offload critical tasks, in particular those related to video transport, from the system’s services-card processor, typically a multi-core general-purpose processor, to the line-card processor, typically an optimized network processor. Because there can be as many as 64 network processors in a switch/router chassis versus only one or two multi-core services processors, the offload of video transport can be very significant and greatly enhance the switch/router's performance.”

 

“We are seeing an excellent market response to these video transport features and the NP-4 in general, which is already generating notable design wins,” added Mr. Fruchter.


Read the Complete Announcement:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20080514005738&newsLang=en

The Gilder Telecosm Forum

The next logical step in the evolution of the Gilder Technology Report (published by Gilder Publishing, LLC in association with Forbes Inc., 1996-2007), the Gilder Telecosm Forum is the web’s premier technology investment discussion 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 Blogger Bonus / China Begins Telecom Industry Overhaul

Lorraine Luk, WSJ.com (5/23/08):
China Telecom Corp. plans to buy the code division multiple access mobile network of China United Telecommunications Corp., a person familiar with the situation said Friday, amid reports China soon would unveil a telecommunications industry shakeup.

 

China's state-run Xinhua News Agency reported Friday the parent of Hong Kong-listed China Mobile Ltd. would merge with fixed-line carrier China Tietong Telecommunications Corp.

Shares of China's major telecom operators were suspended from trading in Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York…

 

Read on:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121155045956017403.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox

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Readings
/

Yahoo, Microsoft and the Ties That Bind
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB121150760422916345.html?mod=2_1571_topbox

Buy Big Blue
http://www.forbes.com/home/2008/05/22/ibm-software-international-pf-ii-in_jd_0521gurusow_inl.html

A Tiny Terahertz Laser
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20817/


Access to next-gen Internet may be uneven
http://news.wired.com/dynamic/stories/N/NEXT_GENERATION_INTERNET?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-05-22-15-14-06
 

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Friday Letter Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com
 

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