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-  THE FRIDAY LETTER  -

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for friends and subscribers)

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 | http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 304.0/July 27, 2007

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HEADLINES:

-  The Week / Gilder: Digital Fountain Excelsior
-  Friday Feature / Gilder: Putting for Winners
-  Friday Blogger Bonus / Seagate’s Path Out of the Forest
-  Readings /

 

Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 2007 CONFERENCE

Hosted by George Gilder and Steve Forbes
October 16 – October 18| The Sagamore Resort | Lake George, New York


ANNOUNCING: Outperforming the Market: The Only Three Question That Count

Featuring: Ken Fisher, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Investment Officer, Fisher Investments; Author, The Only Three Questions that Count: Investing by Knowing What Others Don’t

 

Register at a discount rate online today: www.Telecosm.info

 

The Week / Digital Fountain Excelsior

HEADLINE: 
IEEE Names Michael Luby and Amin Shokrollahi as Recipients of 2007 Eric E. Sumner Award (http://www.digitalfountain.com/entry.asp?PageID=293)

George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (7/21/07): Digital Fountain "raptor codes" enable reception of packets in any order at any time without degradation of the total download or stream, so software packets, movies, or other files can be downloaded without any concern for starting at the beginning of the file. With all packets contributing equally to the file like hologram pixels, any random assemblage will suffice to recreate the transmission provided the necessary number of packets plus 2 percent overhead is collected.

A software patch or antivirus, for example, can be dispatched in one stream and received by all recipients, rather than entailing a separate link for each download. Any collection of packets will compose a perfect file. These codes also allow perfect streaming. This is the standard for DVH (the GSM video download system) that probably makes DVH better than Qualcomm's MediaFlo. It is also that standard for Japanese cable TV, among others. (Caveat: I was the first outside investor in this company.)

Nick Tredennick
Gilder Telecosm Forum (7/21/07): I like Digital Fountain. I have visited with company representatives, including the CTO, several times in attempting to encourage military applications.

My simple view of Digital Fountain comes from the company's name. You stick your cup into the bit stream (fountain) and when it's full, you have the message. One way of looking at the algorithm is to view it as the extreme error spreading code. Each packet contains an error-spread representation of the entire message. The receiver need collect only the number of packets required for the message plus the number required for the spreading overhead. Any packets, any order. All receivers are guaranteed to get the message eventually.


Visit
http://www.gildertech.com/ today to become a GILDER TELECOSM FORUM member and trade investment ideas with George Gilder, Nick Tredennick, and the GTF members.

 

The Gilder Telecosm Forum
 
The
web’s premier technology investment discussion forum, the Gilder Telecosm Forum is a powerful network of talented, tech-savvy investors and thinkers who collaborate online daily by utilizing the very technologies that George Gilder has celebrated and written about for eleven years in Gilder Technology Report.

Become a GTF member today: http://www.gildertech.com/


Friday Feature / Putting for Winners

George Gilder, Gilder Telecosm Forum (7/25/07): Peeking through the hedges and around the topiary, I will nine iron a noggin from out of deep silicon.

Hark, my brother points out, and I confirm, that DirectPC has been swamped by YouTube videos and has begun a job action slowdown. They show you the first few seconds and then shut you down. You growl and try again. Your email doesn't come up ("your connection is unusually slow," says Google (GOOG); "you might try the HTML version"). The collapse of the only reliable rural bandwidth source is a portent. The exaflood has begun.

Remember: When the exaflood hits the telecosm, the telecosm turns green and you can virtually putt for winners.

As I fumble with my satellite connection, let's contemplate the bottlenecks and the critical path enablers ….


To read what George has to say about Anadigics (ANAD), Corning (GLW), Micron (MU), Foveon, Semitool (SMTL), ATI, AMD, TowerStream (TWER), KeyOn, Nvidia, EzChip (LNOP), Sigma Designs (SIGM), Seagate (STX), FormFactor (FORM), Hittite (HITT), NetLogic (NETL), Broadwing (BWNG), Level3 (LVLT),
Cogent (CCOI), and Energy conversion Devices (ENER) become a GILDER TELECOSM FORUM member and read George’s complete posts.

 

Visit: http://www.gildertech.com/ today.
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Friday Blogger Bonus / Seagate’s Path Out of the Forest

Erika Brown, Forbes.com (8/13/07): The glad-to-be-geeky engineers at Seagate Technology (STX) have spent years happily churning out millions of cheap disk drives, aiming their commodity at other engineers--those at the world's major computer makers. But the disk drive market is racked by lethal price competition and faces a longer-term threat: the rise of flash memory chips. So Seagate now must woo an utterly different client: the digital consumer.

 

"Those who continue to live by the sword will get killed by a guy with a gun," says William Watkins, chief executive of Seagate (annual sales: $11.4 billion), explaining his effort to remake the world's largest drivemaker into an emotive, touchy-feely consumer company.

And so it was that James Druckrey, a recent Seagate recruit from Gibson Guitar, teamed up with turtlenecked artistes at Frog Design to create a sleek new look for a line of back-up drives aimed at admen and other creative professionals. The result: a thin, upright anodized aluminum case in a dark color called "espresso," with a yellow light called "amber" that wraps around the drive's edge and pulses when turned on

 

Druckrey tried to translate the concept to befuddled Seagate scientists and suits.

Read Erika Brown’s complete article:

http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0813/092.html
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Readings /

How Sharp Keeps Its Biggest LCD Plant Under Wraps
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2007/07/how_sharp_keeps_its_biggest_lc.html

 

Staying Plugged in at 30,000 Feet
 http://www.forbes.com/technology/2007/07/05/travel-flying-business-forbeslife-cx_lk_0706biztravel_slide.html

 

The Risk Factor: The Downfall of RFID?
http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/riskfactor/2007/07/rfid_technology_a_techncial_bl.html


Regulators in Europe Accuse Intel of Violating Antitrust Laws

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/business/worldbusiness/27chip.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin

The Weekly GTI
http://www.gtindex.com/
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FRIDAY LETTER STAFF

Editor: Mary Collins George / mcollins@gilder.com

Research: Sandy Fleischmann / sfleischmann@gilder.com

 

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