pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=47fe186c796c7afe00ba08bfctxt=wwwr1.2.0.0maxX=122maxY=164" border="0" alt="fred wilson.jpg" title="fred wilson.jpg" width="122" height="164" /The Treasury, the Fed, and Warren Buffet have been the only buyers in this meltdown and have been largely focused on financial companies. Meanwhile the rest of a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?cid=626307"the market has gone down 30% year to date/a and very few, if any, stocks have been spared./p pWhat do we look for next? Does the market just keep going down endlessly? What will bring this to an end? Clearly not government intervention. While possibly necessary (we'll see), the splurge has clearly not put an end to selling in the markets./p pWe need to see more Warren Buffets stepping up. And my bet is they will eventually. And they will be corporations buying back their own stock, large private equity and buyout firms doing going private transactions with all equity cap structures, and possibly foreign companies seeking bargain acquisitions in the US./p pWhat's interesting, as a href="https://twitter.com/howardlindzon/statuses/948610653"Howard pointed out/a repeatedly on twitter yesterday, is that corporations have not yet stepped up to stock buybacks./p pMicrosoft announced last month that a href="http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/sep08/09-22dividend.mspx"they plan to buy back $40bn in stock over the next five years/a. They have $25bn in cash and short term investments and are currently earning about $20bn per year in operating cash flow. a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:MSFT"Microsoft's stock/a is trading at about 11x operating cash flow. It's market cap is $227bn and institutions own 60% of it, meaning there is about $130bn of $MSFT stock in the hands of institutions. If Microsoft wanted to, at the current price, it could purchase all $130bn of that stock from institutions with its current cash balance plus operating earnings over the next five years. If Microsoft is confident about its business prospects going forward, it should be an aggressive buyer of its own stock at these levels. And maybe it is. It's stock is only down 3% in the past month while the SP has been down 15%./p pWhat about Google? a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog"$GOOG/a is down almost 50% year to date and the company is valued at $115bn. Institutions own roughly 60% of its stock, roughly $70bn of it. Google is earning about $7bn of operating cash per year and has $13bn of cash and short term investments on hand. So it would take Google longer to buy back all the stock institutions own, more like eight to ten years. But still, that's a lot of purchasing power and the market is asking the same question a href="https://twitter.com/howardlindzon/statuses/948613126"Howard did yesterday/a./p blockquote pemThe silence of $goog into this meltdown is just as deafening with all their cash. I am not going to be run over. /em/p /blockquote pIn bad bear markets, like we are in, investors look to corporations to defend their stock and Google has not yet shown an interest in doing that. That's something to look for. When you net out Google's cash, it's trading at $100bn, a mere 12x operating cash flow. That's value territory./p pLet's look at a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ANWS"News Corp/a. Rupert Murdoch's company, the best managed media company out there, is down 56% in the past year and is now trading at a mere six times operating cash flow. News Corp is also about 60% institutionally owned. So that means Rupert could buy out his external investors with four years of his cash flow. But we have yet to see him do that./p pI could go on and on. a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=aapl"Apple/a is worth $67bn after you back out the $20bn of cash they have on hand. It earns over $5bn a year. That's another value stock right there./p pAnd those are some of the best US companies right there. The list goes on and on. a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=starbucks"Starbucks/a trades at 7x cash flow, a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=walmart"Walmart/a trades at 10x cash flow, a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AT"ATT/a trades at 4x cash flow, and a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ACMCSA"Comcast/a trades at 6x cash flow./p pYou could buy all of America's best corporations for somewhere around eight to ten times cash flow. Someone is going to start doing this./p pMaybe it will be the large private equity and buyout firms who have been stuck on the sidelines while the debt markets have been closed for the past year. If good companies get cheap enough, they can buy them with their cash, without debt, and own them for however long the markets take to work the issues out./p pOr foreign companies will come in. I am particularly interested in the asian companies. Will a company like a href="http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3ADELL"Dell/a be an attractive acquisition for an asian manufacturer flush with cash? It's only trading at 5x cash flow after you back out the cash on hand./p pI read this a href="http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=477k3d8mh2wmtpc4b6h07p4hy9z83x18"history of the panic of 1873/a yesterday after seeinga href="https://twitter.com/MaryHodder/statuses/948595147" a twitter post by Mary Hodder/a that referenced it. It's worth reading. There are two really interesting points in it. The first is that panic was precipitated in some measure by the US' emerging prowess as a player in the global economy and a lower cost one at that:/p blockquote pemWheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life./em/p /blockquote pBut possibly even more interesting was who emerged as the winners of the panic of 1873:/p blockquote pemThe long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States - those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads - the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun./em/p /blockquote pWe have yet to see the Carnegies, McCormicks, and Rockefellers of China, India, Russia, and the Middle East emerge as capitalists on a global scale. But with prime assets like I mentioned above on sale at bargain basement prices, it's just a matter of time until we will./p pEventually this market meltdown will be over and stability will return. But things will not be the same. There will be big winners and big losers. We have already seen many of the big losers emerge, but we have not yet seen the big winners emerge. I think we know where to look for them though./p pemSAI contributor Fred Wilson is a partner at Union Square Ventures. He writes the influential a href="http://www.avc.com/"A VCimg class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.43.0.1/t.gif?ctxt=wwwr1.1.5.3ctxt=wwwr1.1.5.3ctxt=wwwr1.1.5.3ctxt=wwwr1.1.5.3" border="0" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;" /img class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.44/t.gif?ctxt=wwwr1.1.5.3" border="0" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;" /img class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.50/t.gif?ctxt=wwwr1.2.0.0" border="0" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-family: trebuchet ms ,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; float: none; position: static; left: auto; top: auto; line-height: normal; background-image: url(http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.50/theme/silver/palette.gif); background-color: transparent; visibility: visible; width: 14px; height: 12px; background-position: -1128px 0pt; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;" /img class="snap_preview_icon" src="http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.50.1/t.gif" border="0" style="border: 0pt none; margin: 0pt ! important; padding: 1px 0pt 0pt; max-height: 2000px; max-width: 2000px; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; font-family: trebuchet ms ,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; float: none; position: static; left: auto; top: auto; line-height: normal; background-image: url(http://i.ixnp.com/images/v3.50.1/theme/silver/palette.gif); background-color: transparent; visibility: visible; width: 14px; height: 12px; background-position: -1128px 0pt; background-repeat: no-repeat; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: top; display: inline;" //a, where this post was originally published./em/p div id="disqus_thread" /div div script type="text/javascript"!-- var disqus_url = 'http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/10/what-to-look-fo.html'; // --/script script src="http://disqus.com/forums/avc/embed.js" type="text/javascript"/script /div pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/Q55Dtw1AXBAbB_tkX84-voFwASM/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/Q55Dtw1AXBAbB_tkX84-voFwASM/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=OhOD76xv"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=OhOD76xv" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=oTiIZeh9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=gaPsTBLn"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=CLnJI4Dl"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=CLnJI4Dl" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=Bw27kzZ3"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=TyqaN5Qp"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=9yjsw8C6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=L6SRJCn4"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/R6epNRcI3ew" height="1" width="1"/

MundoRare has written a lengthy article that investigates why GoldenEye for XBLA has been abandoned. Activision (the current holders of the James Bond licence) and MS put the blame on Nintendo (who share the rights of original game with MS) for not wanting the game to launch on both the Xbox 360 and Wii. However an optimistic Microsoft source told the site that the game is finished and it could be released if the situation changes in the future.

The News Starts Early Here At NBAA.... Welcome to Orlando, Florida... home to this year's National Business Aviation Association Conference and Trade Show. These are some of the recent NBAA show headlines for Monday, October Sixth, 2008. There's no denying these are different times in the world of business aviation... just as these are difficult times for the world at large. In stark contrast to the festive atmosphere seen over the past three years at NBAA, the news from the first day of this year's event was subdued by comparison, yet still cautiously optimistic... a tone NBAA President Ed Bolen says reflects a general uneasiness of the today's marketplace... Continuing a somewhat-quirky NBAA tradition, Sunday's 'sneak-peak' press conference schedule was jam-packed with companies hoping to get their announcements out ahead of the show's formal opening ceremonies on Monday. Gulfstream was among the first to show their hand, announcing its new G250 "super mid-size" jet. Based on the existing G200 -- itself a variant of the old IAI Astra -- the G250 appears aimed at soothing those naysayers who may quibble over whether the aircraft is a "true" Gulfstream product... While Dassault Falcon didn't have a brand-new plane to announce, the company did reveal its plans for an upgrade package to its popular EASy flight deck, including a new synthetic vision option. But Dassault's Olivier Villa spent most of his time talking about the recently-introduced 900LX... telling attendees the aircraft will build on Dassault's already-impressive lineup of fuel-efficient business aircraft when it enters the market in mid-2010... Embraer's Luís Carlos Affonso provided an update on the Brazilian planemaker's rapidly-expanding line of business aircraft. Starting with just one offering when Embraer launched its "executive jets" line in 2005, today the company has five new business jets in various stages of development, and a sixth in production. Embraer expects to win certification for its smallest ...

Auteur : AeroTVNetwork
Tags : nbaa bizav bolen bizjet faa aero-news aero-tv pilot plane airplane airline airport aircraft aviation aerospace cirrus cessna piper beech mooney
Envoyé : 06 octobre 2008
Note :0.0
Votes :0

SpuriousLogic writes to tell us that University of Arizona researchers claim to have broken a barrier in holographic technology by creating an updatable, three dimensional display with memory. While the existing model is only able to update once every couple of minutes, and isn't particularly suited for 3d images, it is certainly a step in the right direction. "Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found. However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian. Lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales, Dr Justin Lawrence, told CNN small steps were always being made on technology like 3D holograms, but, he couldn't see it being ready for the market in the next ten years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpuriousLogic writes to tell us that University of Arizona researchers claim to have broken a barrier in holographic technology by creating an updatable, three dimensional display with memory. While the existing model is only able to update once every couple of minutes, and isn't particularly suited for 3d images, it is certainly a step in the right direction. "Peyghambarian is also optimistic that the technology could reach the market within five to ten years. He said progress towards a final product should be made much more quickly now that a rewriting method had been found. However, it is fair to say not everyone is as positive about this prospect as Peyghambarian. Lecturer in Electronic Engineering at Bangor University in Wales, Dr Justin Lawrence, told CNN small steps were always being made on technology like 3D holograms, but, he couldn't see it being ready for the market in the next ten years."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Filed under: Videos and Screenshots, News

"Every game has a sequel." Oh, if only that were true. In the case of Timesplitters: Future Perfect, however, it is. Timesplitters 4 is well and truly in production. We're happy about it, but not as optimistic as we might have been before a certain narcotic-and-war-condemning title was released over Summer. Still, our hopes are high that Free Radical's next project will be a little less pretentious and a little more fun, like other Timesplitters games were.

A new video has appeared on the Free Radical website. It doesn't show a lot but, like the first teaser, it shows of more what we can expect from the game; monkeys and pop-culture parody. While the video is cute (particularly the very end), we desperately want to see some actual game footage. Still, a monkey in a suit is better than nothing. Right?
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