Re: DAILY THREAD FOR THE WEEK OF MAY 22-28

Postby alea jacta est » Fri May 27, 2011 8:16 am
That's a bold and hopefully not a rash comment, awk.

Sure would be nice to see.

ARM is the common denominator, presumably. If you think they can swing it so that even Apple adopts the common interoprable hardware trust framework, this would be exciting.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Sep 30, 2011 11:12 am
Hi Snackman,

A deleted post on iHub:

"I'm not sure this board is usually meant to be about posters. But since a few people are introducing the integrity of some posters as a topic, I guess it is okay for me to make a comment too.

Wave has an opportunity. If it had no obstacles to its progress, it would have already become a large company. Unfortunately for long investors, those who have proposed caution regarding the timeline of adoption due to these obstacles have not been quite as wrong as those who demand and expect immediate gratification. So many of those undiluted optimists are gone now. Others have stayed and seem to hope the moment that Wave breaks through is some kind of justification for their inability to admit the existence of a brake all these years.

Oddly enough, I don't get the sense that the people whom I most respect and believe understand this space and its opportunity perceive those who offer cautions as negative. Rather the opposite. They know that there is a grand thesis which might be called the trust matrix. They tend to rise to the challenge of questions. Or they accept the risks as a legitimate part of the conversation.

But let me turn this around. Why do folks like yourself castigate those who are not relentlessly positive?

For myself, I view some of the people who are disinterested in Wave's obstacles to progress as lacking a certain sort of granular vision of the company and its opportunity. The timeline of growth is influenced by demand and by its absence and by its deferral. Getting a sense of these things matter to me and to others, probably, and we like to discuss it. But some folks can't see it or won't hear it. That's a pity for them.

Perhaps other people who cannot abide a caution or three have another purpose. It does not serve them that others stand in their way. After all, nothing I have written would hinder Wave's progress. So I guess there may be some kind of reason having to do with them personally.

Why should this be so?

It's a question of motive. For traders, I suppose cautions are problematic when they are long the stock and looking to boost the price so they can exit at the higher price which suits them. Indeed, I should not be too surprised to learn that some folks play this game both ways, with alternating characters depending on their ownership status. Are such people trustworthy, I wonder?

For those who have only a little insight but perhaps have a large view of their own talent, I guess contradiction is challenging and they cannot abide it.

Others simply have a long history of being unable to contain their aggressive side and end up excluded from most any place they've ever been. I guess there is also a history of resentment for such folks.

Lots of other reasons, I suppose.

So I just stick to my kind of posting, which looks at both opportunity and risk. It won't stop because certain folks only want to hear positives. I have a few friends I communicate with here, and I write for them and those who are interested to read what I have to say and not for everyone else. I suggest if you dislike the challenge of someone who has a different view, that you either move to a space which excludes that kind of conversation (there's a DD board for this kind of person), or that you manage your reading so as to ignore the folks who have positives and negatives to offer.

Hey, but I do know that being relentlessly positive is terrifically popular with folks. That's the ole potlatch effect for you."

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Sep 30, 2011 11:16 am
And another one from iHub:

Hi gucci,

Nice post. All the same, I take issue with your $10 and your analyst friend.

Sometimes a small number seems more realistic just because it requires little imagination.

The scope of the market is very large. We really have no idea what proportion of it Wave will embrace. But it seems to me a large part is as likely as a small part. This is because in this kind of market, network effects will tend to elevate the leader. So I would not be surprised to see Wave end up with as high as an 80-90% share, if it remains in the lead. But if it is overtaken, the next biggest player in a network effect market may have only 5-10% of the total. At this point, Wave is the clear leader. I don't see $10 as a more likely endpoint than $100 or $1,000.

I understand your financial analyst friend. He is interested in incumbents and guessing if the rate of their growth is 19, 20 or 21%. He's not the person you expect to invest at this stage. Nevertheless, there are people who invest in early stage companies who are entranced by the notion of extraordinary returns. So I would call him in five or ten years and ask his opinion then. At this point, his view is pointless. Except to make the point you are making: most money chases large, established businesses and ignores opportunities like this.

Obviously, like Dig, you make a sensible point about MS. It isn't that it is a threat. It is that people perceive it to be. And this has an effect on price. I'm not sure if you are one of the people who has been concerned about them in the past. It has seemed to me that they are not a threat for many moons. Not sure why anyone might think otherwise.

It's encouraging to hear you taking less of a dim view of Wave's prospects than you have in the past. It's the changing opinions of people like you that makes a difference on the margin.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 5:44 am
Hi kant,

these distinctions between devices are really breaking down into a continuum. There are things called phones. And then there are intermediate devices. And then there's the PC. Smart phones are getting smarter. PCs are becoming more mobile.

But there is still a useful clear distinction between the phone industry and the PC industry. And that concerns ownership of the device and the provision of service. The relationship between the PC owner and their cable or phone company usually involves a choice: the PC owner may switch to another provider if they wish taking their device with them. Not so much in the phone industry, in which most consumers use a "subsidised" device, the subsidy for which is paid for (along with service) via monthly fees: so the user relinquishes their ownership in favour of a rental relationship.

This means that the chips fall differently between a phone and a PC. In the phone space, many architectural decisions are taken by the mobile network operator: the MNOs simply won't offer a phone that doesn't fit within their parameters. This gives them the opportunity to shape services to their wants - so they will divert NFC through the SIM card, for instance, and then extract a toll on the financial traffic, force the card companies to cooperate etc. In the PC space, most architectural decisions are taken by the hardware and software companies: the cable company provides users with a bitpipe; any service provider in cyberspace may invent a service and take it to the end user.

So these are very different environments. The MNOs can disintermediate innovators from customers if they wish to. Distinct architectures.

Equipment is getting more similar. But power distributes in very different ways.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread
Hi trust,

I am not but those are good questions.

My question is, how much revenue should investors expect Wave to achieve in 2012?

My next one - would senior management reject their performance bonuses if they fail to achieve this target?

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 9:06 am
The price is going down.

Ok.

What does that mean?

Nothing that I can see. Stock prices have this thing about moving around. They can move around a lot without financial guidance and without information. Perfect world for traders.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 9:03 am
Hi trust,

I am not but those are good questions.

My question is, how much revenue should investors expect Wave to achieve in 2012?

My next one - would senior management reject their performance bonuses if they fail to achieve this target?

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 1:20 pm
Hi dreamer (repost from alea board :o ),

That's the scenario we would like to see. In the other scenario, the MNOs sell access to their inefficient and expensive environment and take a toll in doing so.

For your scenario to happen, it's going to be due to client demand and individual users don't have the clout to force the change. So the roadmap isn't about what makes sense from a cost perspective. It's whether and when someone like the DoD forces the issue.

awk,

The Global Platform has to play nice with all the actors involved initially. As previously posted there will be multiple Tokens able to be used in the User Centric Trusted Ecosystem for things like mobile payment.

Once the Financial Services Industry, Mobile Network Operators, Digital rights Management etc. industry see how efficient the running of applets in Trustzone is and the ability for each of those above actors to have their own MTM's to protect their Space the need for the Secure Elements will no longer be required and will decrease the Bill of Material Cost of the device. JMHO

Next step a Wave/ARM announcement so Wave can be embedded in all Arm Chips and not just in Samsungs???

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 2:14 pm
By the way, wonder why so many folks seem to be panicking. Wave seems to be doing wonderfully well, and Q4,11 makes little difference in terms of its larger progress.

I suspect what is happening is due to one or other market inefficiency. This is the norm in Wave's world.

Wow! What a totally amazing, excellent discovery!

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 1:20 pm
Hi dreamer (repost from alea board :o ),

That's the scenario we would like to see. In the other scenario, the MNOs sell access to their inefficient and expensive environment and take a toll in doing so.

For your scenario to happen, it's going to be due to client demand and individual users don't have the clout to force the change. So the roadmap isn't about what makes sense from a cost perspective. It's whether and when someone like the DoD forces the issue.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 09, 2012 6:56 pm
Hi dreamer,

As usual, I'm presenting an alternative scenario. There's a technological argument. There's a political one. I am not saying the one the MNOs have been pursuing is better. Just that their political power should be acknowledged. When I first started talking about the opportunity in the mobile market (around the year 2000-2001), it became apparent that the mobile phone service providers were in competition with the smart card solutions offered by the financial community. It was at that time I realised that a phone makes a much more powerful solution to exactly the problems that smart cards try to solve. A phone works with a signal. It is a communications device. It is portable. Wave and the financial industry were saying a keyboard and/or a smart card reader could solve important problems. But as I said to awk at the time, you don't need such a large pocket for a phone.

It took a decade for these two industries to find a pathway forwards, and there are still tensions within the industry over the NFC architecture.

So the question is, will the elegant MTM chip model end up being adopted. I can see some of the handset makers would like it to be. I see that global platform has done some work. There's some real money in motion. I think your argument is strengthening. But I think it needs someone to push it the last yard - towards actual adoption. And that someone would be at the end of the supply chain. Someone like DoD.

I just don't think it will be adopted because it is technologically elegant. There's politics and a division of the financial spoils in the secure element design. MTMs disintermediate a bunch of incumbents. These guys have snouts and they want their troughs in place. The MTM design - if it captures the flow of data - turns the MNOs into bitstream providers, which is their nightmare. So it requires force.

Hey, if anyone has tanks to put on Verizon's lawn, it is the US department of defense.

So my point was simply to challenge the method by which you suppose a change will occur. I think it will be done outside the control of the MNOs. The DoD has reasons why it may insist.

Your post: "I'm not going to argue which system is better for all things security in the mobile payment space, I'll leave that to the market. I stated my opinion.

For me and for now I'm glad to see the Trusted Execution Environment make the latest GlobalPlatform paper. We know a tremendous amount of effort has gone into preparing that Secure world of TrustZone and all the players involved. The fact that Trusted Logic and MobiCore are already showing MTM's running as Trusted Applications in TrustZone and in MobiCores case they are running Trustlets in their TEE, well everything awk saw (and of course Wave, barge) is starting to come together.

Now I'm starting to wonder WHO brings Interoperability between the TEE's, could that be the beginning of the Trust Assurance Network (TAN). I think I read somewhere that Wave had such a concept!

Alea, I'm just putting all the pieces of the puzzle out there with everyone else trying to get a grasp on what is possibly coming. To me the future for Wave and it's products looks bright, when I look at the trend of the SP not so bright, go figure "

Dell

Postby alea jacta est » Fri Mar 16, 2012 10:17 am
Certainly could use some clarification re changes on the Dell site.

Dell's website has wrought some mischief on previous occasions.

But realignment would not be altogether surprising from here. So what does it portend?

Here's another possibility to the ones being bandied around.

$1 (or so) per unit sold to, say, 5m Dell purchasers per quarter - who nevertheless rarely switch ETS on - is not especially appealing next to the possibility of a number 1/10th that much sold for more than $10/unit to purchasers of PCs from any OEM in the reseller or aftermarket. Let's say they throw in the BiOS software as well, so let's put the price up to $15-20 per unit!

That would be a sign of the emergence of demand-pull in the marketplace, of course. It also makes sense as the market is broadening and the reseller channel becomes the more obvious location for ETS selection by enterprise customers. Enterprises may want their PCs from folks other than Dell.

That's an optimistic scenario, I admit. But it's also important not to assume a pessimistic one. All we see are potential signs of evolution taking place. The market seems to be expanding beyond Dell. What the change on Dell.com portends requires a mind open to possibilities of various kinds.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Tue Mar 20, 2012 8:16 am
Why would Apple enter this space?

Apple cannot provide multi-platform security. MS and Google wouldn't permit it.

Same with Intel and ARM in the chip/execution space.

Three points:

First, as far as Wave development is concerned, bear in mind they have been working on R&D for more than a decade and a bunch of the things they have done represent cumulative value. So a competitor in the trust space has to build a solution from the ground up in order to compete. The cost per quarter isn't the thing. It's the accumulated cost which a competitor must match in order to build a competing solution.

Second, as demand emerges and revenue growth curves northwards, the amount Wave can invest in R&D also goes exponential.

Third, as Wave's first mover status crystallizes, investors hope network effects take hold and the status of providing the solution to the largest share of the market crowds new entrants out.

Re: Continuing Daily Thread

Postby alea jacta est » Tue Mar 20, 2012 9:50 am
Clearly, Wave's posture in the marketplace is to attempt to keep as low a profile as it can.

Material revenue-bearing news flows through an 8-k. Smaller sales are rarely announced unless they have a persuasive authority eg Northern Ireland health system. The currency of conference calls takes the form of market generalities rather than Wave's own corporate opportunity. Steven states that he is keen to avoid the analytical attention that a profit would generate and Wave's business plan prefers revenue maximisation.

This is a company which has always kept its cards close to its chest. It does so because it wants to avoid alerting competitors to the opportunity.

I expect fudge from the CC. Not red meat.