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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: What’s that “New ‘$39 Computer’ Hitting U.S. Markets?” Bonner & Partners, which is yet another publisher subsidiary of Bill Bonner’s Agora empire, has a new teaser pitch out for Jeff Brown’s Exponential Tech Investor — and what caught the eye of Gumshoe readers was the headline, in the ad from Bonner’s Managing Director Amber Lee Mason, that promises huge gains from a “$39 computer” that will be as transformative as television or the internet. “Tom Mainelli, a tech analyst at International Data Corporation (IDC) said, ‘This is the next generation of computing.’ ‘[“The $39 Computer”] is going to have as big an impact on businesses as the PC had…. It’s going to change the way we interact with technology. It’s going to happen across many businesses over time.’ “Jay Borenstein, a computer science professor at Stanford University, says: “I am a real believer that [“the $39 computer”] will be as transformative as television was, as the Internet was…. it is a profound leap ahead….’ “It’s no wonder companies like Google and Facebook have already placed orders. “As Bloomberg writes, this technology may one day replace your PC. “And Daniel Lemire, a Canadian computer science professor and software writer in Quebec, says: “The PC is dying. Even Microsoft has accepted that. Tablets and smartphones are nice, but they can’t fully replace PCs. What will? [The $39 computer] is the answer.'” So, if you chase down those quotes, it slowly becomes clear that the “big picture” idea being talked up by Jeff Brown is, in fact, augmented reality (often smushed in with virtual reality as a concept). The Bloomberg article he’s referring to is “Will This Augmented Reality Machine Replace Your PC?” — that’ appeared in May, and it’s mostly about a California augmented reality company called Meta. Virtual reality is immersive — you wear an opaque headset and enter a virtual world without being able to see or hear the real world. That’s great for gaming, or for things like pain control or perhaps for having a virtual presence in another location for tourism, or for social reasons. Augmented reality is projecting something on top of the real world — in the most basic case, something like Google Glass that projects a little image in the top of your glasses to give you walking directions, or show you video of something, or alert you to a text… in more extreme cases, with tools like Microsoft Hololens, it’s a real headset that can put virtual characters or graphics into the real world or overlay something over your vision — giving the impression that there’s a holograph of a jet engine’s innards floating in space in front of you for the mechanic who’s working on fixing an engine in the shop, for example, or pointing a warehouse worker toward the location of the item they need to locate as they walk through the shelves. So yes, the “$39 computer” concept is basically “virtual and augmented reality devices” — which are available in some forms now, from the Oculus Rift headset or other competing higher-end gaming headsets to the Google Cardboard “fancy viewmaster” virtual reality that uses a smartphone or even the “sort of” augmented reality of the Pokemon Go game that’s sweeping the world right now (if you haven’t enjoyed that, it basically uses your phone’s camera and GPS to move you around the physical world, and it makes Pokemon critters appear on your screen on top of the “real world” for you to capture when you reach specific physical locations. Many folks (including Daniel Lemire) seem to think Pokemon Go is the first salvo of “augmented reality goes mainstream,” the first thing that’s wildly popular enough to help spur heavy development and adoption of next-generation devices. So what is that “one company” that “owns 223 patents and patent applications” for virtual reality or augmented reality and, according to Jeff Brown, is “just about to go public?” A few more clues: “This company is tiny. “And they reportedly received a $200 million cash injection from China’s largest Internet company. Very soon my contact believes it will make a small handful of investors very wealthy.” OK, so yes, Thinkolator confirms that this is Magic Leap, which is one of those secretive companies that keeps everything close to the vest — no one knows much about what they’re doing, when they’ll have a product, or what their hardware might look like when they get to the hardware stage… but they still have a venture-funded valuation of something like $5 billion, and boast high-impact investors like Google and Alibaba. As a TechCrunch article noted a couple months ago… “Whatever ‘magic’ it involves, it must be good because it seems that everyone who tries it ends up dumping more money or time into it.” And no, I have no idea whether they’ll go public anytime soon, though it gets rumored from time to time. And buying shares of Google or Alibaba to get exposure to Magic Leap would be pretty pointless, those companies are too big for even a huge gain in the value of their investments in Magic Leap to have a big impact on the bottom line. There is no “back door” into Magic Leap, and you’re very unlikely to find shares available on any of those secondary share marketplaces for private companies — not when every VC firm, big and small, is lusting for a bigger piece of the firm and they’re able to get huge investments in one-off deals from major strategic investors. If an augmented reality headset has the computational power of a desktop built into the headset, then it’s going to cost a lot more than $39 for at least the next five years… and if the headset itself has costs that can be driven down to $39, then it’s going to be hooked up (like the Oculus Rift headset is) to a computer with unusually powerful graphics processing capability, and such a computer is likely to be at least $500-$1,000. The pitch gets into some of the more interesting stuff about Magic Leap, too, and what they’re probably doing that’s much more interesting than “just another augmented reality headset” — Microsoft will almost certainly beat them to market when they start selling their Hololens, and almost as certainly Microsoft won’t make any money selling the Hololens for at least a few years… but the ad talks about a different technology inside Magic Leap: “Harnessing the Fastest Force in the Universe…. “… traditional microchips have always worked by controlling the flow of “electrons,” which, as you probably know, is the basis of electricity… “But this chip doesn’t control the flow of electrons. It controls photons, the basic components of light.” That Science article about photonic chips is available here if you want a little background. Here’s the end of that article: “Photonic memories still have a long way to go if they ever hope to catch up to their electronic counterparts. At a minimum, their storage density will have to climb orders of magnitude to be competitive. Ultimately, Bhaskaran says, if a more advanced photonic memory can be integrated with photonic logic and interconnections, the resulting chips have the potential to run at 50 to 100 times the speed of today’s computer processors.” “The company we’ve been tracking has developed a version of the “$39 Computer” with what you might call the ultimate interface… “Wired magazine said the quality of their interface ‘exceeds all others. Because of this lead, money is pouring into this Florida office park.'” www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/ “Alibaba, China’s largest Internet business, has reportedly invested $200 million in this tiny company. They sell more product in a year than eBay and Amazon combined. The big hook for this teaser ad is that we’re asked to invest in this newsletter because they’ll tell us that we should buy Magic Leap when it goes public? You aren’t going to need a newsletter to alert you to the fact that Magic Leap is planning an IPO, if and when that happens — the news could easily be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on the day they file their S-1 (that’s the first filing a company makes to indicate to the SEC that it’s going to go public and sell shares, and the IPO can’t happen until at least a month or two has passed from the first S-1 filing. We don’t hear about these filings that often because the companies often aren’t very newsworthy, but the filings are not secret). So that seems to be the basic promise here — Jeff Brown has a “hotlist” of stocks that he thinks will go public in the next two years, and he thinks a half dozen of them will IPO in the next six months, so you should pony up $2,500 for his newsletter so you can get alerted right away when one of his faves goes public, and get his buying advice. We know he’s made two picks this year that were teased in ads for his newsletter, and we know he now claims to have recommended Twilio as well (that wasn’t teased in an ad that I saw, but I’ll take his word for it that he suggested buying the shares on IPO day). “Last night (well, it was morning for him in Tokyo), Jeff described a new opportunity he’s looking into. It’s a backdoor way to own shares of some of these private companies before they hit the public stock market. Just think about owning companies like Google and PayPal before they went public. “Jeff is going to investigate further. If this ‘backdoor’ is as safe and lucrative and he suspects it is… expect a special report from him soon.” There are a handful of these publicly-traded venture capital investments, with the most prominent probably being the two that I’ve dabbled with and currently have small exposure to, GSV Capital (GSVC) and the SharesPost 100 Fund (PRIVX), though there are others (including Harris and Harris (TINY)). None that I’m aware of have exposure to Magic Leap specifically, but they do have exposure to some other appealing private companies like Spotify and Palantir… and there are even regular mutual funds from folks like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price that invest tiny portions into venture funded companies, both Fidelity and T. Rowe have participated in Magic Leap’s funding rounds in the past so perhaps Fidelity Contrafund has something like a 0.05% allocation to Magic Leap, I haven’t checked the individual funds but their allocations are always extremely small. And in the world of that “$39 computer” and virtual/augmented reality, I still think we’re probably quite a ways from understanding which component makers, software companies, or hardware sellers, if any, are going to have a chance to achieve profitable volume in this space that has an impact on their share price. The most-teased and arguably most compelling investment in virtual reality is NVIDIA (NVDA) because of their best-in-class graphics processing chips, and I held options on that for a while (and the stock has continued to rise since I sold them), and we’ve also seen a half-dozen other stocks teased with at least some connection to virtual reality, including Facebook (FB), Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Universal Display (PANL), Invensense (INVN), Lam Research (LRXC), HiMax (HIMX) and Kopin (KOPN). I do like and own Facebook, though their ownership of Oculus Rift is way down at the bottom of the list of my reasons for owning the stock, I haven’t found the VR connection compelling enough to convince me to buy any of the others so far. Poster Comment: Headset likely be useful for science students studying chemical and biological reactions. Max Hathaway VR is a hoax. It will damage human eyesight and bring the human brain to a state equivalent to being a LSD. And that’s the good part. The more people get hooked into the Data Matrix, the more necessary., normal human relationships are displaced, leading to social breakdown and anarchy. VR is hostile to human normalcy, society and civilization. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)
I tried vr once at the mall, it was freaking awesome but it was run on servers that took up the space of a small car.
______________________________________ Suspect all media / resist bad propaganda/Learn NLP everyday everyway ;) If you don't control your mind someone else will.
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