I am feeling good today. My feed reader showed two stories today that brought a smile to my face.
The first is from Troy Wolverton, one of my former colleagues from TheStreet.com. Troy and I never had a chance to work together but he has a story in the Mercury News today about EA stumbling because it misjudged the popularity of the Wii.
Here's my article on this topic published on May 16:
Game makers fail to cash in on console mania
Meanwhile, Businessweek has a story about one of the hottest stocks in the IT security sector, Vasco Data Security.
I noticed this in January and here's my first article about Vasco from then:
Vasco Shares Show Vigor
Here are some of my other stories on Vasco including their recent earnings and a small slip in their stock price.
It's always good to stay ahead of the pack.
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label security. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Media River and ClickSurge
I don't cover the web applications anymore but a pitch for a company called MediaRiver, formerly known as Intellext, got me curious.
I checked out their press release today and, wow!, there's more jargon in there than I could handle.
Here's what the company says their latest product called ClickSurge does:
ClickSurge, MediaRiver's new offering, enables Web publishers to guide
Internet users to the publishers' online content in a discovery-based
contextual model.
Good luck trying to understand that and how the technology works just from the press release!
I checked out the website and here's what, I think, is going on.
Intellext, as Media River was formerly called, created a product called Watson, a desktop program accessible from within Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. As a user works on a topic, Watson running in background can look for relevant documents from the Web and bring it to the user without having to open a browser. Watson integrates with Google search and other search engines and the company positions it as a "search engine of search engines."
ClickSurge will customize the Watson idea for content publishers on the Web. Here's an example from a Chicago Sun-Times article on the company:
If a user at the People magazine Web site reads an article on Britney Spears, ClickSurge will match a dozen or more words, and offer "next clicks" to links to other articles relating to Spears. In contrast, many Web sites generate random links, which are less likely to hook readers and get them to stay at a Web site. Such sites, in this case, might offer links to more general entertainment news or even randomly selected links.
Not having seen a ClickSurge demo I am not sure how effective it will be. But the ClickSurge pitch reminds me of similar attempts being made by Claria.
Claria was once derided for having software that acted suspiciously like spyware. The company almost filed for IPO before all the negative publicity around spyware forced it to back out. In 2005, Claria decided to reinvent itself and offer publishers a personalization platform.
I need to look at Media River more closely to figure out the overlap between them and Claria.
I checked out their press release today and, wow!, there's more jargon in there than I could handle.
Here's what the company says their latest product called ClickSurge does:
ClickSurge, MediaRiver's new offering, enables Web publishers to guide
Internet users to the publishers' online content in a discovery-based
contextual model.
Good luck trying to understand that and how the technology works just from the press release!
I checked out the website and here's what, I think, is going on.
Intellext, as Media River was formerly called, created a product called Watson, a desktop program accessible from within Microsoft Office or Internet Explorer. As a user works on a topic, Watson running in background can look for relevant documents from the Web and bring it to the user without having to open a browser. Watson integrates with Google search and other search engines and the company positions it as a "search engine of search engines."
ClickSurge will customize the Watson idea for content publishers on the Web. Here's an example from a Chicago Sun-Times article on the company:
If a user at the People magazine Web site reads an article on Britney Spears, ClickSurge will match a dozen or more words, and offer "next clicks" to links to other articles relating to Spears. In contrast, many Web sites generate random links, which are less likely to hook readers and get them to stay at a Web site. Such sites, in this case, might offer links to more general entertainment news or even randomly selected links.
Not having seen a ClickSurge demo I am not sure how effective it will be. But the ClickSurge pitch reminds me of similar attempts being made by Claria.
Claria was once derided for having software that acted suspiciously like spyware. The company almost filed for IPO before all the negative publicity around spyware forced it to back out. In 2005, Claria decided to reinvent itself and offer publishers a personalization platform.
I need to look at Media River more closely to figure out the overlap between them and Claria.
Monday, May 21, 2007
Sourcefire's Mis-steps
Marty Roesch, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sourcefire, has done an interview with Network Computing and it's a very interesting read because it confirms some of my suspicions about the company's inability to understand how Wall Street thinks and works.
I have been following Sourcefire since my days at Red Herring and they used to be a favorite then. I wrote about them through their various ups and down, through the time when I thought they were one of the smartest private security players and most likely to go public (they did in March) to the botched acquisition of the company by Check Point.
The Network Computing interview itself is a very soft one. I wish the reporter had really pressed Marty for answers.
An excerpt from the interview:
Sourcefire announced its first quarterly earnings as a public company this May. The stock went from $18 to around $12, a drop of 30 percent. What happened?
The expectations were a little higher than the performance, and you can't do that in the public market, so we definitely got a good-sized correction. Q1 was something of an anomaly. There was some slowness in the federal procurement cycle and a few other factors came together--we had a bit of a perfect storm.
Here's how the series of events around their Q1 results really unfolded.
In its first quarterly earnings report after the company went public, Sourcefire realized that it was going to miss expectations.
That's really bad news... but well it happens. Investors and analysts understand that much.
But the way Sourcefire tried to convey the news was all wrong.
The company chose to put out a release about the likely earnings miss on Good Friday--a day when the stock markets are closed.
When investors saw the news on Monday morning, they were very upset. To make it worse, Sourcefire never made an attempt to explain the reasons for the miss--at least not till it was too late.
The company didn't make its CEO, CFO or anyone from the company available to the media or analysts to answer questions. I repeatedly tried to get the company and its PR agency to respond to my requests for a comment but they just couldn't be reached.
Sourcefire's stock fell nearly 30% on that day's trading alone. Finally around 3 p.m. --after market close on Monday--Sourcefire released a terse explanation. By then it was too late.
(My story about Sourcefire from that fateful Monday is here)
I find it difficult to believe that you need special acumen to understand this is totally the wrong way to handle something as important as earnings.
What Sourcefire should have done is release the news about the earnings miss on Monday before market opened and have had a brief explanation in the press release about what it thought was the reason for the shortfall.
Sourcefire should have also scheduled a conference call inviting all analysts, media, and investors and explained how the company is doing and what's going on with the numbers.
Something as simple as that could have saved them much grief.
Last when I checked a few days ago, a Wall Street analyst told me it could take nearly a year-and-a-half for Sourcefire to gain back investor & analyst confidence.
Companies can't and shouldn't go public if they are not willing to do what it takes to work with investors and Wall Street. Many times it is as simple as being transparent and upfront about both bad news and good news.
I can't understand how a company, as smart as Sourcefire, could have gone so wrong.
The rest of the interview is about how Marty thinks there's more to Sourcefire than just IPS/IDS. I am not convinced about that either. Sourcefire needs some serious help with telling their story. Any wonder that their stock has been down nearly 25% in the two-and-a-half months since their IPO?
via Mike Rothman's The Daily Incite.
I have been following Sourcefire since my days at Red Herring and they used to be a favorite then. I wrote about them through their various ups and down, through the time when I thought they were one of the smartest private security players and most likely to go public (they did in March) to the botched acquisition of the company by Check Point.
The Network Computing interview itself is a very soft one. I wish the reporter had really pressed Marty for answers.
An excerpt from the interview:
Sourcefire announced its first quarterly earnings as a public company this May. The stock went from $18 to around $12, a drop of 30 percent. What happened?
The expectations were a little higher than the performance, and you can't do that in the public market, so we definitely got a good-sized correction. Q1 was something of an anomaly. There was some slowness in the federal procurement cycle and a few other factors came together--we had a bit of a perfect storm.
"Expectations higher than the performance" is an understatement here.
The problem was Sourcefire didn't play it right by investors.
Here's how the series of events around their Q1 results really unfolded.
In its first quarterly earnings report after the company went public, Sourcefire realized that it was going to miss expectations.
That's really bad news... but well it happens. Investors and analysts understand that much.
But the way Sourcefire tried to convey the news was all wrong.
The company chose to put out a release about the likely earnings miss on Good Friday--a day when the stock markets are closed.
When investors saw the news on Monday morning, they were very upset. To make it worse, Sourcefire never made an attempt to explain the reasons for the miss--at least not till it was too late.
The company didn't make its CEO, CFO or anyone from the company available to the media or analysts to answer questions. I repeatedly tried to get the company and its PR agency to respond to my requests for a comment but they just couldn't be reached.
Sourcefire's stock fell nearly 30% on that day's trading alone. Finally around 3 p.m. --after market close on Monday--Sourcefire released a terse explanation. By then it was too late.
(My story about Sourcefire from that fateful Monday is here)
I find it difficult to believe that you need special acumen to understand this is totally the wrong way to handle something as important as earnings.
What Sourcefire should have done is release the news about the earnings miss on Monday before market opened and have had a brief explanation in the press release about what it thought was the reason for the shortfall.
Sourcefire should have also scheduled a conference call inviting all analysts, media, and investors and explained how the company is doing and what's going on with the numbers.
Something as simple as that could have saved them much grief.
Last when I checked a few days ago, a Wall Street analyst told me it could take nearly a year-and-a-half for Sourcefire to gain back investor & analyst confidence.
Companies can't and shouldn't go public if they are not willing to do what it takes to work with investors and Wall Street. Many times it is as simple as being transparent and upfront about both bad news and good news.
I can't understand how a company, as smart as Sourcefire, could have gone so wrong.
The rest of the interview is about how Marty thinks there's more to Sourcefire than just IPS/IDS. I am not convinced about that either. Sourcefire needs some serious help with telling their story. Any wonder that their stock has been down nearly 25% in the two-and-a-half months since their IPO?
via Mike Rothman's The Daily Incite.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Mike & Robb's Party
Trend Micro's Mike Haro and Horn Group's Robb Henshaw threw a great party on Thursday in San Francisco for IT security folks.
This is the second time they are doing this event and they drew a very interesting crowd of journalists, Wall Street analysts, IT security startup CEOs, Trend Micro senior management, and PR people.
A few interesting conversations from the party:
It was good to catch up with Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda Networks, a company that makes anti-spam appliances. If you have driven on the 101, there's just no way you could have missed their big billboard.
Founded in 2002, Barracuda, has grown into a fierce security player.
Anti-spam is a fairly commoditized market but Barracuda is one of the few private companies that is doing well. They are killing everyone on price and I have had other private security startups complain to me about how aggressive Barracuda is and how willing they are to undercut rivals.
Still Barracuda is a niche player. It doesn't cover the entire IT security needs of an enterprise, or even a sizable portion of that.
The company has grown too big to be acquired by anyone but the truly big boys of IT security. Or Drako will have to take it public. But it may be tough selling Wall Street this story. Barracuda isn't diversified enough in its security offerings and is playing in a commoditized market.
Wall Street isn't happy with public IT security companies now. Many portfolio managers that I have spoken with suggest that despite the potential, IT security stocks don't offer aggressive growth. One fund manager suggested investors would be better off putting their money in a one-year CD instead of an IT security stock as they could get better returns.
I chatted with some of the equity analysts who came to the party about this. The market needs to see one of the existing players do something to surprise them and make them change their opinion.
Anyway, thanks to Robb and Mike for having me there. It was a great location, some good food and wine, and very interesting people.
This is the second time they are doing this event and they drew a very interesting crowd of journalists, Wall Street analysts, IT security startup CEOs, Trend Micro senior management, and PR people.
A few interesting conversations from the party:
It was good to catch up with Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda Networks, a company that makes anti-spam appliances. If you have driven on the 101, there's just no way you could have missed their big billboard.
Founded in 2002, Barracuda, has grown into a fierce security player.
Anti-spam is a fairly commoditized market but Barracuda is one of the few private companies that is doing well. They are killing everyone on price and I have had other private security startups complain to me about how aggressive Barracuda is and how willing they are to undercut rivals.
Still Barracuda is a niche player. It doesn't cover the entire IT security needs of an enterprise, or even a sizable portion of that.
The company has grown too big to be acquired by anyone but the truly big boys of IT security. Or Drako will have to take it public. But it may be tough selling Wall Street this story. Barracuda isn't diversified enough in its security offerings and is playing in a commoditized market.
Wall Street isn't happy with public IT security companies now. Many portfolio managers that I have spoken with suggest that despite the potential, IT security stocks don't offer aggressive growth. One fund manager suggested investors would be better off putting their money in a one-year CD instead of an IT security stock as they could get better returns.
I chatted with some of the equity analysts who came to the party about this. The market needs to see one of the existing players do something to surprise them and make them change their opinion.
Anyway, thanks to Robb and Mike for having me there. It was a great location, some good food and wine, and very interesting people.
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