Big Sofa Technologies Share Discussion Threads

[colinzeal] 05/3/2018 18:23

Says the fish.

[slartybartfaster] 05/3/2018 15:55

Says the guru.

[colinzeal] 05/3/2018 15:06

Some people use the little red "fortune fish" to make their investment decisions.

[bumpa33] 05/3/2018 13:36

Satire? I’ve read better out of a Xmas cracker.

[philjeans] 05/3/2018 11:43

Bargain now after last week's transforming news!

Up to 20p in short order.

[sweet karolina] 04/3/2018 20:45

Bumpa,

Can you really not see the satire in CB's piece?

Thanks to those who have tried to give sensible answers to my questions. I won't be investing, but I wish everyone all the best with whatever investing decisions they make.

I will leave you to your discussions.

[bumpa33] 04/3/2018 18:40

funny, how some (most?) people in life have such a massive problem with their own stupid inflated sense of self-worth in just accepting that they got something wrong? Fascinating really.

Cynical Bears 'apology', well sort of, not really, i'm just too smart but messed up once, type of apology...


I dropped Tom a note immediately upon seeing the great looking Ipsos funding deal with Big Sofa Technologies (BST) on Friday morning saying that it looked like good news. He followed up immediately with a demand for a grovelling apology. Being a reasonable sort, I thought I had better do the decent thing and give him as fulsome a one as I can muster from the bottom of the heart.

All I can say is sorry; I messed up. No-one can get it right all the time and I thought I would look back through my thesis to see where it all went wrong.

Readers will be aware that I have commented on Big Sofa on two occasions; first, after its interims at the end of September 2017 in which I was bearish on the outlook and then again following the recent trading update where I remained concerned about cash.

My bearish stance was based on two strands. First, that it would take longer than anticipated to sign up these behemoth consumer giants as clients and deliver material revenues. The company now tells us as part of the use of funds paragraph that:

“It will also enable Big Sofa to accelerate further investment in its video analytics platform and technology infrastructure, resulting in a more scalable platform, as the pipeline of prospective work increases, but a longer lead time to operational breakeven. “

I have put that sentence through Google Translate on the Management Jargon setting but I’m none the wiser although it seems that we are still awaiting the long-promised operational breakeven. I note from Nigel’s excellent Company Chat piece on Friday that this should now be in Q3 or Q4 2018.

Anyway, sorry about that.

My second strand was linked to the above in that I thought the business would need more cash within six months and I repeated this point after the trading update. At the time, Tom thought cash was not an issue.

So yesterday Big Sofa announced the raise of £3 million to get it through to profitability.

Ok, Ok, I admit it, you were right Tom and I was wrong – you win!

Tom aside, I also want to apologise to shareholders here. If you took my advice to sell at 19p at the start of October and were forced to buy back in on Friday at 15p on the promising news, then I take full responsibility for that. Please send me details of your trades and your losses and I will reimburse you fully.

More seriously though, I do think the Ipsos deal is great.

- Raising money at a significant premium should be applauded;

- Big Sofa now puts the cash question behind it for the time being and can invest and grow;

- It can pay off the old New World Oil & Gas debt which has been hanging around; and

- Most importantly, it has strengthened its relationship with Ipsos and has a validation of what it is doing from someone in the market who knows the industry a damn sight better than me.

That is all good news and I wasn’t surprised to see the share price tick up a bit. I’m guessing further rises will be dependent on seeing more contract wins.

Personally, I remain on the fence for now and would like to see more customer traction before considering investing. I will review the final results with interest focussing on two things. First, cash - I still have an underlying concern about how much headroom they have with an additional £2.3 million in the bank as cashflow break-even will be a few months behind operational break-even for reasons I’ve discussed before, namely the fact that these customers believe it is acceptable to stretch their suppliers to breaking point by paying them on 90 days if that. I will also study the outlook statement closely and assess how positive it is in terms of new contracts and customers. The good news is that I would expect the results to come out sooner rather than later as it is always easier to get the going concern stuff passed the auditors immediately after a significant raise.

In the meantime, I will just leave now, head bowed, wondering how I could have assessed this all so badly. I’m sorry, OK, now leave me alone!

[bumpa33] 04/3/2018 18:32

i see the loud mouthed, personality by-pass chimpers is here too eh.

Cool, I'll leave the thread to it, no point in trying to converse when "The Ego Has Landed".

[parsons4] 04/3/2018 18:27

Chimers I am glad I didn't read your stupid piece !!! All that from somebody else who hasn't got a clue what they do !!!

[terryebby] 04/3/2018 18:05

i think this debate about "face saving" is omitting one important point. When we look at AIM companies like BST we have to treat them more like Venture Capital Funded starts ups then solid cash generative behemoths. VS funded businesses NEVER fully fund their en tire jour new in one round. They have a Seed round to build an Alpha, The a Series A to talker a product to a test market then a Series B to SeriesN as they gradually scale the business up. Start ups are very difficult to forecast and you never know how much money you will need to get traction. So this constant scaremongering about AIM companies running out of money misses the point. Of course they need cash, the key is can they raise cash at the right time for good investor to complete their journey. I would suggest that raising what is effectively a Series D round from one of the Worlds biggest marketing services companies who have tried and liked the product and now want to see it go to scale cannot possibly be seen as anything other than great news, and the fact that it was done at above the market price shows conviction. Why on Earth any entrepreneur wants to put up with this hostility from anonymous people slagging them off for what is in Silicon valley precisely the way a small company behaves is beyond me, but I am happy to have invested in a Company that I think could well become very significant, and could easily be taken over at a very big premium to where we are now

[parsons4] 04/3/2018 18:04

Sweet Karolina you may think you are a technical person but I don't think you know as much as you think you do. I certainly don't know the detail of what BST do but I can see that they have MARKETING tools which have been developed over time. These are evidently superior otherwise a company like IPSOS would not be using them or be investing a substantial amount in them. Many of their clients are household names which doesn't suggest that "anyone could do it" I don't think anybody is going to be able to tell you any more than slarty..........has done (he probably doesn't know much more than he has stated otherwise the competition would be interested). For my part I have jumped on board with a small investment and will be watching closely.

[slartybartfaster] 04/3/2018 18:00

SK, sorry darling, but you can't be that tech savvy if that went over your head. Best not invest. Best not look at Opti either, that may just tip you over the tech edge IMO.

[slartybartfaster] 04/3/2018 15:12

SK, possibly explained in part.

BST is a B2B technology business servicing the marketing and consumer insight industries with video analytics. Its software platform collates, analyses and organises large volumes of raw/unstructured video content enabling companies to perform detailed and sophisticated consumer insight analysis; and make genuine use of their video content. Until recently, video has been difficult and expensive to capture, upload, store, manage and analyse as a consumer insight tool. However, proliferation of smart phones has empowered consumers to speak directly to brands resulting in an evolution of consumer insight and data analytics techniques, with video emerging as a key platform in a massive $33 billion consumer research market. The tech side of your query is probably clouded in IP and NDAs.

[sweet karolina] 04/3/2018 14:30

vilage_idoit,

I have read the website and it does not answer any of my questions, which is why I was hoping someone on here could.

Don't invest in something you don't understand is a key mantra of the most respected investors.

So far it would seem most here, who have invested, have done so without understanding what they have invested in or they would be able to answer my fairly straight forward questions, which I can answer on every other share I am invested in.

I see no point ringing the company, not only for the reasons BBM has provided but if they cannot explain it properly on their website in a clear manner that anyone can understand I doubt they would be prepared to do any better over the phone.

Thanks for taking the trouble to respond in as courteous and informative manner as you could, that is what these boards should be about, but so rarely are. I would still be grateful to anyone, bull or bear, who can give reasoned answers to my questions.

[slartybartfaster] 04/3/2018 12:53

bumpa you will have to ask michaelmouse. Don't expect him to give to a straight answer, even if he does reply. He is a known liar, this is why he has several threads dedicated to him and warning others about him. He likes a confrontation for sure, until he starts losing it and then the filter excuse is pull from the sleeve. That and the multi avatar excuse, that is his fav. He was caught out with it last week. Funny.

[bumpa33] 03/3/2018 23:26

ah, so that's his angle...

[slartybartfaster] 03/3/2018 22:27

I see michalemouse is bashing Tw tips and has been for years. Ffs get a life.