Prelude Trust Share Discussion Threads

[hvs] 11/7/2007 13:40

Think the money is better off invested than in the bank.

We shall see.

[fft] 11/7/2007 13:26

Not sure i see the point of investing such a small amount (less than 500K sterling). Seems to me that management fees/time/air fares to be a part of this could wipe out much of the gain. I wonder how much was spent doing diligence on it ?

"Maybe an IPO in the next 12-24 months". Unfortunately, "maybe" is too common a word in the PDT dictionary :-(

[hvs] 11/7/2007 10:11

Yet another investment.

Looks very interesting even though its only 2 1/2 % :

Prelude Trust New Investment


RNS Number:0231A
Prelude Trust PLC
11 July 2007


Strictly embargoed until: 10.00 on 11 July 2007


PRELUDE INVESTS IN VIRTUALLOGIX

Prelude invests US$1 million in Virtualization Software leader


Prelude Trust plc ("Prelude" or "the Trust"), the investment trust managed by
Esprit Capital Management Ltd that specialises in high growth technology-based
businesses, has invested US$1 million in VirtualLogix Inc. ("VirtualLogix" or
"the Company"). VirtualLogix is the leader in Real-Time VirtualizationTM
technology for connected embedded devices. The investment is part of a US$16
million second financing round led by Esprit Capital Partners ("Esprit"), along
with new investor Intel Capital. Existing investors including Atlas Venture and
Index Ventures, also participated in this Series B funding. Prelude has a 2.4%
shareholding in the Company.


VirtualLogix's VLX software enables multiple operating system environments to
run concurrently on shared hardware. Using VLX, semiconductor companies, OEMs
and carriers are able to reduce their development and material costs and improve
time to market for new connected devices. VirtualLogix has experienced strong
momentum in initial vertical market segments that include digital multimedia,
network infrastructure and mobile handsets and works closely with leading
semiconductor companies including ARM, Intel, NXP, and Texas Instruments.


The Company is headquartered in California with operations worldwide following
its recent expansion into Asia. This funding will be used to accelerate a new
phase in the Company's growth strategy including the development of the next
generation of VirtualLogix's real-time virtualization software.

[timtom2] 11/7/2007 08:23

Lots of competition - potentially lots of acquirers or mergers for ZBD too.

At this moment I couldn't care less how PDT remove themselves from ZBD so long as the share price starts to move.

Good to have great technology but we are all only in PDT to make money - and that includes PDT management that are still taking their fees not to mention any income fom sitting on the board of some of the companies in the portfolio. What about the PI's?

[rivaldo] 10/7/2007 21:08

Mention for ZBD in this new report costing a load of dosh to get hold of, including a section on e-paper being perfect for pricing displays to be worth $1.2 billion by 2014:

[rivaldo] 10/7/2007 12:51

:o)) Know what you mean....

Excellent article here about XMOS - it's long so here's two snippets. Good to see TSMC involved:



"07/09/2007 5:42 AM EDT)

LONDON - Fabless semiconductor startup XMOS Semiconductor Ltd. (Bristol, England) is the latest company trying to deploy a multiprocessing architecture, but if pedigree is anything to go by it has more chance of success than many others.

The company is the route to market for the ideas of its chief technology officer David May. Back in the 1980s May was the architect of the transputer - a processor designed specifically for parallel processing - and the author of its accompanying Occam programming language. Before founding XMOS in July 2005, May was the head of computer science at Bristol University having spent a number of years in academia, prior to which he spent 16 years in the semiconductor industry with STMicroelectronics and Inmos. Inmos was where May did his transputer work."

"Having developed its architecture in System C and demoed it on an FPGA, XMOS has just taped out its first product design which is being made for XMOS by foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 90-nm CMOS. The company will be offering chips, software IP and development tools and its first product is due to be announced during the first quarter of 2008."

[rivaldo] 10/7/2007 11:47

Ta Orange1, good find! It's reassuring to know that all those dinosaurs in nuclear power stations will now be fully protected....

TimTom, yep, CPS was the last disposal - not so long ago (January). Maybe another one to come this year.

It's also good that PDT have been able to increase their investment in Xanadu at the old valuation, but it'd be nice to wake up one morning to an RNS stating that X company had raised new funds at twice the previous valuation...still, I suppose that defeats the object of PDT having large slices of companies which will (of course) eventually turn into big winners on disposal or IPO.

Here's more good news - the language from Tribold is very bullish:



"Tribold Sales Team Expands With New SVP Appointment
04 July 2007

London, UK, 4th July, 2007: Tribold today announces a new senior hire as it continues its aggressive global expansion in support of the increasing demand from communication service providers (CSP) for an effective product management solution. Chris Gomersall joins as Senior Vice President Sales, and will be responsible for overseeing all aspects of Tribold's sales, sales consulting, account management and commercial channel management programs.

Gomersall joins Tribold from PolyServe, where he established and ran its EMEA business until the recent acquisition by HP. Prior to PolyServe, he held senior management positions with Peregrine Systems, managing sales across the UK, Netherlands, Nordics, Middle East and Africa, and with IBM Tivoli where, in a similar role, he held revenue responsibility of $140m. Gomersall's earlier career saw him hold sales and management positions with Oracle and Sequent.

Simon Muderack, CEO at Tribold, said: "Over the past 12 months we have seen massive demand from CSPs for a solution to the high cost and complex challenges of managing the hundreds of product and service bundles in their networks. As first movers on the market, with a unique approach and powerful technology solution, we are best placed to address this critical business need. Chris' enterprise IT expertise is a perfect fit for delivering software solutions into the increasingly converged CSP sector, and I look forward to seeing the impact of Chris's entrepreneurial acumen here at Tribold.""

[timtom2] 10/7/2007 08:19

Xanadu and Ubiwave do look a good combo.

[orange1] 10/7/2007 07:43

Here for non-teccies such as Rivaldo and moi is a simple and clear explanation of what the boys at Ubiwave can actually do - they can protect your dynosaurs and detect gas in your underground garage (!):

[timtom2] 10/7/2007 07:31

Further Xanadu investment. Saw the purchase of Ubiwave but didn't dawn on me it may have required further investment - doh!

We really need a divestment else fiscal drag is not the word for it - need to show some return rather than directors playing. Would be good to see the same effort on exits as there is in further investments.

CPs was the last one?

[hvs] 09/7/2007 19:11

Its all buildi9ng up to a good share price recovery.

[rivaldo] 09/7/2007 18:57

A good day...Kiadis news, share price up, and now Xmos is in full PR mode, coming out of "stealth" mode - looks good to me, but techie opinions welcomed:


Extract:
"XMOS Software Defined Silicon Offers Programmable Alternative to FPGA
Posted in FPGAs on Monday, July 9, 2007

DRC Computer Rolls Out Reconfigurable Processor Unit with Largest FPGA »
« Xilinx Introduces Virtex-5 FPGA Gigabit Ethernet Development Kit
XMOS Semiconductor has revealed plans to introduce a completely new type of programmable semiconductor technology. The UK start-up's 'Software Defined Silicon' (SDS) will provide consumer electronics system designers with the unit cost advantage of SoCs and the flexibility of FPGAs.

Based on arrays of processors, SDS devices will allow system functions that would normally be implemented in hardware to be defined in software, unifying the design flow for software and hardware. XMOS Semiconductor will be offering chips, software IP and development tools and its first product will be announced during Q1'2008."

Other articles:




"XMOS chip revolutionises consumer design
by David Manners
Monday 9 July 2007

Today, XMOS Semiconductor, the fabless semiconductor company from Bristol, launches itself onto the market after two years developing its products in stealth mode.

The company's first prototype products are currently at TSMC. In Q4 07, technical details of the architecture and beta tool availability will be announced, and in Q1 08, the first device family, launched at price points between $1 and $10, will be introduced along with development tools and a software IP library.

"Low-cost is always the most interesting place to be," said David May FRS, CTO of XMOS and professor of computer science at Bristol University. XMOS' chips are one tenth the cost of current FPGA chips but they will have enough performance to support 200Mbit/s Ethernet, 7MSPS 16-tap FIR or 500MIPS control software.

The products are a new class of semiconductor devices called software defined semiconductor devices (SDS) aimed at bringing low-cost user programmability to the consumer electronics industry. The chips are programmable in C.

Like the Inmos Transputer, for which May was also the architect, the XMOS architecture is an array of parallel processing cores. It is an event-driven processing engine with pin control integrated within the core (Xcore) allowing the entire system, including interfaces to be implemented in software. XCore-to-Xcore communications capability allows arrays of cores to be built up.

The market need for SDS devices is the dearth of innovation in the consumer electronics industry. "This is all driven by the cost of state of the art ASIC going up and up," said May, "so designers have to design chips that cover the whole world market. That strangles innovation. Innovation has been squeezed out of consumer electronics."

"We want to develop a third party IP community", added May, "the opportunities for developers are enormous. People haven't been able to anything innovative because of the cost of Asic. If you use Asic you have to raise a few million dollars. It wasn't like that, you used to be able to do it in a garage. C allows you to develop IP very very rapidly."

SDS chips will allow consumer companies to try out concepts quickly and cheaply. "To do consumer electronics well you have to experiment in the market by trying products out on customers", said May, "you have to have a fast way of finding what works and what doesn't."

XMOS has venture capital backing from Hermann Hauser's VC fund, Amadeus Capital Partners, and from Esprit Capital Partners. It has a team of 23 people in Bristol. CEO is James Foster, formerly CEO of Oxford Semiconductor, and vp of marketing is Noel Hurley, formerly of ARM.

"When we talked to high volume consumer electronics companies, one of the issues they're having is differentiation," said Hurley, "they tell us: 'I receive my reference design, I've got the software drivers already ported to it. The big issue is that, so do all my competitors. So how do I differentiate my product?'"

SDS provides differentiation. "Customers have software engineers who understand C," added Hurley."

[rivaldo] 09/7/2007 14:19

Kiadis news - Kiadis' valuation in toto is around £32m, not much for a company with a number of products in trials, including one in phase 111:



"Kiadis Pharma Announces Clinical Study with NIH

FDA Approves First Clinical Trial in the United States with Lead Product
ATIR

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, July 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Oncology focused
pharmaceutical company Kiadis Pharma B.V. announced today that physicians
at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) will begin a clinical phase
II trial with Kiadis Pharma's ATIR product. Following existing trials in
Canada and Europe that focus on 'mismatched' bone-marrow transplants, this
will be the first clinical trial with ATIR as treatment for conventional
HLA matched transplants. ATIR was selected after a pre-clinical research
program and will be investigated as a treatment option for terminally ill
blood cancer patients.
"We are extremely proud that NIH, as the leading medical research
authority in the United States, has selected ATIR for a clinical trial. We
believe that it underlines the promise of our product and expands the
potential application for ATIR to a broader range of patients undergoing
bone- marrow transplants." said Manja Bouman, CEO, Kiadis Pharma.
NIH investigators leading the trial are Dr. Stephan Mielke and Dr. John
Barrett of the Hematology Branch of the NIH's National Heart, Lung, and
Blood Institute (NHLBI), who have been approved by the NHLBI Institutional
Review Board and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct the
study.
Bone marrow transplantations are broadly recognized as a treatment
option for patients suffering from blood cancer, such as leukemia and
lymphoma. Despite its promising results, the occurrence of life-threatening
complications often compromises the outcome of patients undergoing
transplantation.
The team of Dr. Mielke and Dr. Barrett aims to significantly improve
the outcome of bone-marrow transplantation procedures for blood cancer
patients. The investigators selected ATIR for a clinical study after a
pre-clinical research program (Mielke et al. 2006). The new study by NIH
focuses on improving donor transplantation procedures and complements the
ongoing clinical trials with ATIR at the University of Perugia in Italy and
Maisonneuve-Rosemount Hospital in Montreal, Canada.
According to Dr. Barrett of NHLBI: "Our study focuses on the
development of transplant approaches that can significantly improve the
outcome for patients by minimizing graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and
non-relapse mortality, and increase anti-leukemic effects. The clinical
protocol has been designed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of ATIR as
an improved selective depletion procedure in HLA-matched transplants.""

[hvs] 08/7/2007 15:43

Its not easy.

Patience is the key.

If the price goes any lower I wil buying yet AGAIN.

[timtom2] 08/7/2007 15:26

1p off the NAV since last update and 14 investments currently vs 6 divestments of the past. Kind of says it all at the moment.

This company is screaming for some exits to add value. They have also said they want to achieve this result to reduce fiscal drag and have given some approximate timescales. That doesn't mean we have to wait another 18 months for the first in the series though.

Let hope for some movement before the end of the summer else we languish still longer or even slip down further.

Any hint of even another penny reduction to NAV and I reckon the discount could widen - this could easily happen if we have a slip-up at one of the portfolio companies.

What next within the next 3 months?

[hvs] 06/7/2007 20:24

This will happen,

Zbd have the technology so it will have more customers soon.

[orange1] 06/7/2007 19:52

Episys and Zbd are partners:

This from 2006:

"ZBD Displays, the retail display innovator, has signed Episys as a global solutions partner. Episys will support ZBD's plans to roll out its electronic point of purchase (epop) displays commercially.

ZBD has successfully trialled its epop displays, which enable retailers to dynamically update prices and product information, with High Street names including Tesco, Metro, Dixons and John Lewis. Following these trials, the company is now manufacturing large volumes and has a strong commercial proposition with early and ongoing return on investment for the retail market.

Episys provides expertise and support for retail signage, labelling and mobile systems. The Episys Retail Enterprise Suite™ allows a retailer to manage all their promotions and product information and deliver the information to customers in the most appropriate format – from printed signage, electronic signage, plasma screens, web pages or catalogues. It has already worked with ZBD in the John Lewis and Dixons trials using the Episys Retail Enterprise Suite™ to deliver promotional and pricing information to the ZBD displays. "

Early in July of this year it was announced that:

"Marks & Spencer is to implement a new labelling system from Episys to streamline marketing messages and enhance customer experience.

Marks & Spencer has chosen Episys' Retail Enterprise Suite for its new in-store labelling solution. The initial phase of the project will be to provide in-store, colour shelf edge labels for all of its food products in more than 530 stores. Subsequent phases will see the solution expanded to cover all shelf edge and promotional signage throughout the estate.

Signage will incorporate both graphics and text. The Episys solution comprises head office control of label design using templates. These are delivered electronically to the stores, where labels can be locally printed in full colour for both food and general merchandise. "

The Marks and Spencers deal is limited to colour shelf edge labels. But could it at some stage involve ZBD's EPOP displays?

[hvs] 06/7/2007 19:29

Patience my friend. It will happen before year end.

[timtom2] 06/7/2007 12:22

m-spatial is just asking to be taken out. The mobile web is now just at the cusp of becoming mainstream and m-spatial are in just the right spot. Probably pocket-money purchase price to Yello Pages, Google, Yahoo etc.

Careful what I wish for but it is high time we saw some activity here.

[timtom2] 05/7/2007 07:34

wonder if todays investment list may be in order of sale IPO too.

Going down the list you can knock-off the "only recent" new investments and get the core out of which divestments could occur.

Still not much the wiser though.

[orange1] 05/7/2007 07:34

NAV announced today and still no higher than in March 2006:

UNAUDITED NET ASSET VALUE AT 30 JUNE 2007

Prelude Trust plc ("Prelude"), the investment trust managed by Esprit Capital
Management Ltd that specialises in technology-based growth businesses, reports
its Net Asset Value ("NAV") on a quarterly basis. Prelude's unaudited NAV at 30
June 2007 was #49.7 million; the audited NAV as at 31 March 2007 was #49.8
million. Prelude had 34,156,564 shares in issue throughout the period, which
resulted in an unaudited NAV per share at 30 June 2007 of #1.45, compared with
#1.46 as at 31 March 2007.

The NAV consists of:

Quarter ended Quarter ended
30 June 2007 31 March 2007

Unquoted portfolio #39.5 million #35.4 million
Net Current Assets #10.2 million #14.4 million
NAV #49.7 million #49.8 million

NAV per share #1.45 #1.46


During the quarter Prelude made additional investments totalling #3.94 million.

Unquoted companies are valued in accordance with International Private Equity
and Venture Capital Valuation guidelines. Net Current Assets comprise net
working capital, cash and short-term investments.

[hvs] 03/7/2007 17:22

I second that.