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| Share Name | Share Symbol | Market | Stock Type |
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| Warthog | WHOG | London | Ordinary Share |
| Price Change | Price Change % | Share Price | Last Trade
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| 0.00 | 0.00% | 0.03 | 01:00:00 |
| Open Price | Low Price | High Price | Close Price | Previous Close |
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Posted at 17/2/2008 20:46 by micky468 For thows who still belive freer-starts-over-wi skip to main | skip to sidebar Wednesday, January 23, 2008 Carl Freer Promises To Resurrect Gizmondo (Here You Can Read the Exclusive Interview) (Originally published in Swedish on Realtid.se, 2007-11-13.) Carl Freer hasn't given up on Gizmondo, and a Chinese manufacturer has promised to help him restart his venture. Photo: Hans Sandberg This is a quick translation of the the first part of a five-part series about Gizmondo, which was published November 12-15, 2007 by Realtid.se, a Swedish business news site. My original intention was to translate the entire 60,000 character series into English, but other work has so far prevented me from doing that. The realease of Stefan Eriksson and a couple of articles in Swedish business press has generated a smatter of blog comments on English blogs, and some refer to my interview with Carl Freer, which is the only interview he has given to media so far. Here it is! "I'm Going to resurrect Gizmondo," Carl Johan Freer says in an exclusive interview for Realtid's U.S. Correspondent Hans Sandberg. He does it because he still believes that Gizmondo can stand up to the competition, and in order to give the investors who lost money in the Gizmondo crash a chance to get some of their money back. "There is still life in this product. Two products dominate the market and there is a vacuum to fill. The Gizmondo was the first real handheld game system capable of delivering several types of entertainment, and we have not seen any other products with similar capabilities," Carl Freer tells Realtid's correspondent. "If all goes well, we will be up and running by May of 2008. I intend to do this version inexpensive and work with open source code." Carl Freer with the original Gizmondo and a mock-up version of the wide screen model. Photo: Hans Sandberg "By Christmas 2008, I'm planning to launch a more advanced Gizmondo with a wide screen. We're also talking to a cellular provider about offering Gizmondo for free to customers who subscribe to a data service," he says. Carl Freer says that he already has an agreement with a Chinese company in Shenzhen. They will set up a production line and manufacture Gizmondo on credit, on the condition that they will become the sole reseller of Gizmondo in China. You need deep pockets to set up a factory, acquire components and start the production, something Gizmondo's owner, the Florida-based company Tiger Telematics never had. "The credit means that I don't need to purchase components, and that I don't need to pay until the day I get the product from the manufacturer's warehouse," Carl Freer says. The dilemma of Gizmondo was, and is, to bridge the time span from when the product is made and when it is placed on the shelves of the retailer. The manufacturer normally wants at least a part of the payment in advance to get started, but the retailers and superstores usually don't pay until they have received the product, unless they demand credit from the seller. It's a long bridge to build, and very costly, especially for a newcomer. Carl Freer told me in a follow-up call after our meeting in New York that Plextek, the British design house in Cambridge has given him green light for their cooperation on the new project. "I was nervous about rebuilding the relationship with Plextek, but we have now built very close ties to them. It also turned out that some of the components we thought we had to redesign completely are still holding up. That is true for the graphics accelerator SE-10 that nVidia custom designed for us. This will save us five months of development work." We have learned that nVidia is willing to restart the production of the graphic card for the Gizmondo (the GoForce 3D 4500 wireless media processor). The reason for why Gizmondo made such a big splash in the media when it was first launched was that it really was a new and exciting product. It got a lot of attention, especially in the gaming community, but it was also severely criticized for being too expensive and having too few games. This is however a criticism that most newcomers face, unless your name is Sony or Nintendo. The original Gizmondo cost $399.00 for the ad-free version and $229.00 if you agreed to view ads delivered by Carl Freer's clever SmartAdds technology. The lack of game titles was however a tough problem, but one that they share with other products that were initially declared dead on arrival by the critics, f. ex. Microsoft's Xbox. But Microsoft could afford to ride out the skeptics' resistance and the product got its boost once Halo was released. Tiger Telematics and it's subsidiary Gizmondo could however not afford to wait, and Carl Freer's own investments in new development tools and new titles through his company Nordic Light was not enough. But today, he has a number of titles to show, including games that take advantage of Gizmondo's built-in gyroscope. The Agaju game combines the gyroscope function with the built-in camera to deliver "augmented reality" in the form of 3D-figures that pop-up on the screen if you point Gizmondo's camera towards an object that has a special code embedded. Carl Freer says that he would love to develop games for McDonald's, games where customers can point their Gizmondo's at Happy Meal-cards encoded for Gizmondo. Carl Freer says that they have 35 titles, of which 6 are new Gizmondo games, and that more are under development. But the biggest surprise must be the price. At first he hesitates to give a figure, but by the end of my seven hour long interview, he says that he is pretty confident that he will be able to sell the revived Gizmondo for $99.00. Carl Freer says that he never believed that he would be able to push Sony or Nintendo aside, but that it is possible to capture a niche of the market, and that it could be a profitable venture because the market is so large. He says that he also hopes to be able to build an alliance with independent game developers and open-source programmers. "The market for handheld games has stagnated and there is too much status quo, but I think the consumers want to see more innovation. One of the great opportunities with Gizmondo was that we opened the door to open source code, and that is a huge issue among game developers today. Normally you have to buy expensive Software Development Kits and pay expensive royalties to the hardware manufacturers, but as Gizmondo runs on Windows CE, and the games are delivered on a regular SD-card, both amateurs and pros can join in and develop everything from simple games to complex games that fully uses Gizmondo's technical capacity with its 3D-graphics," he says. "We are also going to bring out an easy to use program that allows kids that doesn't have any experience at all to create their own games on a PC, save them to a SD-card and play them on their Gizmondo. I think many teenagers will love this concept," he says. Florida-based Tiger Telematics will formally own the new Gizmondo. "My plan is to elect a new board, assign new ... and appoint a new management. Mike Carrender is still CEO, but the company doesn't run any business at this point. The shareholders have nothing to loose, and it won't cost them anything, but without their support I can't do it," Carl Freer says, indicating that he is talking to at least one of the company's institutional shareowners. He has also come to an agreement with the British liquidation firms regarding his plan to restore Gizmondo. "The only other example of anything like this is Canary Wharf," says James Hunt, who performed an investigation into Gizmondo on behalf of the liquidation firms Begbies Taylor and David Rubin. Canary Wharf was restored six years after having been declared bankrupt. It's not hard to understand why the liquidators like the idea of getting more resources for those that the company owes money, but wouldn't the institutional investors hesitate before working with one of the key men behind Gizmondo. "Not at all! Everybody doing business with me has done their due diligence. And if you do that, you will see that the Gizmondo crash was a tragic event. I didn't cause it, and I haven't profited from it, or done anything contrary to my fiduciary responsibility towards the company. No large company will work with you if you've done something bad, it doesn't matter if you have discovered a new vaccine against AIDS! Of course I have missed opportunities because of Gizmondo, and there are companies we ought to have worked with, but that has nothing to do with any guilt on my part," he says. But why not simply start a new company instead of working with Tiger? "I feel a responsibility towards the smaller investors who lost money on Gizmondo. I regret that I wasn't stronger, that I didn't do more to save Gizmondo, and that is what I am trying to do now. The large institutional investors often did all right. They had departments that read our 10K reports to the SEC. I would like to bring our product to the market so that those who invested in me will get some of their money back. It has to do with my self-respect. I feel like have an unfinished business, and I am ashamed over that a company with such a great potential crashed when I was in charge. I want to make that right, but I also want to be able to be heard, to answer back to the smearing that has been going on against me personally." "I know that I'm not perfect, and that I've done made some rotten decisions in my life, but I take responsibility for them. I've never had anybody else suffer for decisions I've made personally. Those who I let down are the people who bought shares in the company, who believed in the opportunity. They must of course have realized that Tiger was a high-risk project, but I still feel that I let them down. More than anything, I regret that I resigned as CEO during the crisis," Carl Freer says. Will you lead the company? "I'm not sure. My instinct says no. Ideally I would just get it started and then let it continue under new management. I intend to work hard with Blowfish Works, but I'm ready to take charge of Gizmondo if needed. But that's one of those questions I'm trying to avoid." |
Posted at 01/11/2007 00:02 by knowing Private Investors Van |
Posted at 23/10/2007 13:27 by dusseldorf mrnitelite - its barclays stockbrokers. when any client of theirs e.g. could be one of the people here, buys a few shares - they have to make an announcement. I wouldn't read anything into it. It just means there are lots of private investors who will be carrying the can should it go under |
Posted at 15/10/2007 09:45 by philwill A shell company is a company that exists but does not actually do any business or have any assets. The most interesting type of shell company (to investors) is one that has a listing. This is a listed shell, and is almost always what is meant by a reference to a shell in an investment context.Given that it takes time and money to obtain a listing, a listed shell has significant value even if it does not have any assets. Listed shells are therefore often the targets of reverse takeovers. |
Posted at 27/3/2007 10:52 by dusseldorf rmart - I would assume that Barclays (only via Barclays stockbroker) only have a substantial holding as one or more private investors (who trade shares via Barclaycard stockbroker) have accumulated holdings - so I wouldn't read too much into it at this point in time |
Posted at 21/3/2007 10:00 by the_professor Chaps get into BRF (Bright Future) - promised RTO news BEFORE the end of this month - recently appointed new brokers and advisors and big investors have been steadily accumulating shares - should head north very soon!! |
Posted at 05/11/2006 17:47 by linsay33 Just been looking at a site for info' on Laser T.V.'s. Supposedly the next generation of television. It says that the biggest investors in this are the same guys that came up with the GIZMONDO.Surley they are not talking about the same lot involved with TGTL. |
Posted at 28/4/2006 10:44 by 300808 Ribton - you can get him on acorn partners number - WHOG aim cash shell is listed under their portfolio now; maybe why they don't have to delist the company:-Team, Acorn has a small yet highly qualified and dedicated team of professionals who have considerable expertise and experience. The team has largely been together for a number of years and is committed to providing a proactive and proficient service to investee companies and investors alike. Ian Templeton FCA - chief executive, A founder of Acorn, Ian was also a founding Partner of the Manchester and Liverpool firm of BDO Stoy Hayward, resigning in June 2000 to establish Acorn. He has extensive experience in corporate finance, insolvency and corporate restructuring. Ian shares his experience and expertise with a number of Acorn investee companies as a board member and is currently the Non-Executive Chairman of AIM quoted Warthog plc. Ofice details, Acorn Capital Partners, Bollin House, Riverside Park, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 1DP Tel +44 (0) 870 122 5420 Fax +44 (0) 870 122 5421 Email mail@acorncapital.co |
Posted at 27/2/2006 09:01 by sunshine57 I agree MRPHIL and I am wondering whether the investors can get indemnity from this Company who appears to have blatantly misused investors money to break the law? Perhaps we should all do our homework on it, after all, it seems fraudulent to me to take people's hard-earned cash in this way with no retribution. Makes you wonder whom we can trust in this business if one gets away with it! |
Posted at 16/1/2005 10:42 by soysoy very good stuf there soysoy - 16 Jan'05 - 10:35 - 505 of 505 edit Invisage - 11 Dec'04 - 19:30 - 1 of 130 Market Makers- the official version 1. What are Market Makers? a. What are Market Makers? i. Market Makers are companies who have agreed with their clients and who have been approved by regulators to "Make a market" in the shares of the client. b. Who are the Market Makers? i. They are usually large international banking organisations, usually with thousands if not tens of thousands of employees' worldwide. c. What is the job of a Market Maker? i. Simply it is to make a market, i.e. to ensure that there is always a market in which investors can buy and sell shares of the clients they are Market Makers for. d. Who is a Market Maker responsible to? i. Their shareholders. ii. Their clients. iii. The broker with whom they are entering into a contract with. iv. Whilst not strictly "responsible to" the regulator the Market Maker has to be able to demonstrate that the obvious conflict of interests arising from this list are dealt with in an appropriate manner, and that no one is especially advantaged or disadvantaged. e. What is a client in the Market Maker context? i. The client is the quoted company. Quoted companies have contracts with the Market Makers in their stock. They are usually large international banking organisations, usually with thousands if not tens of thousands of employees' worldwide. 2. Market Manipulation or doing their job? a. Do Market Makers manipulate the market? i. "Market Manipulation" is an emotive term, and conjurors images of shady deals and exploitation. Market Makers are not elusive companies that appear then vanish overnight. Market Makers are duty bound to make a market and to meet the needs of those they are responsible to (See 1d.) to this end they may try to influence the market. b. How Do Market Makers make their money? i. Market Makers make money from buying shares at a lower price to which they sell them. This is the bid/offer spread. (See 4.) The more actively a share is traded the more money a Market Maker makes. c. Surely a Market Maker raising/lowering the price on news/rumour without any buying or selling is manipulating the market? i. No, not really. If the Market Maker was to keep the price steady on the release of news they would find themselves with lots of buys or sells which they had no choice but to fulfil at the screen price but before they could find matching orders (buys for sells, sells for buys) they would have to change the price and they would then loose money through market exposure. This is bad for them and for us. (See 3.) d. Why do Market Makers raise prices on Monday morning for shares tipped in the Sunday press? i. This is the same as question 2c, because the Market Maker needs to ensure that there are enough sellers to fulfil the needs of the buyers responding to the tips. e. Suppose my screen shows all sells and the price is increasing, what is the Market Maker doing? i. An explanation of this phenomenon is given for Tadpole, which very briefly shot up to 73p before settling back comfortably to the 50p support level. The likeliest explanation is that the Market Maker had an Institutional order to fill and no stock to fill it with (this trade would not have shown up on peoples screen until somewhat later), under thier obligations to create liquidity in the share the Market Maker is obliged to gather a stock holding, only possible if they can encourage people to sell, which can be achieved by raising the price. The order is likely to have been large enough to be significantly outside the NMS thus allowing the Market Maker to gather a fairly significant premium on the price (probably being some-where between 50p and 73p allowing the Market Maker to offset gains against losses and still profit). Once the order is filled and the market volumes return to thier "normal" levels, so does the share price. f. Do Market Makers ever lower prices to "panic" investors into selling, sometimes called "shaking the tree"? i. Yes, moving the price up, encourages sells, moving it down also encourage sells, take another look at Tadpole, in the first instance, the price was hiked way up despite the 50p support level, but at 50p few of the people who got in between 20p and 45p are going to sell (and look how many buyers there were still at 50p), the rise was meteoric, smart money just ignored it as it only lasted about 2 hours, but what was probably caught was huge investors who were in way before 20p and had forgotten about it, now they want out. The Market Makers order gets filled, the price settles back to a smart support level and volumes decrease, however the Market Makers gets another order to fill, maybe not so big, maybe not so prepared to pay the premium, but you also know that there are a lot of people out there waiting to see if it's going to shoot up past the 50p support level again or dip and if it dips they're going to sell now before it dips back past their 100% profit level. g. Surely delaying the posting of trades is Market Manipulation? i. This was allowed as part of the SETS trading system when institutional investors pointed out that with 100% transparency, any other institutional investor would be able to trade against that position which would put their client holdings in jeopardy. Further, with 100% transparency, if it could be seen that an institutional investor was (for whatever reason) adjusting a large holding in a particular company it could also scare private investors into selling or alternatively encourage them to invest without doing thier own research. Both scenarios lead to either over- or under-selling and an inaccurate reflection of the company in the share price as a direct result. h. Do Market Makers try to reduce volatility? i. Sometimes, usually at the request of the client (see 1e), this is mostly done by increasing the bid/offer spread therefore discouraging trading especially by day traders and also by marketing the clients shares to institutions in the hope they will take up long term positions. ii. By asking their client to reduce the number of news releases. i. Do Market Makers encourage liquidity? i. Yes, partly because they have a duty to their client to ensure an active marking in their clients shares, and partly because they have a duty to their shareholders, it is only through trading/liquidity that Market Makers make money. j. How do Market Makers encourage liquidity? i. Partly just by being there, by being the enabler to liquidity, they will always buy or sell shares if you want to. ii. By narrowing spreads. iii. By encouraging their client to produce news releases. 3. Are Market Makers risk adverse? a. Does a Market Maker hold "stocks" of the shares they make a market in? i. No. Market Makers are there to make a market, not to act as some form of stock control system. At any one time a Market Maker is likely to have a position in the stocks they are the Market Makers for, but this position could just as easily be short as long. However having a position (of either persuasion gives market exposure and Market Makers try to avoid this.) (See 3d.) b. Can Market Makers take a short position? i. No and yes. Market Makers are not supposed to allow themselves to go short, but in process of making a market they may well find themselves short of a stock. If this happens a Market Maker has a number of options, purchase from another Market Maker, fiddle with the price in the hope that enough sellers will emerge to cover the short or borrow the shares from an institutional investor. c. What is market exposure? i. Market exposure is the amount of money you have exposed to the vagaries of the market, i.e. the amount of money you could loose or gain from your positions open in the market. d. Why do Market Makers avoid market exposure? i. Simply because a Market Maker who is over exposed to the market is giving systematic risk to the whole market. Ill explain... If a Market Maker was to take up lots of large position across the whole range of shares they make a market in then if there was a market crash the Market Maker may find themselves bankrupt (ala Nick Leeson and Barings) and therefore unable to make a market. Once there is no longer a market the shares will become pretty worthless (if you cant sell something, at any price, what is it worth?), this in turn could force other Market Makers to go bankrupt and the whole thing would spiral down into a very unpleasant mess. We would all loose vast amounts of money from our pensions, endowment policies, insurance funds, Unit Trusts, Investment Trust and direct equity investments, in addition to which an important source of cash for companies would vanish! 4. Prices; how do they work? a. What do the on screen prices reflect? i. The prices you see on screen are the best prices currently being offered by any and all the Market Makers for the share you are looking at. b. Why do spreads change? i. Market Makers can and do change their spreads, but nowhere near as often as you see the spread change on the screens. (See 2h.) ii. The main reason that spreads change on screen is because the screen shows you the best prices on offer. c. Why are some spreads so large? i. The stock may be very volatile and the Market Makers needs to protect themselves from sharp price movements and market exposure. ii. The client (see 1e.) may have asked the Market Makers to reduce volatility. iii. The price and NMS combination maybe so small that the Market Makers need a large spread to ensure that they cover their costs and make a profit. d. What's an inverted price? i. The prices you see are always "the best prices" it is possible that Market Maker A is offering to sell the shares for less than Market Maker B is offering to buy them at. Normally the reverse is true, so this is know as an "Inverted Price". e. Do Market Makers have to buy and sell at the quoted prices? i. Yes, so long as the quantity of shares you want to trade is equal to or less than the NMS. f. How come my broker can sometimes get a better price than those onscreen? i. Basically because Market Makers compete with one another for business. When your broker calls the Market Maker he is giving them the opportunity to 'bid' for the business, the Market Maker may well improve on the price on offer via the screens. The Market Maker only makes money when they are buying and selling, so the Market Maker will prefer to see the business go through their books at a reduce margin than allow it to go to another Market Maker. g. What is Normal Market Size (NMS)? i. It is the quantity of shares for which the Market Makers are quoting prices. IE for which the prices are valid. h. Why don't Market Makers set a price based on intrinsic value? i. The first person that comes up with a calculation that is 100% accurate for 100% of quoted companies is going to be very rich indeed. Market Makers no more 'know' the intrinsic value of share than you or I do. ii. If they got the calculation wrong everybody would be buying or everybody would be selling, leaving the Market Maker with huge market exposure. iii. Intrinsic value is still a notional value, since surely something is worth exactly as much as they highest bidder is willing to pay. iv. Many investors value "in fashion" shares at far more than the traditional "intrinsic" valuation methods would yield, again this would lead the Market Maker having huge market exposure. i. How come I don't see my trade listed? i. Trades for less than 3000 units don't have to be reported. ii. Some stocks don't have to have trades reported. iii. Your broker has batched up your trade with others. iv. Your trade was large enough to cause the Market Maker to treat it differently, it will be reported at a later stage. v. Your broker arranged the trade via an alternative to Market Makers. j. Do Market Makers make money from the raise or fall in share prices? i. Probably not. Market Makers make money from trading, at all times they try to minimise the open positions they have, so the actual price of a share is of little consequence to them. (See 3.) |
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