In Search of the Perfect Investment

I walk the floor searching for the perfect investment. I look for a company with its proverbial shit-together. And I find — so far — only two. Qualcomm and Google.

What I’m looking for is a product/corporate vision that I can understand, that I can see, that I can feel, that I can touch. Vision is the key word here. The company must know where it’s going for years hence. That Vision must viscerally excite me, and make 100% sense — to me.

I’ve been in technology since 1969. That’s 43 wonderful years. I can count the number of companies on one hand with Vision. MCI in long distance telecom. Dialogic in computer telephony. Apple and Microsoft in PCs. Compuserve, AOL, Yahoo in Internet gateways. Google in search. And now Qualcomm in mobile and the Internet of Things. And Google with software for tomorrow’s mobile devices — called Android — and all the other things Google does (like Google Drive and Google Docs).

Along the way, thousands of technology companies appeared, invented something and then disappeared — Polaroid, Eastman Kodak, Sony with walkmen and Trinitron TVs (remember them?). I’ve seen companies do unbelievably well with one product — like Intel in PC chips. Or Microsoft (under Ballmer) in Windows and Office. Or Cisco in big Internet switches.

Walk the floor. You’ll find one product companies all over CES. Case covers for iPhones, loud speakers for cars, processors for gaming, bigger and bigger TVs, devices to hang TVs to your wall, etc. These are one-product companies. They have great sales, for a while. Then they disappear.

They are not enablers. That’s what Qualcomm and Google are.

Together these two will enable others to build the next generation of portable phones, of tablets, of health monitoring gadgetry, of home entertainment systems, of smart TVs, of location devices. All the stuff that will make our future lives richer, safer, healthier, more interesting and more family-knitting (bringing far-flung families together).

I saw the people at Qualcomm demonstrate their new Snapdragon 800 chip running seven sound channel HD TV off a tiny tablet. Shortly to run on a smartphone. A kindly Qualcomm person rattled off the features of this new chip — from power saving to 4G/LTE, to WiFi, to screen rendering… and a million other things. Far more than any other company — including what tired Intel has. I’d give you the full list. But I can’t. As I write this column, I’m hog-tied by the world’s slowest Internet connection.

Try this for idiocy. I’m staying in a friend’s apartment on the 39th floor in the center of things — 300 yards from the Convention Center. It seems Verizon aims its cell phone signals to reach no more than 20 floors up. So at 39 floors, I’m getting the dregs. A smidge faster than dial-up. But not much. That means I can’t scrounge around Qualcomm’s awful website for more technical information on Snapdragon. All I can come up with (until I get back to civilization) are these two links:

+ Charlie Rose interviews Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs before CES and previews Jacobs’ CES keynote speech. Click here.

+ Qualcomm previews the keynote speech on its own awful web site. Click here.

I can’t find a video clip of the actual speech, which demonstrated Qualcomm’s Internet of Things ideas. But it’s somewhere.

You should understand also I haven’t checked Qualcomm’s financials. They may be awful. The stock may be overpriced. Senior management may have sold all its shares. Maybe. Maybe. I could check all these things on the Internet — but not at Verzon’s above-20 story speed. It’s amazing how far we have come to rely on the Internet. Reflecting that is that no one at the show issues press kits any longer. They simply say “Go to our website.” If only it were that easy on the 39th floor.

OK. Now time to look at some product trends — a preview of new things we might buy in coming months:

+ 4K TVs. I thought the TV industry was done. But no. They want to extend 1080p HD (high definition) into something called 4K Ultra-High Definition TV. A 4K image contains four times as much information as today’s 1080p HD. That makes the image much clearer. You’ll be able to see your favorite anchor’s pimples in excruciating medical detail. I didn’t notice any difference between normal HD and ultra-HD.

+ 3D TV without glasses. Watching animation or playing games is wonderful in 3D. I can imagine watching the Australian Tennis Open (starting soon) in 3D. That might be fun. But after that…? Still the TV biz got to sell us something to replace all those big screens we’ve hung on our walls in recent years. I don’t know anyone who’s got walls the size of some of the gigantic TVs I’ve seen in the booths of Samsung, LG, Viewsonic and others. Time to build bigger houses.

+ Smart TVs are those that look like a smartphone. They have apps. Several TV makers, including Haier, included a Roku flash drive which allows you to stream stuff from the Internet directly to your smart TV. Instead of watching your favorite show on your laptop’s tiny screen, you can watch it on your TV’s massive 84″ screen. You can also sit your entire family down in front of the TV and video conference with grandma in Florida. This stuff used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And corporations actually, figuring it would save them megabucks in airline and hotel bills for their people, spent the money. Now videoconferencing is simply on app on a smart TV.

+ Smart cellphones are looking more and more like tablets with a cell chip. Holding one of these huge six inch babies to your ear feels strange. But viewing your emails on a big screen is a big plus for tired eyes. These big babies are already at your local cellphone store. Look at the Samsung Note. Most of these big cell phones seem to be powered by the Google Android operating system (not Windows). Android has benefits approaching (and in some cases) exceeding what you get on an iPhone. Android smartphone sales are eclipsing Apple’s iPhone sales. Another reason I’m pleased I sold all my Apple shares.

+ Still DSLR (digital single lens reflex) cameras are becoming professional movie cameras. Meantime real professional movie cameras are getting cheaper and cheaper. Soon you won’t see the familiar $100,000 klunkers that unkempt camera operators schlepped to  a crime scene or a hurricane disaster. Go on the Internet (I can’t) and check out Canon’s EOS C300. This $16,000 baby can do everything a $100,000 camera could do three years ago.

+ Mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses and big image processors. These turn out pictures as good as a high-end DSLR. But they’re smaller and lighter. I recently bought the Canon G1X, but then left it at home, preferring to bring the smaller Canon G15 which makes perfectly fine photos in low light — so long as you don’t want to enlarge them too big. For serious work, like shooting weddings or animals in Africa, I would only use a DSLR. My favorite is the Nikon D7000. But that’s because I have lenses for it. If I were starting over today with an DSLR, I’d go with Canon. Their software is better. Their customer service is better. And I think their lenses may also be better.

Walking CES, the good news is that the American dream  to start your company and successfully grow it still reigns. I instance two remarkable companies — NiteIze and Able Planet. NiteIze makes stuff that’s “never been done before” (their wonderful slogan) — like devices to mount your smartphone in your car or on your bicycle. And a wonderful product called Gear Tie. Stand in their booth. You want everything — all the neat stuff to organize your life.

Able Planet makes great headphones and hearing aids.

I’ll run some pictures of both companies’ great stuff when I get back to the Internet. You should check them out yourself.

I’ll have more fun stuff tomorrow. I’ve seen about a tenth of the show and my feet hurt.

Harry Newton, who, as a result of yesterday’s tour around CES, will buy a Slingbox and some of NiteIze’s neat stuff. I’ll write more about NiteIze’s neat stuff when I get to a fast Internet.

Meantime, Las Vegas is for gambling. This is a town where people have lost $20 million in a night. (I don’t make this up.) I’m not a big gambler. Every time I have visited Vegas, my routine has been to insert one single quarter into a slot machine, pull the handle and walk away, having lost my entire fortune. Once I brought Susan to Vegas. And we did the 25 cent routine. She pulled the handle. Bingo, she hit the jackpot. The machine disgorged quarters. I wanted to take the money and run. But Susan figured she was Lady Luck and she’d parlay her winnings into that new Porsche Primavera  (see yesterday’s column). Anyway she lost half of her winnings before we finally beat a hasty retreat upstairs to our cozy room to sleep.

So last night, in keeping with my gambling sine qua non,  Dan and I are looking for a quarter slot machine in the Palazzo Casino. No luck. We finally ask a guard, who laughs:

Photo by my friend Dan Good, taken with his Android smartphone.

The Palazzo doesn’t have any 25 cent slot machines any more. In fact, they don’t have any machines that take money. They use plastic cards. (I guess Bernanke is a shareholder.) I feel like an antediluvian idiot. In fact, it’s worse. I’m the only person out of the 150,000 people at the Consumer Electronics Show with grey hair. At 70, I’m twice the age of the average attendee and at least three times the age of the kids manning the booths. It gets worse. I couldn’t even buy a cup of coffee for my quarter (see photo). A small cup costs $3.71 in the Palazzo’s lobby. All this is seriously freaking me out.