The Tech Stock Investor

General Motors was once used as faithfully as the DOW as a barometer for the entire US economy. If GM dipped so followed the market. Lately, GM has suffered from several angles. Earlier in the year, GM was outsold by Toyota. This was the first time the company had been outsold globally, albeit by a narrow margin. Mounting health care costs and a beneficiary burden (which some estimate at 1 worker supporting 2.6 retirees) is slowly grinding away at GM’s ability to compete in North America.

GM’s other woes have usually followed prolonged strikes by labor unions. This has led to reduced sales and crippling some operations for weeks at a time. Management has cut jobs, closed plants, and done everything short of merge with another company to prevent the continuing crumble of the company. A preliminary agreement seems to have been met today and it looks like the strike may be over very soon. This pushed GM shares up a bit and tugged Ford’s shares up with it. Is the long term solution for GM a merger? Some have speculated once in a while that a merger with Ford could produce a more dynamic company since they both share a lot of suppliers and vendors in the supply chain.

Personally, I feel that the days of the multinational conglomerates which were formed in the US are numbered. Regulatory problems keep them from competing globally and domestically with foreign competition which has free reign and little regulation in their home countries. Keep yourself diversified and consider your portfolio warned.

Times and technologies sometimes change quickly but for some the changes needed to get WiMax rolling nationwide have been slow to manifest. For investors, WiMax is the next big growth opportunity for the web and tech investing. A discussion of WiMax would not be complete without a little background which we can pull from the WiMax Forum’s website:

WiMAX is a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to wired broadband like cable and DSL. WiMAX provides fixed , nomadic, portable and, soon, mobile wireless broadband connectivity without the need for direct line-of-sight with a base station. In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified™ systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications.

What does this mean for users of the WiMax technology? In a nutshell, it means you get nice DSL-like speeds at your home and if you have to travel you will just take it with you and use the same account and access provider regardless of where you go. No more trying to fiddle with network settings at every wifi hotspot and hotel room. Just plug in your laptop and get some work done.

So where is the investment opportunity here? The WiMax Forum website has a page where you can view all the companies. Just go to the WiMax Product Registry page and you will find three drop down boxes. Just hit the “Go” button on the middle one (don’t type anything in) and the server will return a nice list of companies which are WiMax Forum Certified. Now these companies provide the equipment that WiMax runs on and some of them should make a solid investment at some point. The real gem is not listed here.

The real gem, which is striking quickly into the WiMax market, is ClearWire Corp.(CLWR). Trading at a healthy clip, ClearWire is not stranger to volatility and nice price swings. The YTD high is 35.41 and the low hit 15.81. The company is led by CEO Ben Wolff and Chairman Craig McCaw, both veterans in the wireless communications industry. McCaw is a former director for Nextel Communications, Inc. and Wolff has deep contacts built while representing 360 networks, Allied Signal, Eagle River, ICO, Intel, NEXTLINK and Starbucks Coffee Company in various corporate and transactional matters while he was a partner with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP.

While shares have taken a recent dip, takeover chatter has increased dramatically and partnerships in the works with Sprint Nextel and DirectTV have only fueled speculation on the stock. In any case, this is a gem in the rough and I will personally be keeping a sharp eye or two on it in the coming months.

In a surprise move that few probably expected, the New York Times has announced that it will begin making a large part of it’s past archives available to the public for free. It will also open access to more sections of it’s website for free as well. According to their own article, they were surprised by the large amount of traffic they received from search engines and indirect links. Users faced “the pay wall” were likely to leave without returning (I am among these).

So a lot more of their content should be available to the general public. Now those links from blogs to NYT articles might actually work in the future. I know that personally this was a very aggravating things to click a link and get a big message saying I would be able to read the story right after subscribing. A lot of the news articles they posted were also available from other news sources, so this makes sense.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

Advertising revenues outstripped subscriber growth and the bottom line is that free content is still king on the web. Good move NYT. We look forward to reading more articles. :)