COMMUNICATIONS PORTALS COMING!

Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL to name the most important players are all preparing to be communication portals. In other words, instant messaging is about to morph into a voice, data communications home base.

It is going to be very interesting to see who buys Skype. Skype has 42 million registered users. It is the plumb of plumbs in this area. Yahoo recently purchased Dial-Pad which has been a VoIP provider for many years. I suspect Yahoo is still willing to bid on Skype.

Companies such as Comcast and Sprint are working together to make VoIP and cellular seamless. Who knows, maybe Comcast will be the big bidder for Skype which has also made moves to become "mobile". Can you imagine the traffic when kids can play video games and carry on conversations wirelessly from any location for no additional costs--no wonder GLW keeps trading higher and higher.

Google's home portal is now an RSS reader! Gmail also accepts RSS feeds. This means that if you have a favorite news source, you can have updates feed to your home page automatically. It also means the days of the home delivery news paper are numbered. It means the day is coming when consumers will look at one screen to see who has called, who has left voice mail, who has sent email, who has made the news and much more. Voice activation is the next huge step to taking the pocket computer to the next level and changing our lives in ways we cannot understand.

Google is not the only firm to recognize that digital storage space is virtually free. Promise.tv is a personal video recorder similar to Tivo. The big difference is that it records all your TV channels so that you can watch anything at anytime! This sounds so much easier than the Tivo approach of allowing you to burn any shows you record to DVD so that you can take them anywhere. In the long run, the methods will merge such that you really can watch what you want when you want and where you want. Radio anywhere has been available for a long time but the big difference coming is personalized TV and radio anywhere.

One of the many mistakes I made during the past three years was to never double up on my AMX position. The stock is up 275% since we purchased (note the 3 for 1 stock split) and we never purchased another share. It is not too late to buy this one but I really like FON. Using Cramer's term, FON is the best of breed by far. I know! Yes, I know! Sprint does not have the best coverage in the world and a friend had a billing problem and you have heard that xyz is the best cell phone company.

Sprint is the pure play in the US. When you buy SBC or VZ, you are making a bet on their success in the TV business as much as anything else. When you buy FON you are betting that the growth in cell phone business is going to continue. The part of SBC or VZ that are growing the fastest is the cellular phone business. FON is the one who has said it does not want to be in the land line business but would rather partner with the cable companies for connections to the home. The strategy is right on.

Communication portals are coming--Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL but how are they going to go wireless? FON could be the biggest winner of all in this game.

BUY THE BULL! AS HARRY DENT HAS POINTED OUT, THE PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT GM 7 YEARS AFTER FORD INVENTED THE PRODUCTION LINE MADE 22 TIMES THEIR MONEY IN THE NEXT 8 YEARS! FON DID NOT INVENT THE CELL PHONE BUT IT SURE IS POSITIONED TO SELL A LOT OF SERVICE!