Thursday, February 26. 2009

Bass Somber on Autodesk's Quarterly Numbers

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, somberly began his quarterly call with investors and analysts by indicating his disappointment with the company's quarterly and yearly report and said that the news was not at all what he is accustomed to delivering during investor calls. Bass however believes that Autodesk is positioned well for any potential investments as a result of the recently passed U.S. stimulus package. The company reported that their direct business held up better than that of their partner channel.

"All aspects of our business is being impacted by this slowdown," said Carl Bass, CEO. Declines in revenue were seen across all geographies. Bass said that emerging economies will be an opportunity after this economic downturn. But the company is going through a restructuring phase that includes a hiring freeze, travel restrictions and reduction in head count. The global economic environment has impacted Autodesk's ability to forecast beyond the first quarter of the new fiscal year and they expect a loss for this quarter. The full benefit of restructuring will not be realized until the second quarter. Operating cash flow will be negative for the first quarter as well. The company expects their operating margins to increase throughout the coming year if the economic situation remains the same. Asked by an analyst if he could see a bottom to the market, Bass said that looking broadly on all the economic indicators, not just his sales, "I don't really see any signs [of a bottom]."

When asked a "geography" question by an analyst who wanted to know what regions were not affected by the economy or were relatively strong, Bass joked that Antarctica and maybe Greenland were unaffected, "but perhaps not Iceland as we have seen." More seriously he noted that, "Maybe China or India...but I haven't seen an unscathed territory out there."  

Asked about what the company might do with its cash position, Bass indicated that at these stock prices, the company monitors the situation and might consider a buy back of shares. Regarding possible acquisitions Bass said that, "Our tolerance for acquisitions has gone way down in this market."

Asked if he was considering a more drastic cut back in the company expenses and size given that the analyst asking the question believed that Autodesk could not sustain the revenue levels from the emerging markets, Bass conceded that he did not know what the appropriate level of his company's size should be but would watch carefully during the current year. The same analyst thought that perhaps the company should return to levels seen in 2002 and not 2006 as Bass had indicated earlier in the call. Bass said, however, "We need to size this business considerably smaller."

Microsoft Shows off GeoLife VE Social App at TechFest

Because apparently you can't have a mapping solution without a social layer, Microsoft has been cooking up GeoLife for about a year and testing it out with 112 people. Participants upload their GPS tracks and use those as a base for sharing experiences, places of interest and social interaction.

Continue reading "Microsoft Shows off GeoLife VE Social App at TechFest"

For the PR Folks: "Three quarters of the PR email I receive is irrelevant."

No, I didn't come to that conclusion, some one far more savvy than I did: Josh Bernoff at Forrester Research. He breaks down all the PR e-mail he received in a two week period and provides some great tips for doing PR better, whether you do it yourself or through a third party.

via For Immediate Release

Virtual Alabama May Grow into Virtual USA

FCW reports on the effort, currently being discussed by several southern states. The idea is to allow states to share their own data across jurisdictions no matter their platform. As discussion get going David Boyd, director of DHS Science and Technology’s Command, Control and Interoperability Division reports technology is not the issue, it's getting the players on the same page.

The whole article sounds like every OGC conversation I ever heard. I guess it's good to see progress, but the term standards is not part of the current reporting. That said, I suspect it's in the mix.

Virtual Alabama is built on Google Earth Enterprise; the technology for the pilot of gulf coast states was not detailed.

TomTom/Tele Atlas Pursues LBS Platform Offering

GPS Business News has the story. Here's the key quote from CEO Harold Goddijn, speaking today at the Fourth quarter conference call.

So what you will see coming out of Tele Atlas-TomTom is a set of tools and platforms to make it easy and fast to deploy location-based services in a variety of applications and contexts. That platform of development, you can see some of that if you go to our website and see our route planner. That is a branded expression of those platform tools, but you can expect further development in that space. We will make that type of development available in a white label to a wide variety of customers in the mobile space for them to develop specific applications.

So, instead of standalone solutions noted last year, the company will compete against the likes of deCarta, the recently spun off Autodesk Location Services among others. The big distinguisher? The TomTom offering will be tied to Tele Atlas data. As GPS Business notes, the company is very late to that space.