Audifans.com in the news

[JShadzi at aol.com]

Man, still living in Silicon Valley, I thought the world had forgotten how to do businees, to rewrite the rules, to think outside the box, but thank God Audifans.com's long term strategy hasn't been influenced by proven economic theory and a slight "glitch" in the market.

Its really been disheartening over the last few years to see so many sharp business minds go diving for the nearest "risk shelter" and claiming some kind of "Dot Com Bomb" (whatever that means??).

Markets take time to develop, we just can't expect the whole internet realm of commerce to manifest on only a couple a years, can we??  Webvan.com (online grocery shopping) only lost 900 million, Pets.com (online pet food) started selling its mascott-sock-dog-handpuppett to support its losses when it couldn't sell any petfood, now that is the cutting edge, stoic internet-pioneer attitude that I miss!

Glad to see you guys forging ahead, may all your strategic inflection points signal downward trends and your assets always at least a 1/4th to 1/10 of your liabilities.  Let me know if I can ever contribute to your losses.

Javad

>Posted early this morning.
>
>
>NoJournalisticIntegrity.com
>The Ultimate in Unbiased Reporting
>
>Audifans.com goes IPO!
>
>WESTCHESTER COUNTY, NY  Audifans.com has announced it is in the final
>steps of an Intial Public Offering.  CEO Dan Simoes explained the
>logic behind the move: "One day, we woke up and realized, 'Shit, we'd
>been loosing money for years, why haven't we gone IPO?'.  We've been
>around for almost 15 years, and we haven't turned a profit during
>that entire time.  Our record is unmatched in the business world;
>Worldcom may have lost a couple billion, but did they do it over 15
>years?  Nope, just a few years.  How old school...they relied heavily
>on fraud.  That's what you get for having 'Grey Hairs' in your
>management team."
>
>   The numbers back up Mr. Simoes's comments; since its inception, The
>Quattro List, renamed to Audifans.com, has lost money every single
>year, according to their L/P reports. Audifans.com staff bristle at
>the suggestion that the company name was changed to take advantage of
>the "dot bomb" craze.  "We were loosing money well before we changed
>our name," stated CTO Brett Dikeman.
>
>   Under the symbol AUDI, 10,000,000 shares are to be offered at an
>initial price of $50.  A company employee, who didn't wish to be
>quoted, said "we're all very excited- many of us got great options
>packages.  Management got the best deals, rumor has it around $60 to
>70 per share- we didn't get quite as good a deal, $40 or so.  Still,
>everyone's hoping it'll drop like a rock on the first day.  We may
>even set a record drop!"
>
>   Audifans.com hasn't rested on their laurels, as VP of Development
>Mark Chang explains: "We came to the conclusion that we just weren't
>using up enough bandwidth, so we switched to a mailing list
>management program with at least half a dozen extraneous headers.
>The new software boosted productivity- it made the lists easier to
>subscribe to, which increased the number of WebTV, AOL and Prodigy
>users.  That alone boosted the noise on-lists by a healthy 20%.  That
>wasn't enough- among other things, the sophisticated automatic
>bounce-handling worked really well, and cut down on extraneous
>bounces, negating the overhead of the extra headers.  So we added
>some web-based features whereby people could upload insanely large
>images of their cars.  It's working great- we get a return rate of
>about 10-50x on uploaded content."  There have been successes in
>hidden areas: "The Marketplace worked out better than we could have
>dreamed.  Not only do people post for-sale items in the Marketplace,
>but they post about them on-list, which has the added benefit of
>causing flame wars, and those eat up bandwidth like crazy", Chang
>says, beaming.  "I'll admit, that one was a surprise."
>
>   Not that the journey has been easy, according to Brett.  "A few
>years back, we moved off our ISDN line to a slightly higher capacity
>DSL line.  It was great, our burn rate shot through the roof.
>Unfortunately, now we're in tough times- we've got free hosting now."
>
>   Dewey, of Dewey, Cheatem, & Howe, Audifans.com's accounting and
>auditing firm, echoed the concern: "It used to be we could show a
>loss like that", he says, snapping his fingers.  "Now, we really have
>to work the books to show a loss each quarter.  Our reduced IT
>spending is killing us."
>
>   The worries have been compounded by a rock-solid IT infrastructure,
>according to Brett.  "We're using ancient technology- a single, 10
>year old Sun Sparc clone- not even a real Sun- and we had forecast
>having much more trouble with it.  While it's been slow as molasses,
>doing wonders to boost expenditures in consulting costs while people
>simply wait for it to do something- it's been dead reliable.  We're
>even using a single old hard drive for maximum unreliability.  Every
>once in a while, the drive makes a funny noise, but it just won't
>give up the ship.  We've also had some employee sabotage recently-
>during a recent server move, someone cleaned out all the dust
>bunnies.  We're still investigating that one."
>
>   "We're currently searching for a less reliable vendor to better
>meet our 99.9998% downtime goal.  We had some guys in from Microsoft,
>and they sold us in a heartbeat.  Difficult to manage, scales poorly,
>everything is proprietary, enormous resource requirements, none of
>the software is free, and the OS is unreliable and insecure.  It is a
>dream come true for us.  The only issue we haven't worked out is
>which will loose more money- making staff keep up to date with all
>the system and security updates, or leaving the system(s)vulnerable
>for people to hack."
>
>   We aren't entirely convinced- there are some glaring issues.  For
>example, a downed server consumes no bandwidth, lowering costs.  But,
>their management team shows ineptitude, and in the current market,
>loosing money is hardly challenging.
>
>   What's in store for the future?   Simoes lets the cat out of the
>bag: "We're investigating some breakthrough technologies to help
>lower our Total Profit from Ownership on our equipment.  We'll soon
>have unbeatable losses; our competitors won't know what hit us."
>--
>----
>"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
>safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
>http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/
>