Re: escorts 'r' us

[drobbins@net2net.com (David Robbins)]

At 10:47 PM 11/5/96 -0500, fjbauer@dsavm.e-mail.com wrote:

>>   It is my belief that Cinncinnati Microwave was bought out by Cobra, and    
>>that is why Valentine, one of CM's founders, started his own company
making th 
>e
>>V1. The flyer the new CM sent out last year at Christmas about their 900mhz  
>>spread spectrum phones also offered what they called the state-of-the-art    
>>answering machine; upon close observation with a magnifying glass it had
Cobra 
>>in nice letters across it...go figure. The original CM didn't do phones,
Cobra 
>>always has...

>
>i don't dispute that cobra owns CM, but i doubt cobra bought out mike v.      
>otherwise we would have seen the cross marketing much sooner.  keep in mind   
>valentine signed the standard 5 year non-competitive agreement when he bailed 
>out of CM.  how long has the V1 been on the market? at least 3-5 years?       
>that means m.v. has been out of CM 8-10 years.  if you remember, his first    
>product from valentine research was the g-analyst and that was mid to late    
>80's.  btw, i thought CM was marketing an early (and very un-cobra-like)     
>900 MHz (or cell?) phone in the late 80's at very (at the time) CM-like
prices. 
>too bad!  i remember when CM was a respectable name and escort was the
industry 
>benchmark.  now it's just "which sticker should we slap on it before we put    
>it in the box."                        

Sorry guys, a quick visit to the Cincinnati Microwave homepage
<http://www.cnmw.com> will show you that this is not the case.  One of the
pages  states:  "Shares of Cincinnati Microwave, Inc. are traded on the
NASDAQ National Market System under the symbol CNMW."

The deal with Cobra is a just a straight OEM deal, which is quite common in
high tech.  This deal allows CM to sell their products through an alternate
channel (retail) while maintaining their direct sales process, which has
worked well for them for years.

Also, to my knowledge, CM actually owns some patents on the 900 MHz spread
spectrum technology (mind you, this is not all 900 MHz phones).  Among
others, they license it to AT&T. 

-DMR.