A complete guide when choosing an eye tracking solution
Join us (Rob Wesley, Brant Hayes and Aaron Galbraith) live on June 10th at 6PM CET for this webinar where we will go through the background of understanding eye tracking followed with a guide when choosing the right eye tracking solution for your purpose.
Huhujen mukaan joitakin jenkkisijoittajia alkanut kiinnostua firmasta
Ajankohtakin viittaisi vähän siihen, että halutaan joillekin “uusille omistajille” kertoa mikä SmartEye oikein on…?
Osa ihan valideja pointteja Colinilta (mm. softastackien integrointi ei ole helppoa), mutta normaalit analyytikot analysoivat yhdistymistä esim pros&cons tyylisesti.
Colin taas ei löydä normaalin tapaansa Smartista tai sen ekosysteemistä mitään hyvää ja hakemalla hakee kaikkea negaa.
Kysymykseen, miksi Cerence ei ostanut Affectivaa, jos Affectivan teknologia kerta niin hyvä ja Cerencen arvo moninkertainen, voisi vastata vastaavasti, että miksi joku BMW, Ford, GM tai Qualcomm ei osta Seeing Machinesin nakkikiskaa, jos heidän teknologia niin ylivoimainen.
Kesa, let me provide some pro points for the deal:
The two companies are complimentary with little overlap. Good, you won’t need to spend 3-6 months deciding which developments to stop (but you won’t be able to reduce development costs much)
The media part of Affectiva is profitable - good, it should be able to fund the cost of 1or 2 good engineers in Boston or Sweden
Staff in Egypt (plus contractors?) provide cheap labelling for test data. Useful for emotion, and verification of possible state in video - have some video, possibly mostly for emotion and linked to media consumption rather than automotive. But they do have some automotive video but don’t have the experience of optical path, so will not be representative of real life embedded camera and lighting.
Complimentary in locations, but this also gives little fat to cut as will still need HR, finance, management etc for each country but will enable extra office location for merged sales staff.
Extra PR Affectiva are excellent at PR. I have been listening to the podcasts for over a year. They follow a wide range of subjects to get their name out there, especially the good Dr with her book. They are good at getting attention which was essential when funding thru VC
Colin is right, merging two ISO 26262 stacks will be hard. But it will be easier if you assume that Affectiva aren’t auto qualified and you only try to add the bare minimum of Affectiva into the SEYE stack and bring that part up to SEYE standard. (ASIL?)
You probably don’t need to write off the $10m or so that it takes to optimise Affectiva for HW acceleration. So now you will only need to do it once, when you have merged stacks
The best part of the merger/acquisition (other than the extra staff (cash burn) is that it provides a new narrative. SEYE concentrate their PR on Nordic investors (private and institutional) to keep the share price growing. They have 80+ DW, but that growth may stall due to Qualcomm. So Martin needs a new dream to sell (and cash to fund it) until he reaches his goal of the big sell. That is not VAG or Toyota, it is when he sells SEYE. He needs to be a bigger fish and the extra confusion of Affectiva will provide extra DW without needing to clarify who won what.
Now you may say correctly that SEE is about the big sell too. But our PR is tiny and aimed not at us grumpy shareholders, they are trying to make sure that auto Execs don’t know much about us until they sign the contracts. We don’t want them to realise that we are aiming for more than 30% of the HW market (we will share the software market with you, Cipia etc)
I don’t really fancy the idea of dealing the DMS/OMS/… market completely on one player entirely (due to dual sourcing preference and market dynamics in common), so this argument may be invalid in the first place.
Anyway, I find it unsettling to read comments on a company (whether it is SEE or SEYE) argued from a point of view of “us” and “them”. Those pronouns make the conversation feel like it is spoken by private investors against the (aggressive) IR of the “opposing” company. After all, every private investors is looking for best risk/reward ratio, and these conversations are not sounding like that. The point of many posts seem to be about trashing the opposite player, instead of validating the investment case of either of argued company. There may be (and there are) valid points in both of the “camps” of SEE and SEYE, but the idea of providing the best information on the best investment case seems to be lost in the struggle of which company is better as such at times. Not about which company is better investment case.
Of course the rivalry and division of the market is a significant factor in the investment case, but simply pointing out the problems of a deal or challenges of a company is not fertile discussion at all. The conversation on pros and cons might be the first step on creating value on the discussion on business case, and it concretely gives something to the discussion on the investment case itself.
To be not trashing myself, I do appreciate the effort @TheLongestShot is giving here! You are pointing out valid points against SEYE, which are of great value on calculating the business case. Also, my comment is not against the SEE “camp” alone, I find a lot of pro-SEYE comments, which are argued simply by negative view on SEE, which is not providing any more fertile discussion on the investment case of SEYE. After all there are loads of other tier 2 (and tier 1 I guess) players interested to win the market share, besides the OEMs who are not interested to give the DMS/OMS/… market solely to one DMS supplier. And behind them, are the interests of us tier 2 private investors, trying to find the best investment case, which may be different to anything the OEMs, or tier 1s, or other tier 2s are interested in. So driving the discussion to the points of view of “us” or “you” really do not serve the purpose.
Guess this is my zero cents on the discussion on the investment case. On the topic instead, I don’t really take the cons mentioned above too meaningfully. The investment case of SEYE is now mostly about DMS/OMS/… market share of 30-40%, which would generate such amounts of revenue the tiny monetary cons of Affectiva are just tidbits. Instead, the acquisition provides more opportunities to create value for shareholders even after the big first DMS/OMS/… wave, which provides the investors better outlook and therefore increases the value of investment case. And that should be about the only thing a private investor cares about!
Nice! Itse nostaisin lähiajan katalyyteistä myös jenkkisijoittajien kiinnostuksen lisääntymisen Affectiva-oston myötä. Muistajat varmaan muistaa mitä Seeing Machinesin kurssille tapahtui jenkkiroadshown jälkeen. Lähti kuin hauki rannasta.
Smart Eye shows strength and value growth according to Stockpicker which lands in ‘speculative buying advice’
The technology company Smart Eye shows strength and value growth after the acquisition of Affectiva according to Stockpicker. The strong valuation does not deter and the recommendation results in a “speculative buying advice”, according to an analysis.
After the issues, the market capitalization amounts to around SEK 5.5 billion, which can be set in relation to the year’s expected turnover of around SEK 100 million (including contributions from Affectiva). If all the pieces fall into place, however, it can be 10x as high in the foreseeable future, Stockpicker writes.
Tulee olemaan selkeästi tosi huono fuusio, kuten industry expert epäilee kukaan ei ole innostunut. Ketään ei kiinnostanut. Teknologiakin varmaan ihan kuraa…
Palaa muuten mieleen el Kalioubyn sanat siitä, että he lähestyivät Smartia eikä toisinpäin. Tämän voi ajatella joko niin, että Affectivalla oli rahat lopussa ja jostain piti löytää ostaja tai rahoittaja TAI (my bet) pitävät Smartia niin mielenkiintoisena kumppanina, että näkevät tässä molemmille ISON WIN-WIN tilanteen. Tähän viittaisi myös se, että iso osuus maksettiin Smartin osakkeilla.
Tästä samaa mieltä. Affectivalta edistyksellisempi OMS ja Smartilta DMS sekä OEM-asiakkaat. Yhdessä vahvempia OEM:n silmissä myös organisaation kokoa katsoen jne. OEM haluavat toimijoita jotka ovat pystyssä koko platformin elinkaaren ajan.
Yhtiöiden mukaan voidaan tarjota tuotteet asiakkaille välittömästi. Sopii ainakin omaan järkeen, koska käsitykseni mukaan teknisesti parhain tapa hoitaa OMS ja DMS vaatinee ainakin kaksi eri kameraa. Yhdelläkin onnistuu (expertin kuuluttama peräpeili-ratkaisu), mutta jälki ei ole yhtä priimaa kuin erilliset kamerat DMS ja OMS. Näistä oli keskustelua affectivan podissa jossa NCAP-edustaja mukana. Linkki yllä. (Oma tekninen tietotaito ei riitä sanomaan miten hyvin kaksi softaa toimisi yhdessä kamerassa tekemässä hieman eri juttua)
Siispä mielestäni kumpikin softa voi pyöriä itsenäisinä palikkoina auton softa-alustalla, mikä selittäisi tämän ”heti toimitettavissa” kommentin. Noh tätäkin meidän riippumaton expertti ei halua myöntää.
Pystyykö tekstistä päättelemään jotain jostain,esim:
“Our software must support many different hardware platforms, CPU architectures (x86-64, ARMv7, ARMv8, C6x DSP etc.), accelerators/vectorization units (NEON, ASIMD, SSE, various NPUs, GPUs etc.) as well as many operating systems (Linux, QNX, Integrity, SYS/BIOS). The faster we can make our software run on these platforms the more new and exciting algorithms we can use while still satisfying our real-time requirements.”
Siis Colin & Seeingin fanipoikien mielestä varmaan ihan paskaa, ja todennäköisesti Smartti taas ihan myöhässä kaikesta ja perseelleen menee, mutta löytyisikö jotain positiivista?
Hw agnostic on se malli jolla smart toimittaa… Kuuntelin yhden colinin podin ja vertasi siellä mobile-eye caseen, jossa he voittivat koska olivat tehneet ylivoimaisen HW:n. Vertasi älytelkkariin, eli niissä sw lagaa koska hw on surkea eikä sw:tä pystytä niillä spekseillä pyörittää.
Olisi hyvä saada jonkun teknisen tyypin näkemys asiasta
Lupaava uutinen, varsinkin näin yrityskaupan alla kun remmiin on jo pian liittymässä iso joukko Affectivan devaajia.
Listasin marraskuussa 2020 LinkedInin perusteella Smartin johdon, softakehityksen ja myynnin avainhenkilöt. Tarkistin tänään listan, ja kaikki 14 ovat vielä työsuhteessa Smartilla
Lisäksi, työntekijöiden määrän muutos marraskuusta 2020 (LinkedIn):
SEYE: 122 → 134 (~10% kasvu)
SEE: 276 → 278 (< 1% kasvu)
Eihän tuo välttämättä kerro mitään, esim Seeingin sisällä jotkut tiimit ovat saattaneet kasvaa ja toiset supistua, mutta hauska näitä on seurailla.
kukaan ei ole innostunut. Ketään ei kiinnostanut. Teknologiakin varmaan ihan kuraa…
