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Warthog Looking to the future !!! (WHOG)     

SueHelen - 23 Dec 2003 17:29

http://www.warthog.co.uk
Daily Execution Price and Volume
big.chart?symb=uk%3Awhog&ma=None&maval=9big.chart?symb=uk%3Awhog&ma=None&maval=9big.chart?symb=uk%3Awhog&ma=1&maval=10&ubig.chart?symb=uk%3Awhog&ma=1&maval=50&ubig.chart?symb=uk%3Awhog&ma=1&maval=200&
Major Shareholders
( 4 Nov 04) 367.48m 1p Ords - Evo Noms Ltd 9.12%, Broughton Ltd 8.16%, Chase Nominees Ltd 4.76%, Barclayshare Noms Ltd 4.71%, Goldman Sachs Secs (Noms) 4.18%, HSBC Global Cust Noms (UK) 3.81%, Gartmore Inv Ltd 3.09%, A J Hall 2.05%, Other Dirs 1.34%.
http://www.hemscott.com/internet/custom/whog/
Trades over 90,000 shares are delayed in reporting by 1 hour.

03 November 2004
WARTHOG PLC
DISPOSAL OF SUBSIDIARIES

The board of Warthog plc (the 'Company') announces that it has today completed
the sale of all of the Company's subsidiaries to Tiger Telematics, Inc ('TGTL')
together with the transfer to TGTL of certain intra-group indebtedness due to
the Company. The total consideration including assumed indebtedness is $8.11
million of which $1,113,000 will be paid in cash and $7 million satisfied by way
of an allotment of 497,866 shares of common stock in TGTL at $14.06 per share,
being the average mid market closing price of a TGTL common share over the 14
days preceding completion. These shares are restricted stock and as such can
only be traded on or after the first anniversary of completion (the
'Anniversary') in accordance with U.S. securities laws. Up to the Anniversary,
these shares will be held in escrow against any claim arising under certain
warranties, tax indemnities and completion account net asset value adjustments
set out in the sale and purchase agreement. 150,000 of the cash consideration
will also be held in escrow until the Anniversary, pending specific warranties.
The Company has waived the balance of all other amounts due to it by its former
subsidiaries.

Upon completion of the transaction, the executive directors Ashley Hall, Steven
Law and Simon Elms together with one other remaining employee of the Company
will transfer employment to TGTL leaving Ian Templeton FCA and David Robinson as
non-executive Directors of the Company. The Company has also undertaken to
change its name and will be calling an EGM to effect such a change in due course
and will at that time update shareholders further.

The board of Warthog plc has sought to complete this transaction as rapidly as
possible (and therefore did not elect to seek shareholder approval) because the
group has continued to face difficult trading conditions within the games
development industry, as reported in the Company's Final Results on 28 September
2004, which has put the group under ongoing financial pressure. In addition,
TGTL required the transaction to be consummated as expeditiously as possible, in
conjunction with the commencement of shipping of its Gizmondo product into the
UK. The transaction leaves the Company having discharged substantially all of
its liabilities and with a valuable shareholding in TGTL which will be capable
of realisation in a year's time. The realisable value of this shareholding
depends entirely upon the commercial success of TGTL and the performance of the
TGTL shares on the financial market.

The board considers, in conjunction with its advisers, that this transaction
represents the best available outcome for the Company and its shareholders.

Tiger Telematics, Inc is listed on the 'NASDAQ Other OTC Market' under symbol
'TGTL'. TGTL's publicly stated intention is to apply for a listing on the
'NASDAQ National Market' in December 2004. TGTL is a designer, developer and
marketer of mobile telematics systems and services that combine global GPS
functions and voice recognition technology to locate and track vehicles and
people down to street level in countries throughout the world. The systems are
designed to operate on GPS and are currently being marketed to GSM current and
potential subscribers, primarily by the company's United Kingdom based
subsidiary, Gizmondo Europe Limited ('GEL'). GEL is a wholly owned subsidiary of
TGTL and is the maker of the Gizmondo, a next-generation mobile entertainment
device which includes games, built-in music, video, messaging and picture
functions and GPS. On 29 October, TGTL began shipping its first generation
product as part of a strategic retail roll out in the UK.

The transaction gives GEL access to existing games content and porting
technology to enable the transfer of titles developed for use on other platforms
on to the Gizmondo handheld device. Warthog plc shareholders will therefore
benefit from continued investment in TGTL as it seeks to exploit the games
content and technical capabilities that the Company has developed over the past
few years.

As previously announced on 12 October 2004, GEL is interested in 8.62 per cent.
of the Company's current total issued ordinary share capital.

About the Gizmondo device
The Gizmondo is powered by a Microsoft Windows CE.net platform, boasts a
2.8-inch TFT colour screen with a Samsung ARM9 400Mhz processor and incorporates
the GoForce 3D 4500 Nvidia graphics accelerator. It provides cutting-edge
gaming, multimedia messaging, an MP3 music player, MPEG4 movie playing
capability, a digital camera and a GPRS network link to allow wide-area network
gaming. Additionally, it contains a GPS chip for location based services, is
equipped with Bluetooth for use in multi-player gaming and accepts MMC card
accessories.

The Gizmondo device and its games are due for launch in the UK in the fourth
quarter 2004 and in North American markets from the first quarter 2005.

Further information on TGTL, GEL and the Gizmondo device can be found at:
www.tigertelematics.com
www.gizmondo.com
Enquiries:
Ian Templeton
Chairman - Warthog plc
Tel: 0870 122 5420

6 November 2004.
Daily Mail Newspaper : Page 80.

DEALERS believe that Warthog, 0.11p dearer, could be a good recovery punt. More than 52m shares in the computer games developer changed hands on hopes that the worst is over. Tiger Telematics, a leading European games console maker grabbed it by the tusks in October when it bought its subsidaries, intellectual properties and assests. In return Warhog acquired a stake in TT which is now worth at least 3p per share.

micky468 - 17 Feb 2008 20:03 - 1449 of 1449

for thows who still belive ::http://sandberghans.blogspot.com/2008/01/carl-freer-starts-over-with-gizmondo.html

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Carl Freer Promises To Resurrect Gizmondo (Here You Can Read the Exclusive Interview)

(Originally published in Swedish on Realtid.se, 2007-11-13.)


Carl Freer hasn't given up on Gizmondo, and a Chinese
manufacturer has promised to help him restart his venture.


Photo: Hans Sandberg

This is a quick translation of the the first part of a five-part series about Gizmondo, which was published November 12-15, 2007 by Realtid.se, a Swedish business news site. My original intention was to translate the entire 60,000 character series into English, but other work has so far prevented me from doing that.

The realease of Stefan Eriksson and a couple of articles in Swedish business press has generated a smatter of blog comments on English blogs, and some refer to my interview with Carl Freer, which is the only interview he has given to media so far.

Here it is!

Im Going to resurrect Gizmondo, Carl Johan Freer says in an exclusive interview for Realtids U.S. Correspondent Hans Sandberg. He does it because he still believes that Gizmondo can stand up to the competition, and in order to give the investors who lost money in the Gizmondo crash a chance to get some of their money back.

There is still life in this product. Two products dominate the market and there is a vacuum to fill. The Gizmondo was the first real handheld game system capable of delivering several types of entertainment, and we have not seen any other products with similar capabilities, Carl Freer tells Realtids correspondent. If all goes well, we will be up and running by May of 2008. I intend to do this version inexpensive and work with open source code.


Carl Freer with the original Gizmondo and a mock-up version
of the wide screen model. Photo: Hans Sandberg


By Christmas 2008, Im planning to launch a more advanced Gizmondo with a wide screen. Were also talking to a cellular provider about offering Gizmondo for free to customers who subscribe to a data service, he says.

Carl Freer says that he already has an agreement with a Chinese company in Shenzhen. They will set up a production line and manufacture Gizmondo on credit, on the condition that they will become the sole reseller of Gizmondo in China.

You need deep pockets to set up a factory, acquire components and start the production, something Gizmondos owner, the Florida-based company Tiger Telematics never had.
The credit means that I dont need to purchase components, and that I dont need to pay until the day I get the product from the manufacturers warehouse, Carl Freer says.

The dilemma of Gizmondo was, and is, to bridge the time span from when the product is made and when it is placed on the shelves of the retailer. The manufacturer normally wants at least a part of the payment in advance to get started, but the retailers and superstores usually dont pay until they have received the product, unless they demand credit from the seller. Its a long bridge to build, and very costly, especially for a newcomer.

Carl Freer told me in a follow-up call after our meeting in New York that Plextek, the British design house in Cambridge has given him green light for their cooperation on the new project.
I was nervous about rebuilding the relationship with Plextek, but we have now built very close ties to them. It also turned out that some of the components we thought we had to redesign completely are still holding up. That is true for the graphics accelerator SE-10 that nVidia custom designed for us. This will save us five months of development work.

We have learned that nVidia is willing to restart the production of the graphic card for the Gizmondo (the GoForce 3D 4500 wireless media processor).

The reason for why Gizmondo made such a big splash in the media when it was first launched was that it really was a new and exciting product. It got a lot of attention, especially in the gaming community, but it was also severely criticized for being too expensive and having too few games. This is however a criticism that most newcomers face, unless your name is Sony or Nintendo. The original Gizmondo cost $399.00 for the ad-free version and $229.00 if you agreed to view ads delivered by Carl Freers clever SmartAdds technology. The lack of game titles was however a tough problem, but one that they share with other products that were initially declared dead on arrival by the critics, f. ex. Microsofts Xbox. But Microsoft could afford to ride out the skeptics resistance and the product got its boost once Halo was released.

Tiger Telematics and its subsidiary Gizmondo could however not afford to wait, and Carl Freers own investments in new development tools and new titles through his company Nordic Light was not enough. But today, he has a number of titles to show, including games that take advantage of Gizmondos built-in gyroscope. The Agaju game combines the gyroscope function with the built-in camera to deliver augmented reality in the form of 3D-figures that pop-up on the screen if you point Gizmondos camera towards an object that has a special code embedded. Carl Freer says that he would love to develop games for McDonalds, games where customers can point their Gizmondos at Happy Meal-cards encoded for Gizmondo.

Carl Freer says that they have 35 titles, of which 6 are new Gizmondo games, and that more are under development.

But the biggest surprise must be the price. At first he hesitates to give a figure, but by the end of my seven hour long interview, he says that he is pretty confident that he will be able to sell the revived Gizmondo for $99.00.

Carl Freer says that he never believed that he would be able to push Sony or Nintendo aside, but that it is possible to capture a niche of the market, and that it could be a profitable venture because the market is so large. He says that he also hopes to be able to build an alliance with independent game developers and open-source programmers.

The market for handheld games has stagnated and there is too much status quo, but I think the consumers want to see more innovation. One of the great opportunities with Gizmondo was that we opened the door to open source code, and that is a huge issue among game developers today. Normally you have to buy expensive Software Development Kits and pay expensive royalties to the hardware manufacturers, but as Gizmondo runs on Windows CE, and the games are delivered on a regular SD-card, both amateurs and pros can join in and develop everything from simple games to complex games that fully uses Gizmondos technical capacity with its 3D-graphics, he says.

We are also going to bring out an easy to use program that allows kids that doesnt have any experience at all to create their own games on a PC, save them to a SD-card and play them on their Gizmondo. I think many teenagers will love this concept, he says.

Florida-based Tiger Telematics will formally own the new Gizmondo.
My plan is to elect a new board, assign new and appoint a new management. Mike Carrender is still CEO, but the company doesnt run any business at this point. The shareholders have nothing to loose, and it wont cost them anything, but without their support I cant do it, Carl Freer says, indicating that he is talking to at least one of the companys institutional shareowners.

He has also come to an agreement with the British liquidation firms regarding his plan to restore Gizmondo.
The only other example of anything like this is Canary Wharf, says James Hunt, who performed an investigation into Gizmondo on behalf of the liquidation firms Begbies Taylor and David Rubin. Canary Wharf was restored six years after having been declared bankrupt.
Its not hard to understand why the liquidators like the idea of getting more resources for those that the company owes money, but wouldnt the institutional investors hesitate before working with one of the key men behind Gizmondo.
Not at all! Everybody doing business with me has done their due diligence. And if you do that, you will see that the Gizmondo crash was a tragic event. I didnt cause it, and I havent profited from it, or done anything contrary to my fiduciary responsibility towards the company. No large company will work with you if youve done something bad, it doesnt matter if you have discovered a new vaccine against AIDS! Of course I have missed opportunities because of Gizmondo, and there are companies we ought to have worked with, but that has nothing to do with any guilt on my part, he says.

But why not simply start a new company instead of working with Tiger?
I feel a responsibility towards the smaller investors who lost money on Gizmondo. I regret that I wasnt stronger, that I didnt do more to save Gizmondo, and that is what I am trying to do now. The large institutional investors often did all right. They had departments that read our 10K reports to the SEC. I would like to bring our product to the market so that those who invested in me will get some of their money back. It has to do with my self-respect. I feel like have an unfinished business, and I am ashamed over that a company with such a great potential crashed when I was in charge. I want to make that right, but I also want to be able to be heard, to answer back to the smearing that has been going on against me personally.

I know that Im not perfect, and that Ive done made some rotten decisions in my life, but I take responsibility for them. Ive never had anybody else suffer for decisions Ive made personally. Those who I let down are the people who bought shares in the company, who believed in the opportunity. They must of course have realized that Tiger was a high-risk project, but I still feel that I let them down. More than anything, I regret that I resigned as CEO during the crisis, Carl Freer says.

Will you lead the company?
Im not sure. My instinct says no. Ideally I would just get it started and then let it continue under new management. I intend to work hard with Blowfish Works, but Im ready to take charge of Gizmondo if needed. But thats one of those questions Im trying to avoid.

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