Omnicell is roger King’s kind of stock. In barely a year the medical information company has let down WallStreet with its quarterly earnings and seen its market value shrivel 68% to $173 million. But King, comanager of the Fountainhead Special Value Fund, believes Omnicell could be worth $300 million and that one day the company will prove it.

“Omnicell will make it on its own,” says the 62-year-old Houstonian, “or somebody’s going to put it under their umbrella.”

After 36 years in the investing business King has settled on several ways to root out stock bargains. His favorite among them is to find stocks selling for less than what a buyer of the whole company might pay, the so-called private market value approach.

It’s largely a matter of guts, King explains, as impatience or jitters will always lead certain investors to sell stocks at prices below their true economic worth. “If there’s a significant discount,” he says, “we’re interested.”

Full story at Forbes.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Three weeks ago, 858 people showed up in Washington for a conference, hosted by the Consortium for School Networking, on the use of technology in K-12 education. The mood at the event? “Pretty somber,” reports participant Bruce Wilcox, chief executive of an education technology venture called Project Inkwell.

Weighing on the group: money troubles. For one, concerns simmered about the fate of E-Rate, or the Schools and Libraries Universal Service Support Mechanism. The U.S. government program, funded by fees added to phone bills and devoted to wiring schools to the Internet, has been wracked by charges of fraud and mismanagement.

A more immediate worry was President George W. Bush’s proposed education budget for fiscal 2006. The budget, released in February, proposes eliminating a program known as Enhancing Education Through Technology. Created as part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, EETT doles out grants for integrating technology into schools. The program received $500 million in fiscal 2005, down from $700 million in 2002.

Full story at Forbes.com