re: attn: stocko - your opinion is required
Hi noip,
For obvious reasons, my money is on Roo Networks and Conferserv. Just take a look at the corporate investors in Roo and the article by Australia.internet.com. The IC papers also make for fascinating reading on this, but more than this, I cannot say.
------------------------------------------------------ Australia.internet.com Roo Networks: Streaming Media Sleeper?
BY STEWART TAGGART (profile) | September 10, 2002
Without a doubt, streaming simultaneous video, sound and data is the Holy Grail of the wired age. It's like TV on steroids - enabling highly-customized one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications over the Internet.
The problem is: the idea is fabulous, but the practicalities are a nightmare.
Receiving end streaming software routinely crashes individual PCs. Meanwhile, the Internet's architecture defies efforts to transmit uninterrupted video. And kludgy coding and compression technologies can give even heavy-lift microprocessors a hernia.
One company hoping to turn this technical snake pit into a user-friendly Garden of Eden is three-year-old , Roo Networks Inc. Formed in Sydney in 1999 but since decamped to Silicon Valley, Roo believes it can unlock the end-to-end dungeon doors that have been blocking streaming media from more wide-spread use on the Internet.
Clearly, the 15-employee company now in Scotts Valley, Calif. faces a challenge. Or, perhaps more precisely, two challenges. The first is to prove its technology in the corporate trenches. The second is to stand out among other companies vying in the space. While Roo may be making progress toward the first, progress toward the second is harder to see. But whether that's by weakness or design depends on who you talk to.
Mark Arman, a former Royal Australian Air Force test pilot and founding CEO of Roo - plays up the company's strengths. To hear him tell it, Roo has notched up a series of respectable but little-heralded wins so far. For instance, its technology is being used by a major entertainment and sports content business in South Korea streaming media to 15 million users.
Roo is also actively integrating its technology with a major maker of streaming media camera technology in order to more efficiently encode data straight from a video source to the Internet's data pipes. And, according to Roo's marketing materials, a major US nationwide telecommunications company, with a three-letter abbreviation anyone would recognize, says nice things about the technology. At this point, Roo asks that names of its clients not be disclosed. While that's fair enough, it does beg the question: how is the company going to blow its marketing horn?
Without getting into details only a Ph.D could unravel, the company's technology claims are three-fold. First, it offers more efficient means of compressing and encoding data where it's generated, for instance by a camera at a conference. Secondly, it provides more efficient traffic routing through corporate networks to ensure data doesn't get interrupted or garbled. And thirdly, its downstream software can provide simple and intuitive interfaces for end users. In short, end-to-end seamlessness - offered primarily through a product suite called Conferserv - in which the key technologies are covered by an Australian patent.
Roo sees its primary business opportunity in the corporate sector, where streaming can act as a money saver to cut expensive travel costs. Roo estimates about 9,000 US companies now stream media to about four million employees, with both figures expected to rise nearly six-fold by 2006. Roo believes the world market for enterprise content creation, management and distribution technologies will expand even faster, rising eightfold from US $1.4 billion currently to US $11.2 billion in 2006.
Roo has been funded so far by US $7.7 million of venture capital from DB Capital Partners, UBS Capital, Newport Technology Fund, Rothschild e-Fund and is currently seeking another US $1.5 million to expand its sales in the US and continue research and development. Revenues from first shipments are expected any time now, with break even seen in late 2003. Looking forward, the company is forecasting US $100 million and earnings before interest and taxes of $18 million by 2005.
Ultimately, Roo's aim is to sell itself down the line to an acquirer. But that could be hard unless the company becomes better known. And that brings up a second issue: the company's low profile.
"I go to countless trade shows, give speeches, and constantly have business cards given to me, and I've never heard of these guys," says Dan Rayburn, a widely-published specialist writer and commentator for Streaming Media Inc..
Streaming Media is a website and trade show organizer providing news and schmoozing opportunities for the small American streaming media community.
Streaming Media also compiles what may be one of the most comprehensive streaming media industry directories. Roo's not in there, a strange omission for a company on the rise, Rayburn says. For his part, Arman plays this omission down.
"I don't place much value in this feedback, because Streaming Media Inc is not in a position to track all of the undercurrents in this industry, and because we have also been very, very quiet," Arman said. "We've been in complete stealth mode for over a year, and are only just approaching the point where we want to make a large fuss."
Is Roo Networks a company still smartly in stealth mode? Or an invisibly small player struggling for a limpet grip in a tough industry?
Stay tuned. Or, perhaps more accurately, stay streamed.
