Advertisment

Wireless web gets $90 m. for R&D

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

SAN FRANCISCO: High-tech start-up PacketVideo Corp. said on Monday it

received $90 million in funding from some of the biggest US technology

companies, which it plans to invest in designing software to streamline video

and audio content over the Internet.

Advertisment

Investors included Intel Corp., Motorola Inc., Qualcomm Inc., Sun

Microsystems Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. Monday's financing for

privately-held PacketVideo brings the total it has raised since its July 1998

launch to $145 million, the San Diego based company said. The Monday investment

alone ranks among the largest private technology financing deal this year.

"It represented the entire food chain of the wireless world,"

PacketVideo chief executive Jim Carol told Reuters. "Every one of those

partners we brought in, we'll do business with," he said.

PacketVideo envisions content, including news, traffic report and movie

previews, streamed over the Web to devices such as cellular telephones, personal

digital assistants and lap-top computers. Its software turns analog video into

digital video and compresses it, while the company's server software delivers

the coded transmissions to handheld devices, which are enabled with PacketVideo

software for decoding transmissions.

In December, PacketVideo unveiled its PVAirguide, a kind of portal for video

content from 100 partners - including AOL Time Warner Inc. and a number of movie

studios - available over the wireless Web.

(C) Reuters Limited 2001.

tech-news