Quick Hits

Thursday, January 20, 2000

(Quicklink to X10 portion of article)

RealNetworks to buy part of BackWeb Technologies

Seattle streaming-media giant RealNetworks said it will spend $15 million for 1.3 percent of BackWeb Technologies of San Jose, Calif., and will incorporate BackWeb's "push" technology into its free RealJukebox player.

Starting mid-year, RealJukebox users (now numbering 21 million) will be able to subscribe to the musicians or types of music they like, from inside RealJukebox. Then they'll receive music over the Internet while they're connected to it but not actively working. BackWeb downloads packets in bursts during even brief pauses in online activity.

Dave Richards, vice president of Real's consumer and e-commerce group, said Real will experiment with how the initiative can generate money. "Both companies are designed for profit," said BackWeb marketing vice president Todd Johnson.

Most of the pushed music will be free, though Real contemplates a premium offering that would charge for big-name artists' tunes. Free offerings might include samples and songs with limited life spans.

"This is a way for Real to please both consumers and providers of music by delivering music in an unobtrusive and effective way," said Rebecca Nidositko, an analyst with the Yankee Group.

Tech stock options get Etheridge to sing here

Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge is used to playing to thousands of screaming fans at sold-out arenas.

Her appearance last night in Seattle, however, was more intimate.

Etheridge, known for her bluesy rock 'n' roll, was to play a party at iSpy to celebrate a new technology from Seattle startup AudioTrack Watermark Solutions Corp.

How did AudioTrack, hardly a household name, get her to play?

Two reasons: connections and stock options. AudioTrack, which makes a digital watermarking technology used for protecting downloadable music, gave Etheridge an undisclosed amount of stock for her performance. The company approached the musician through Colin Filkow, director of label relations at AudioTrack, formerly a music executive at Priority Records and EMI.

 

 

Snippets

Kirkland-based AVT Corp. yesterday announced the formation of AVT Capital LLC, a venture-capital subsidiary that will invest as much as $25 million over the next two years in communications startups . . . Forty-nine schools in Iowa, with about 5,000 students, participated in a mock election yesterday, using an online voting system developed by Bellevue-based VoteHere.Net . . .

iStart Ventures, a Seattle high-tech incubator that plans to launch as many as six companies this year, has named executives to its advisory board: Will Lansing, chief executive of Fingerhut; Bill McCormack, managing director of Trident Capital; Bruce Fredrickson, chief executive of Tactical Marketing Ventures; William Justen, president of Samis Land Co.; Pete Leddy, former vice president at PepsiCo; Scott Svenson, former president of Starbucks Europe; Bill McNee, former analyst at Gartner Group; Brian Conte, former manager at Microsoft Corp.; and Tim Choate, president of FreeShop.com . . .

Freei.Net, a Federal Way free Internet service provider, raised $322,915 for the Starlight Children's Foundation through an online program that allowed new users of the service to donate $1 to the charity . . . NetRadio, a Minneapolis Internet radio network, has converted 50 of its most-popular new music channels into Microsoft's Windows Media Format . . .

Mercata, a Bellevue e-commerce company that brings consumers together for group purchases, will award customers with store credit for every shopper they refer to the site . . . Redmond-based Spacelabs Medical has received Food and Drug Administration clearance to sell Ultraview Clinical Messenger, a wireless paging device that notifies doctors and nurses of a patient's condition . . .

Palm Computing's PalmOS gave up 6 percent of its market share to Microsoft's Windows CE in December, reports British Internet publication The Register . . . The first Windows 2000 virus has been found, but can be defeated by anti-virus software, reports security firm F-Secure Corp. of San Jose, Calif.

Bellevue's Click2learn will provide training certification to Vignette Inc., an Austin, Texas, vendor of business relationship management software . . . X10.com of Seattle has announced the GigaCam, a color video camera with an integrated 2.4-gigahertz wireless transmitter, which weighs less than 4 ounces and sells for less than $100 . . .