There's more media exposure for SiegeSoft in the millennium edition of the
Financial Post (National Post).
See the front page article:
nationalpost.com
Bill Sakkalis
Investor Relations
Tel. (604) 681 1568
Toll Free: 1 877 377 6222
Fax. (604) 681 8240
E-mail info@roccaresources.com
ICQ 50678193
SiegeSoft.com
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Canaccord backs 15-year-old
entrepreneur
Bank ready to raise $3-million via private
placement
David Akin
Financial Post
A Vancouver-based investment bank is raising $3-million for a company whose
chief asset is some Internet privacy software created by a 15-year-old Chicago
teenager.
Canaccord Capital Corp. of Vancouver has agreed to raise, in a brokered
private placement, up to $3-million for Rocca Resources Ltd. of Vancouver.
Rocca, once a junior mining play, has just completed its change-of-business
filing with the Canadian Venture Exchange, a regulatory move it made to
transform itself into an Internet play.
In September, Rocca acquired SiegeSoft.com Inc. of Chicago from that
company's teenaged owners, Rishi Bhat, 15, and Antonio Guillan, 16.
"We knew that Internet privacy was huge, and the 15-year-old aspect we also
recognized as being marketable," said David Hodge, Rocca's president. "It was
a perfect fit."
For Rishi, the sale of the company he developed over his summer vacation gave
him the means to buy a top-of-the-line Pentium III 600-Mhz computer and treat
his friends to pizza. Based on the closing price yesterday of Rocca's shares,
Rishi's proceeds from the sale of SiegeSoft are worth more than $775,000.
Rocca closed yesterday up a penny at 50½.
Next year, when Rishi learns to drive, he said he might even buy a car.
"I would like to see it developed into as big of a company as possible," Rishi
said yesterday in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago.
"I'd like to see it do very well," he said. "Everyone wants security and privacy."
The $3-million financing, expected to close by the end of January, is also the
latest evidence that Canadians are as interested as Silicon Valley financiers in
placing bets on risky but potentially lucrative Internet plays.
"Your average investor is a lot more savvy than [he] used to be in terms of
technology," said a representative of Canaccord's corporate finance department,
speaking on condition of anonymity. "The same level of due diligence is still
required, but I believe the shareholder and institutional investor alike have
moved up the food chain in terms of awareness. It's not a paradigm shift in terms
of investing."
In addition to the brokered placement, Rocca has also agreed to a
non-brokered private placement of up to $300,000.
Canaccord believes the success Zero-Knowledge Systems Inc. of Montreal,
another maker of privacy software, has had in raising money through private
placements is a good omen for Rocca. In the fall, Zero-Knowledge completed a
first round of financing, raising $12-million (US) through three Silicon Valley
venture capitalists. Financial Post reported this week that Zero-Knowledge will
announce early this year a second round of financing, raised mostly from
Canadian sources, of $25-million (US).
SiegeSoft will use the proceeds of its offering to expand its business, market the
product and provide capital for acquisitions.
"The market is huge," Mr. Hodge said.
Rishi, a Grade 10 student, said he is spending a few hours a week working for
SiegeSoft, mostly trouble-shooting or fine-tuning some aspect of the service.
He's also developing another business, MyeDesk.com, a kind of Web-based
desktop portal, similar to the MyDesktop.com portal created by two
Toronto-area teenagers earlier this year.
Rishi, who plays tennis, the clarinet, and the piano and likes to watch The
Simpsons, has been writing computer code since he was six. Most of the work
on SiegeSoft was done in Perl, a scripting language that programmers use to
automate certain computing tasks.
SiegeSoft is a privacy service that purports to let Internet users visit Web sites
without leaving any identifying characteristics in the digital information packets
that are exchanged between a user and the Web site. Such characteristics are
frequently used by marketing organizations and others to track or identify an
Internet user.
SiegeSoft's tools purport to accomplish some of the same tasks of Freedom 1.0,
the software and network of Zero-Knowledge Systems that debuted in
December. But where Freedom 1.0 involves a user installing a piece of software
on the user's computer, SiegeSoft takes a Web-based approach, which means
users can collect e-mail, surf the Web and download files using nothing more
than their Web browser.
Freedom 1.0, though, runs only on Windows 95 or 98 and the service can only
be used from the machine that has the Freedom software installed on it.
SiegeSoft requires no client software, which means it could be used from public
computer terminals. And because it is Web-based, it can be used on any
operating system -- Macintosh, Linux or Windows NT -- for which a browser
has been designed. |
