Article: Possible competitive threat from DataPlay:
I seem to remember a few of you discussing this company in the past. The company is attracting plenty of ink in the press as well as some strong investment backers. Feel free to chip in with any thoughts for what this means to SNDK. thanks, - Netconductor
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DATAPLAY'S DISKS SMALL, BUT INTEREST IS COLOSSAL INVESTORS ARE FLOCKING TO OPTICAL-DRIVE SYSTEM
Kris Hudson News Staff Writer
06/02/2000
Denver Rocky Mountain News
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(Copyright 2000)
DataPlay's little disks have attracted big-league interest and loads of investment capital.
The Boulder-based company, which has developed a miniature optical- disk drive and tiny, two-sided disks slightly larger than a quarter, announced Thursday it has received a $50 million investment from a slew of strategic partners and financiers.
Among the heaviest hitters music colossus Seagram Co.'s Universal Music Group and electronics manufacturers Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
DataPlay intends for its miniature optical drives to be designed into consumer electronics such as portable music players, electronic- book devices, digital cameras and personal digital assistants. The company plans to begin producing the drives late this year, and its partners are expected to introduce products equipped with the drives by mid-2001.
"We have a big job here," said Steve Volk, founder, chairman, president and chief executive officer of the nearly 2-year-old company. "There are so many market segments that we need to pursue that it's going to take a fair amount of resources to ramp up for that."
Other strategic partners contributing to DataPlay's third-round financing were S3 Inc. and data-storage media company Imation Corp. Other investors include Boulder-based Sequel Venture Partners, Boulder-based Tango Partners, manufacturing partner Belton Industrial Ltd., Computer Sciences Corp., STMicroelectronics and the University of Colorado Foundation.
DataPlay's 500-megabyte disks can hold four hours of CD-quality music, several novels or numerous pictures. Blank disks will retail for $5 to $10.
DataPlay's investors chipped in to stay abreast of cutting-edge storage technology. Today, many portable electronic devices store data with flash memory, a semiconductor storage technology with a higher cost than that anticipated for DataPlay's drives.
"We're smack dab in the middle of this digital music environment," said Jim Cady, president of S3's Rio Audio Group, producer of the Rio digital-audio player. "One of the biggest opportunities and obstacles are the cost and flexibility of memory storage for music and the spoken word. Anything that helps drive the cost down and the functionality up is a win for us." |
