Monday March 30, 8:40 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
Parable Closes Second Round Financing With Strategic Partners in
Entertainment, Sports, and New Media
-- Announces Content Relationships with Hasbro Interactive, New England Patriots, and Parker
Brothers --
NEWTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 30, 1998-- Parable today announces the close of its second round of
financing with backing from key strategic investors including CMG@Ventures, F.S.C. Corporation (an affiliate of BankBoston,
N.A.), The Kraft Group, Venture Management, and Wasserstein Adelson Ventures. With this investor group, Parable gains
additional opportunities to partner and produce the industry's first distributable, ownable and protectable multimedia --
''Things'' -- with major players in the entertainment, sports and new media arenas.
In addition, Parable announces content relationships with Parker Brothers and Hasbro Interactive, divisions of Hasbro Inc.
[AMEX:HAS - news], as well as the New England Patriots football team and New England Revolution soccer team -- to
create multimedia Things that display their brand on the web, owned and protected on the Web. Examples of branded Things,
such as Hasbro Interactive's Frogger, are now available at thingworld.com.
''As with our first round of financing, we recognize the value of strategic investors,'' said Eric Bedell, CEO and president of
Parable. ''Each of the investors in our second round offers us knowledge, experience and key inroads into strategic markets for
the dissemination of our multimedia technology and products.''
Parable recently introduced a powerful new multimedia file format -- Things (.tms) -- which allows unique distribution and
ownership of content across the Web. ThingMaker(TM), Parable's first product, permits anyone to rapidly construct rich
multimedia objects -- or ''Things'' -- with no programming or coding required. Things can consist of any media type and format
and can contain powerful actions, attributes and behaviors.
''We are very excited about Parable and believe that multimedia-enabled Web publishing tools, especially user-friendly
products like ThingMaker, will help drive the continued growth of the personal and business Web publishing space,'' said W.
Townsend Ziebold, Jr., head of Wasserstein Perella's venture capital arm.
Parable recently announced strategic partnerships to adopt Parable's technology with GeoCities and Tripod, the two leading
online personal publishing sites which together total over 2.5 million publishing members. Parable's current content partners
include the Boston Red Sox, Houghton Mifflin Interactive, Jones Soda, Lycos, New England Sports Network, O
Entertainment, and WGBH. |
