Spyglass wins first Motorola contract
Reuters Story - August 17, 1998 11:05
By Kathy Fieweger
CHICAGO, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Spyglass Inc. Chief
Executive Douglas Colbeth said Monday the company has landed
its first contract with Motorola Inc., a deal that will
provide the telecommunications giant with technology and
services for a high-end interactive media platform.
"It's the largest device-related contract in our history,"
Colbeth told Reuters, pegging the estimated royalties and fees
at "multiple millions" of dollars. "It's a multimedia platform
for Internet-based interactive content as well as broadcasted
content."
"We receive royalties on the technologies we license in the
future and we also receive what we call professional service
fees for any type of custom engineering that we do, and that's
done on an hourly basis," Colbeth said. "These are ongoing
royalties." Spyglass, based in Naperville, Ill., provides
software and services that make a variety of devices work with
the World Wide Web. Colbeth declined to give details of the
product, saying Motorola wants to announce the specifics of the
deal when it announces the product, probably sometime this
quarter.
"It's for broad-band, highly interactive. It's similar to a
very high-end set-top box. You'll be able to receive television
off of this box. What we're doing is all the Internet-related
software technology." Colbeth said the company's previous
largest device-related contract involved Microsoft Corp. and
was for personal computers. The new deal with Motorola started
in June and the company has already received some revenue,
Colbeth said.
"There's more revenue to come," he said. Colbeth said
Spyglass hopes to win more Motorola business in multiple areas.
"We have quite a bit of technologies actually for their
wireless platforms, and we're obviously talking to those
groups," he said. "This is for a wired, broad-based platform.
But, yes, we would anticipate doing business with other groups
in Motorola, in addition to more work with this group."
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