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Technology Stocks : Quokka Sports, Inc-(QKKA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lao Ou who wrote (19)	7/29/1999 2:34:00 PM
From: Don Schoenbeck	Respond to of 79

I got in at 9 7/16 .... I dont see this as a EBAY or anything... but I think a move back into the teens could be possiable.... dont forget this is a very down day on the market..... lots of stuff is going south.... give it some time... it should be ok! >>> DON <<<

To: Lao Ou who wrote (19)	8/8/1999 12:21:00 AM
From: Lao Ou	Respond to of 79

Putting America's Cup at One's Fingertips By BARBARA LLOYD o longer do the armchair sailors of the world need to feel left out. With innovations in cyberspace about to revolutionize yacht racing, coverage of the America's Cup trials this autumn will offer viewers at home everything but the chance to get seasick. Gearing up for the challenger trials, which begin Oct. 18 in New Zealand, is Virtual Spectator Ltd. The new Internet company will offer viewers live coverage of cup competition; it will be as if viewers were on the race course itself. If it were baseball, the firm says, it would be like sitting in a stadium seat. "It will allow you to literally be 1,000 feet in the air watching, or to zoom down to the water level as if you were beside each boat watching the yachts move around you," Craig Meek, director of Virtual Spectator, said in an interview from Auckland, New Zealand. The service provides a way around one of the biggest obstacles blocking yachting's acceptance as a spectator sport: making the event accessible to fans when it is staged several miles offshore. Subscribers to Virtual Spectator will receive a CD-ROM that will open animated 3-D graphics in a virtual-reality format. Each race will be transmitted to individual spectators in real time from the Hauraki Gulf, the race-course site off Auckland. Telemetry data emitted directly from each race boat will provide instantaneous tracking of position and relative speed. Viewers access the live race coverage by logging on to the World Wide Web with personal computers. Registration for the subscriber service opened last Thursday on the company's Internet site, which is www.virtualspectator.com. Access is limited to 100,000 subscribers worldwide at a one-time cost of $69.95 each. Besides the site's interactive zoom feature, the service will transmit a split screen that includes a real-time indicator showing actual wind direction and velocity. A course drawing will show competing boats' positions followed by the course marked with a graphics "snail trial." At the bottom of the screen will be a score card with time differences for each mark rounding. People whose schedules do not mesh with Auckland time -- 16 hours ahead of New York time -- can log on to the site and call up any previously sailed race in the challengers series. The company will also e-mail its subscribers each day to let them know the day's schedule. As a high-profile way of showing off its America's Cup Web site, Virtual Spectator is arranging to set up a large computer screen that will transmit race coverage at Wall Street in New York. Louis Vuitton, the French leather-goods company, will disseminate cup race results as part of its sponsorship agreement with challengers. Vuitton has enlisted Virtual Spectator as its official tracking site. Thirteen international teams, including five U.S. syndicates, are competing as challengers. Their round-robin trials end in late January with a best-of-9, two-boat final series. The winner is scheduled to race New Zealand, the America's Cup defender, beginning Feb. 19, 2000, for rights to the prestigious 19th-Century trophy. Although Virtual Spectator will most likely offer the most animated live coverage, there will be other ways of tuning in to the early races. ESPN, the cable sports network, plans on more than 70 hours of programming. The challengers' trials will be shown through early feature presentations. Live broadcasts will begin with the semifinal racing in January. Another outlet for online coverage of America's Cup 2000 will be Quokka Sports, a digital sports entertainment company. The firm's first online endeavor was the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race. Personal insights on the race from crew members at sea provided chilling accounts of life on the open ocean for Quokka's Web-site browsers. Based on that popularity -- more than 1.8 million different online visitors during the nine-month event -- Quokka has moved into other sports arenas, like the Olympics and adventure programming. Quokka's America's Cup coverage, which will be free to users at www.americascup.org, will include input from America's Cup 2000, which is New Zealand's race organizer, and Telecom New Zealand, the local telecommunications company. "It will be immersion coverage," Brian Terkelsen, general manager of Quokka's cup programming, said last week. "We will have all the same information as Virtual Spectator with the exception of boat-positioning data. But our reporting will be live with momentary updates combined with our own photos right off the race course. We believe there will be a great demand."