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To: Voltaire who wrote (24049)	6/29/2000 11:48:00 AM
From: Clappy	Respond to of 35685

I bought into an IPO today. VRGE just came out. I'm in at 16 1/2. Here are some details about the company: Forbes.com Virage Hopes Kinder Nasdaq Is No Mirage By Amy Doan It's unlikely many Americans have heard of Virage. But if they're among the thousands who typed ``blue dress'' into AltaVista's video search engine, they've used its technology. The San Mateo, Calif., company develops software that lets Web surfers find a video file of President Clinton's grand jury testimony or one of Anna Kournikova's matches, then jump to specific moments within the clips. Its public offering today could raise the hopes of other online media companies--or it could send them shrinking back to the boardroom. Virage (Nasdaq: VRGE - news) is the first company working on broadband media to go public since the market soured. ``It's a rather direct broadband play, since there's going to be an enormous amount of video content online in the next couple of years and companies will need a way to manage and distribute it,'' says Jeremy Schwartz, a senior analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. Virage licenses its technology to more than 100 companies, from Walt Disney & Co. (NYSE: DIS - news) to image archive Getty Images and the FBI. CSpan.org has run 800 hours of video through Virage's system, so that voters can compare what George W. Bush says about guns in Kentucky to what he says in California. Virage has $38 million in financing from investors including Sutter Hill Ventures, Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE - news) and AltaVista. It lost $6.2 million during its 1999 fiscal year on revenue of $3.4 million. The company has been around since 1995, but it held its offering for more than four months due to softness in the Internet IPO market. Today lead underwriter Credit Suisse First Boston is offering 3.5 million shares of Virage at $11 per share. In addition to the $39 million it should raise from its public offering, Virage has $18 million in side-by-side investments scheduled for today from Thomson Multimedia (NYSE: TMS - news), Real Networks (Nasdaq: RNWK - news), CNet (Nasdaq: CNET - news), and Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM - news). Virage's founders developed technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, San Diego's multimedia department that allows quick, reasonably accurate video searches online. Content owners like Disney feed their video through the Virage software, which breaks video images up and scans them, resulting in manageable ``storyboards'' or thumbnail sketches. Virage extracts data from the storyboards and codes it into the video files with a timestamp, so that moments in the video clips can be linked to common keywords. It's not like a mammoth game of Concentration; Virage doesn't try to learn what a basketball looks like so that it can return a clip of a Lakers game when someone types in ``basketball.'' That approach would be more likely to return images of the sun or an orange. But the Virage software can be taught to recognize crowd noises (like the bounce of a basketball), voice patterns and facial structures. It also plucks out keywords using voice-to-text technology and from closed-captioning tracks and graphics. The company has increasing competition from newer video-search companies like Los Angeles-based FasTV.com and MediaSite in Pittsburgh, Penn. And researchers at AT&T Labs (NYSE: T - news) and Mitre are working on video-search technology. But for now, Virage looks like the best way to find out for sure if Clinton winced.