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Technology Stocks : Motorola (MOT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yaacov who wrote (1212)	6/11/1998 5:11:00 PM
From: Ariella	Respond to of 3436

Has anyone heard of MOT's involvement with ProjectX? Jun 8, 1998 (MULTIMEDIA WEEK, Vol. 7, No. 23) -- VM Labs has yet to reveal all the technology under the hood of Project X, but endorsements from Thomson Consumer Electronics and Toshiba Corp. should send a message to component manufacturers that they need to take the start-up firm seriously. Both vendors have bought into the ideology that by replacing an MPEG-2 decoder inside DVD players with a VM Labs media processor they can add a game system to their hardware at little cost. Thomson and Toshiba plan to bring out Project X-enabled products in 1999. Thomson officials are considering adding the silicon to a DVD player but have not ruled out tapping into the modem or audio capabilities of the silicon, which may show up in a DSS system or HDTV product. Toshiba officials are keen on an implementation in DVD players. A Toshiba executive who spoke with Multimedia Week said the announcement of the company's participation came out of Japan and took the U.S. based affiliate by surprise. *Motorola Inc. [MOT]* is the first company slated to manufacture Project X silicon and has an equity investment in VM Labs. Jim Reinhart, Motorola's director of operations for media processor and platforms, said his company became involved with Project X "the day after VM Labs was incorporated" in January 1995. Greg LaBrec, VM Labs director of marketing, said Project X silicon is such a departure from existing technology it required Motorola to "revamp some of its manufacturing facility." LaBrec and Reinhart would not provide specifics beyond saying the silicon is not DSP based and can process more than 1.5 billion instructions per second with benchmarks equal to a Pentium II operating at more than 500 MHz. They also declined to say how much cost Project X would add to a DVD or DBS players' bill of materials. Motorola is working on several Project X reference designs including one called Blackbird. Project X is not based on a Windows architecture. LaBrec said it will take developers a few months to port a DVD-ROM title to Project X. "Our system is more similar to OpenGL than anything else," he said. Whatever Project X is, it should give MPEG-2 suppliers a reason to sweat. Toshiba and Thomson source Toshiba's semiconductor affiliate and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.'s [MC] silicon arm, respectively, for MPEG-2 decoders. Should other DVD-Video manufacturers jump on Project X, C-Cube Microsystems Inc. [Cube], ST Microelectronics [ST] Zoran Corp. [ZRAN] and LSI Logic Corp. [LLSI] also risk losing business. C-Cube also supplies a large quantity of decoders to DBS set-top box makers. VM Labs' goal is to interest developers in the technology rather than hyping it to consumers. In due time, the firm will rely on its CE partners' marketing muscle to accomplish that. Courting Developers VM Labs is shipping stand-alone developer systems with Ethernet ports that can plug into various kinds of hardware, along with sample code, hardware registers and libraries. The firm has shipped about 50 and plans to disperse them at a rate of 25 per month. As is typical when a company tries to drum up support, VM Labs is loaning the equipment to interested parties. LaBrec expects to charge $7,500 per system. VM's business proposition, which allows software publishers to tie their fortunes to the growing number of DVD players, has interested at least 11 companies so far, including Activision Inc. [ATVI], Psygnosis Inc. [SNE] and Hasbro Interactive. [HAS] On the authoring-tool front, VM Labs is getting support from at least two companies. MultiGen's Creator and Animatek International Inc. has ported Caviar to the Project X architecture. (VM Labs, 650- 917-8050) Money and Brains Behind VM Labs In addition to Motorola, VM Labs has investments from a former executive of Rolm Co. and individuals working at Applied Materials Inc. [AMAT] and Sigma Designs Inc. [SIGM]. The company does not plan to raise VC money but foresees other investments and an IPO. * Richard Miller, founder, CEO, Chairman, Former Atari VP of technology * Bill Rehbock, VP, third party development, Former VP of R&D and tech support for Sony's [SNE] PlayStation comapny * Matthew Halfant, VP, software development, Managed Apple's [AAPL] TrueType development team * John Mathieson, VP technology, Managed the design team for the Atari Jaguar * Nicholas Lefevre, VP, Business and Legal Affairs, Worked at Atari, Sega and Commodore