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News Updates - 22
February 2001 Inventor hopes to mesh stereo, PC - Washington Post VC money to triple in India - Forbes magazine Where the seed money is - Industry Standard Talisma helps you chat with your customer - TechRepublic Inventor Hopes to Mesh Stereo, PC SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Sound doesn't often sound so good. An invisible hand seems to be confidently plucking guitar strings a few feet away. Bass thumps heavily and unmistakably, but without distorting vibrations. The room feels ringed with drums. The most amazing thing about this high-fidelity experience: It isn't coming from a top-tier stereo system with a five-figure cost. It's being blasted through the speakers of a humble personal computer. The advance comes from a little chip produced by Tripath Technology Inc. (tripath.com), a 150 -employee company in Santa Clara. It was founded in 1995 by Adya S. Tripathi, a 48 -year-old engineer from the holy city of Varanasi, India, who dreams of improving the world's relationship with sound. Tripathi believes he can bring about inexpensive home theater systems, more powerful cell phones, better Internet access and new hybrids of electronics -like set-top cable TV boxes with a high-end sound system already included. And after raising the quality of the sounds we hear, he also believes he can drown them out, by using his technology to power noise-reduction devices. "With our technology, many things that were not possible are now possible," he said. Tripathi has had little trouble convincing others to hear things his way. Before taking the company public last year, Tripathi secured $50 million in funding from such high-tech heavyweights as Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc. Tripathi's breakthrough was to vastly improve the performance of amplifiers, which perform a key function in most electronic devices. Amplifiers accept an incoming signal and boost it out -through a stereo speaker, for example. The problem is that inexpensive amplifiers tend to distort the signal, and expensive ones with high fidelity are clunky and inefficient, sucking power and creating large amounts of heat. A solution struck Tripathi while he tried to sleep in his dorm room in India one night more than 25 years ago. He figured out a way to make the amplifier work digitally -converting its signals into a series of ones and zeroes that are processed at regular intervals. Traditional analog technology involves processing signals continuously. Tripathi moved to the United States in 1979 and worked at IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and National Semiconductor Corp., waiting for technological advances to make his dream cost-effective. Now his patented system, called digital power processing, is behind the circuitry in amplifiers that are a fraction of the size of their predecessors, use far less power and create much less heat. The key ingredient, the power-processing chip, fits on a finger and sells for as little as $4. Rather than coming as a bulky and costly separate attachment, the digital amps fit inside space-deprived devices like PCs, which consumers are increasingly using to hear music, play games and watch videos. Tripath's amps have cropped up in new Blaupunkt car stereos, Apple Computer Inc.'s Power Mac G4 Cubes, high-end Sony Vaio computers and some late-model Dell PCs. In addition, Belgian networking company Alcatel is partnering with Tripath in hopes of improving the performance of digital subscriber lines for high-speed Internet access. Apple found Tripath amplifiers were nearly three times as energy- efficient as comparable models - an important factor for the Cubes' design, which has no fan -and had very high sound quality, said Mike Culbert, Apple's director of system architecture. "They're miles ahead of what's out there now," Culbert said. Tripath had $9 million in revenue last year and expects sales of more than $30 million this year. Analysts don't expect Tripath to be profitable until the fourth quarter of 2002, however. "Clearly they've had a breakthrough, and no one appears to be close at this time," said Shekhar Wadekar, a research analyst with Dain Rauscher Wessels, which helped underwrite Tripath's initial public offering. "The company's position gets better day by day as they win customer acceptance." Still, how well Tripath's chips will work in low-power devices like cell phones and handheld computers remains to be seen. One company that hopes to mine that market is rival National Semiconductor Corp. Ken Boyce, an audio products marketing manager, would not comment on the specifics of Tripath's technology. But he pointed out that cell phones and handhelds are sensitive to interference that can be created by some methods in digital amplifier technology. Tripathi is already looking further into the digital future. He theorizes that his technology could be used to shush car engines, blenders or noisy children by emitting sound waves digitally tailored to interfere with each annoying sound. Though noise-reduction devices are years away, talking up their potential is one of his passions. Tripathi, who owns about 36 percent of the company and is president, chief executive and chairman, half-jokingly admits that sometimes he needs to be reminded to focus on the business at hand. "Do what you like and where your heart belongs and money, wealth, fame, everything follows you," he said in heavily accented English. "Because if you chase all those things, you know, they go away from you." VC Money To Triple In India NEW YORK - While most of the world's economies may be contracting, with technology sectors ranging from telecom equipment makers to dot-coms shuddering and crashing, the fortunes of India continue to rise. A new report out today from the Asia Private Equity Review, a Hong Kong-based journal, says that India is a global hotbed of venture capital activity that has gone unscathed by the recent downturn. According to the report, venture capital flowing into India this year will more than triple to $2.5 billion from $770 million last year. This follows a seven-fold increase last year compared to 1999, when India received just over $100 million in VC money. That figure puts India in the number five position of top Asian markets for venture capital, behind Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan. While this is the first time India has cracked the top five, the talk there is quickly turning--not to whether but when it will surpass Taiwan on the list. Much of India's leap into the VC major leagues can be attributed to its strength in the software services sector, and India as a whole seems to have taken IT (information technology) as its new mantra. The country graduates a staggering 200,000 qualified IT professionals every year, according to the report. Many of those graduates have gone off to America only to return as IT heroes: For example, Vinod Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Sabeer Bhatia, the founder of Hotmail; and Rakesh Mathur, founder of Junglee.com, an Internet comparison shopping site. Several reports place the number of Indian millionaires living in Silicon Valley at more than 5,000. And it's just those returning heroes that are fueling the VC flames higher and higher. The report attributes 38% of the fund pool as coming from non-resident Indians (NRIs), and suggest that there has been no better time for NRIs to return to India and start up their own companies. Chief among those reasons: "the liberalization of regulations, new tax breaks, the easy availability of English-speaking professionals and a lower cost of living." One of the hottest areas for investment will be in building out India's Internet infrastructure, which, according to some, is woefully inadequate and continues to limit the ability of India's legions of programmers to compete on the global marketplace. By some accounts, only two in 1,000 have anything resembling direct access to the Web in India. And those connections can often take up to 30 minutes to log on to--and top out at transfer rates of 9,600 kbps. According to Ramanan Raghavendran, the founder and CEO of ConnectCapital, which focuses on tech-driven investments offshore in India, many of the stories about India's antiquated infrastructure are overblown. He claims that too much is being spent on building infrastructure and not enough on leveraging Indian programming talent. "On one level we have to feel really good about the report, but on another level I have to be skeptical," says Raghavendran. "Most of that money is being spent on infrastructure, but the parts of India where most of the IT activity takes place already have global-class infrastructure." Raghavendran claims that only $200 million to $300 million of the total is being spent on the "Indian-U.S. corridor," which can best be described as back-end programming operations done mostly for American companies. Nevertheless, building bandwidth will likely continue to capture the bulk of investments. Much of that activity will require heavy investing in fiber-optic networks and setting up gateways to the Internet. The government has recently abandoned that law and now allows firms to set up gateway connections on foreign-owned satellites. That's good news, but there may be too many players involved in building India's domestic infrastructure, and there could be a fall-out at some point. According to Raghavendran, more money and effort should be put into leveraging Indian talent to serve the global IT market. Where
the Seed Money Is - Venture capitalists are still funding startups-and
here’s what’s getting their green Doom-Mongers, Take note: Dot-coms may be dying and the new economy may be out of vogue, but newborn companies with good ideas and talented leaders are still getting the money the need. Narad Networks, located in Westford, Mass., is embarking on an even gutsier solution to the last-mile problem. It’s betting that cable can be a cheap alternative to fiber-optic networks. The company received $42 million earlier this month from Polaris Ventures’ Bob Metcalfe, a Silicon Valley legend who developed the Ethernet networking standard. Narad Networks, whose founder and CEO Dev Gupta has founded two successful telecom startups is also strengthened by his investors’ pedigree: In addition to Metcalfe, the company is backed by executives like Juniper Networks founder Pradeep Sindhu. “Bandwidth by itself isn’t very useful. What is useful are the services that can be offered to businesses. That is the opportunity” says Dev Gupta The
pitch: VC’s
take: “We’re not taking about cable modems here. We’re talking about hundreds of megabits of broadband, thousands of times faster than what there is now.” – Bob Metcalfe, a partner at Polaris Ventures. Talisma helps you chat with your customers As editor of TechRepublic's CRMSuperSite, I spend a lot of time on the Web looking for new information on customer relationship management (CRM). I was deep into a search one day when I came across the Web site for Talisma, an Internet-CRM (eCRM) company. Cruising the site, I caught something moving and changing out of the corner of my eye. Thinking the box in the top left-hand corner was an advertisement, I ignored it. Then I realized that it wasn't an advertisement at all; in fact, it was someone or something trying to initiate a chat session with me, asking me if I had any questions about Talisma or if I needed help navigating through the site. The someone or something turned out to be Philip, my "online guide." At first I had my doubts about Philip, assuming he was an automated service dolling out cached answers. But then I realized Phillip was a real person, initiating a real-time conversation with me. I asked Philip how the chat technology worked and about its possible advantages to the CRM industry. He told me about Talisma, a six-year-old eCRM company that places emphasis on keeping Internet-based services as personal as possible. Personal service from an impersonal source Talisma focuses its eCRM solutions on providing its clients' customers with the personal attention that is often lacking in Internet-based business-to-consumer communication. While many CRM and eCRM vendors claim to offer one-on-one customer service, Talisma is using Talisma Chat, the proper name of the chat product that originally caught my eye on the Talisma site, to make good on their personal service claims. "Chat is a bunch of technology, but there is a person behind it," said Mike McClure, Talisma's vice president of product marketing. Talisma Chat can also collect a history of customer interaction. A representative can look back over a customer's file to see what they needed help with in the past or what they purchased. The chat session is recorded word for word. "The first step towards building an ongoing relationship is storing what I know about you as a customer and using it to personalize things to you," McClure said. Customer
service—Online! Talisma
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