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A
t the age of 30, Jacob
Guedalia is living the
dream of the start-up en-
trepreneur. He has already
succeeded in establishing and sell-
ing his first endeavor to a high-
wheeling NASDAQ-traded
company, and he has just signed
a deal with Apple Computer, Inc.
that will propel his second ven-
ture, OLiVR Corporation, onto the
list of leading companies that cre-
ate 3-D applications for the World
Wide Web.
Based in Givat Shaul,
Jerusalem, and Lexington, Mass.,
OLiVR, or On-Line Interactive
Virtual Reality, enables people to
create 3-D, multimedia movies for
the Web that can be seen in real
time. Designed especially for com-
panies wishing to do commerce
over the Internet, this technology
allows merchants and advertis-
ers to go beyond 2-D catalogs and
advertisements to bring photore-
alistic images of their products to
customers.
In turn, browsers can vir-
tually pick up objects, ro-
tate 3-D images, zoom
onto the product
and select differ-
ent outfits for a
3-D charac-
ter to mod-
el.
"There's
$50 billion
in direct
marketing in
the United
States,
and for it to succeed
on the Web it has to be
more compelling than a
mail-order catalog," ex-
plained the American-born
Mr. Guedalia.
An expert in optics and
imaging, Mr. Guedalia, an ad-
mirer of Israeli high-tech forefa-
ther Efi Arazi, received his
master's degree in applied physics
from the Weizmann Institute.
Through personal investments
and financial assistance from his
family, Mr. Guedalia founded
Computational Graphics Ltd. in
1992.
Two years ago, he sold a con-
trolling share of the company,
which develops technologies that
allow video on the Internet, to
DSP Communications.
Today, Computational Graph-
ics, which is now known as
VDOnet Ltd., is considered an in-
dustry leader in Internet video
software. Microsoft recently
bought a minority stake in
VDOnet, testimony to Mr.
Gueclalia's ability to develop a cut-
ting-edge core technology.
After leaving VDOnet, Illr,
Guedalia spent some time Uyi
n g .
to decide what to do next. He re:
alized that he wanted to go one
step further than he had with his
first start-up and began thinking
of ways to develop an application
using innovative technology,
"There's a difference between
having a core component tech-
nology and an application," Mr.
Guedalia says. "It's the difference
between creating spell check and
creating Microsoft Word."
Seeing the huge potential mar-
ket for developing an application
that would take mail-order cata-
logs to the next dimension, Mr.
Guedalia began thinking about
how he could combine his past ex-
perience with the present.
Communications Week fore-
casts that by the year 2000 the In-
ternet will grow from 30 million
to 200 million users, and revenue
from advertisements on the In-
ternet will grow to more than $2.2
billion. Industry analysts Frost
and Sullivan estimate that
the market for multinie-
dia development tools
will grow from $400
million to about
$3 billion over
the next few
years.
' Anxious to
take advan-
Mr.
tage,
Guedalia ac-
quired patented
fractal wavelet com-
pression technology,
which makes it possible to
bring bits of information over
the Web by compressing and de-
compressing files, and hired a
team of developers.
Mr. Guedalia and his staff of
four software programmers then
began combining the compression
technology with Quick Time VR,
Apple Computer's interactive vir-
tual-reality movie format, and
found that the combination made
it possible to bring 3-D movies
over the Internet in real time.
Today, the company, which has
grown four-fold, proudly says that
OLiVR's capabilities go over and
above those developed at VDOnet
is the first compression
and enabling technology to.opti-
ce
mize the multimedia experien
in today's narrowband world of
14.4 Kb modems," says Rich. ard
Levandov, president of OLiVR.
"While Java and ShockWave are
both interactive, and RealAudio
and VDOnet are streaming, only
OLiVR movies are both interac -
tive and streaming."