VIACING ALL iFITERFITSOEFRO COUNTY onnEcTIon • Residential and Commercial A Jerusalem company takes catalog shopping to the third dimension. • Personal and Customized Services JENNIFER FRIEDLIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS • 100% Customer Retention and Satisfaction • Non-Profits Call For Your Free Account (810) 334-5492 or (810) 335-1309 SpeedLink A Division of SpeedNet, Inc. http://www.speedlink.net • e-mail: speed@speedlink.net • 53-1/2 West Huron Street, Suite 211 • Pontiac Detroit's Premiere Custom Clothier Since 1949 At your service! SNIP IRE{ CUs • Benchmade Suits • Custom Alterations • Accessories • Custom Made Shirts • flud4 o Lithzi (yearn Clotlittr THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 271 %La • attlai.44, • 68 OLiVR's Twist Custom Made Suits from S525 (810) 646-0535 Complete Financial Services PaineWebber Invest With More Intelligence Gerald E. Naftaly Vice President-Investments 32300 Northwestern Hwy., Suite 150 Farmington Hills, MI 48334 (810) 851-1001 or (800) 533-1407 ORCHARD LAKE ROAD NORTH OF MAPLE WEST BLOOMFIELD CA$ H \ FOR LIKE-NEW WOMEN'S & CHILDREN'S DESIGNER fashions G accessories CONSIGNMENT CLOIIDERS Call today for a FREE housecall appt or in-store appt. 349-4570 43041 W 7 Mile • Northville 0/ CLASSIFIED GET RESULTS! Call The Jewish News 354-5959 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."