VDONet Corp, Palo Alto, California start-up hoping to pioneer real-time video on the Internet, has landed $3m in venture funding from the New York phone company Nynex Corp. The year-old start-up wants the cash to finance its efforts to develop video broadcasting and video telephony services for the Internet over analog and digital telephone lines and private networks. Nynex made the investment to buy itself access to VDONet’s technology for multimedia services, and its compression technologies – the fledgling company is offering VDOLive Internet video broadcasting technology and the VDOPhone Internet video telephony product.
Online Interactive Inc is pioneering on-line shopping and plans have found favor with Trident Capital, which has put up $3m of venture capital via its $80m Information Associates fund to further the company’s plans. Dun & Bradstreet Enterprises is the primary limited partner in the Trident-managed fund. The on-line shopping services of Online Interactive are @Once Software, claiming to be the leader in direct electronic software distribution, and the FreeShop Online, a lead generation program that has garnered over 1.4m of orders. The services are already available on America Online, Microsoft Network, Prodigy, and the Internet, with CompuServe due to be added in next month.
