In Brief: Start-Up Aims to Use Net for Business TV

Electronic commerce entrepreneur and Open Market Inc. founder David Gifford has cofounded a new company that uses the Internet as a distribution channel for business television. With former Avid Technology Inc. executive Jim Ricotta, Mr. Gifford announced the formation of SightPath Inc., which aims to combine streaming media technology with a new generation of Internet appliances and self-organizing network distribution architectures pioneered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science.

The entrepreneurs said SightPath's solution would let a business of any size create an affordable private Internet-based system for communicating, educating, and motivating with television-quality video at the desktop.

"The networked personal computer has become the predominant information delivery channel for business users," said Mr. Ricotta, chief executive officer. With SightPath, which has test systems at several companies, including 3Com Corp., "businesses will now be able to communicate with the impact of television while leveraging the convenience of the PC and the low cost and ubiquitous reach of the Internet."

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