One of the companies that don't exist anymore.

Pixelon's home page boasted, at one time, "...TV-Quality video delivers full-screen, full-motion video communication over the Internet without the usual sacrifice of quality using alternate technologies." This "proprietary" solution was based on MPEG and had "...full-screen, full-motion, true color video with CD quality stereo sound for the Internet. Pixelon's encoding solutions work in real-time to compress, and if needed, encrypt digital files."

The wholly buzzword-compliant web page told how their video technologies are superior, and compliant with the MPEG standards... and press releases told how the picture quality goes UP and bitrate goes DOWN. Which is, of course, among the video expert considered a sign that stuff isn't completely right =)

...

The company was founded in Virginia by a person called Michael Fenne.

While the company was up and running, the venture capitalists, investors and prospective customers had very high hopes for the company. So, the company had money with which to do stuff. They threw togheter a gala called "iBash '99" in Las Vegas that had a lot of big-name stars - and people even witnessed The Who's reunion.

(Meanwhile, in Slashdot, Roblimo complained that the Pixelon's browser plugin wasn't working at all... This was the kiss of death! =)

Several misfortunes later, it turned out that the founder's real name was actually David Stanley - a stock swindler. Stanley surrendered to the authorities in April 2000. Then, it turned out the company had a lot in debt to other companies and, well, the whole thing sort of fell apart.


Sources:
http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit.shtml/pixelon
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,36243,00.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/17/1116248&mode=thread
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16317,00.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/27/1156210&mode=thread

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