CyberWorks Ventures (CWV), the venture capital arm of Pacific Century CyberWorks Ltd (PCCW), Monday said that the company has eight new investments, making a total of 42 since PCCW’s inception eight months ago.
Hong Kong Chinese newspaper Apple Daily said that PCCW is in the process of acquiring radio broadcast station Commercial Radio Hong Kong, but PCCW has yet to comment.
“A parallel goal is the need to serve our Pacific Convergence Corp. strategy, gathering the best in content and technology that will benefit our Network of the World (NOW) service,” said Richard Li, chairman of Pacific Convergence Corp. “The investments we are announcing were made with this in mind and we will continue to set the pace for investment in Asia.”
Company officials say that the NOW project, planned for a launch later this year, will provide a broadband digital video/Net-access system targeting a potential reach of 130 million households.
The eight investments include:
a US$3 million investment in Beatnik, Inc., a developer of Web-based audio tools and technologies;
a stake in US-based Dotcast Inc., a broadband communications enabler targeting media content, e-commerce and communication service providers. Its products can deliver video to PCs, TVs and other Dotcast-enabled devices over their analog and digital channels at speeds of 4.5 to 12 Mbps;
a further increase in equity shareholding in Outblaze to 46 percent. Outblaze provides customizable email, mailing list, message boards and other services for Web sites;
a minor stake in Palm, Inc., a provider of PalmPilot handheld computing devices;
PCCW has taken a 5 percent stake in India-based portal Rediff. According to AC Nielsen, Rediff has 560,000 registered email users and 57 million pageviews per month as of January 2000;
PCCW has made a 4.65 percent investment in Sohu.com, an all-in-one Chinese portal in China;
a stake in consumer ratings company Taste For Living, an online health and wellness company that originates from the Taste For Living Cookbook by Michael Milken.
a 22.4 percent investment in 3Fusion, which provide networked e-commerce infrastructure to merchants. Its platform and embedded content catalog enable merchants (manufacturers, distributors and suppliers) to integrate commerce in their sites and merchants direct access to target markets;
PCCW previously took a 49 percent stake in India-based ISP Data Access.
