Company: CrestaTech
Headquarters: Santa Clara, Calif.
Technology Sector: Hardware
Key Product: CrestaTV Universal Broadband Receiver
Year Founded: 2005
Number of Channel Partners: Less Than 10
Ideal Channel Partner: System Builders
Why You Should Care: With the growing importance of digital video broadcasting and GPS technology for mobile devices, CrestaTech's technology allows PCs to be region-free and able to receive a variety of broadcast signals across the globe.
The Lowdown: Imagine if you could take your laptop, netbook or smartphone anywhere in the world and be able to play any kind of live broadcast HDTV, listen to any radio station, and -- deep breath -- also use your GPS technology, regardless of region code limitations. That's the dream CrestaTech is selling, and the product is the CrestaTV Universal Broadband Receiver.
CrestaTV's "programmable broadband" technology comes in the form of an RFIC (radio frequency integrated circuit) and accompanying software that allows a PC or mobile device to receive region-free TV, radio and GPS signals. Instead of having your connectivity cut off by the different region codes, CrestaTV's integrated circuit and multi-threaded software framework simply identify the signal of a particular region and allow the broadband receiver to access the signal.
Ramon Cazares, vice president of business development at CrestaTech, said the product is basically a "translator" for various media signals. "This is a big benefit for the manufacturers because they can ship the same unit everywhere in the world without having to worry about each country's standard," Cazares says. "It's a value-add feature at a low price point that provides real differentiation."
While CrestaTech was formed in 2005 and received early funding from Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim, the company didn't unveil its CrestaTV product and universal broadband receiver technology until last year. Now the company is diligently working on forming deals with OEMs and system builders to get CrestaTV installed on laptops and netbooks. And after CrestaTech gets traction in the mobile PC market, it plans on moving CrestaTV to smaller mobile devices like smartphones. "Looking at the mobile market and the architecture trend, we expect that in two years smartphones will be powerful enough to support any mobile HDTV standard," Cazares says. "There's a lot of potential for us in smartphones."
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