Breaking speed limits

Want to watch high-definition movies with 5.1 digital Surround Sound on your picture cell phone? A little Reno-based company developed compression technology that would allow movie buffs to watch high-quality films on their cell phones, but it's having a devil of a time getting anyone to pay attention.

Executives of Web Delivered Solutions Inc.

think the biggest potential market for their technology is likely to be the broadcast industry, which is under a federal mandate to update its signals to high-definition by 2006.

Bill Sikkens, the chief technology architect for Web Delivered Solutions, says the company's technology allows broadcasters to move DVD-quality video over the Internet without the need for costly high-speed networks.

Other uses for the compression technology include moving massive amounts of medical data.

Web Delivered Solutions' technology has been used, for instance, to transfer MRI scans taken in remote locations of Iraq to the offices of radiologists in Europe.

Time to transfer the files: about five minutes, compared with four hours or more with existing technologies.

Sound too good to be true? That's been a common reaction when company executives call on potential clients.

"People don't believe it.

The technical people say that it's not possible," says John Sikkens, the company's chairman, chief financial officer and father of its technology architect.

Part of the reason for the disbelief, says Bill Sikkens, is a long history of big promises and under-delivery by other developers of compression technology.

"Customers are a little gun-shy," he says.

"We have to get in and show it.

This is a visual medium."

Sikkens began working out the complex algorithms behind the compression technology about two years ago while working on a graduate degree in cryptology at the University of Washington.

Initially, he was looking for a way to speed downloads of software purchased by consumers but soon realized the compression technology could be used in applications ranging from television broadcasts to superfast downloads of movies to airline passengers' laptops.

The company was incorporated less than a year ago, and Sikkens resolved the final issues in the algorithms in a flash of insight a couple of days before Easter this spring.

With a completed and tested technology in hand,Web Delivered Solutions began getting feelers from larger companies that were interested in buying or licensing the system.

Those talks haven't led anywhere, however, because Sikkens is reluctant to let others look at the formulas he developed.

That means that the company's seven employees for the moment are marketing the technology themselves,making cold calls on broadcasters and other potential users and hoping to get an appointment to show them DVD-quality video delivered over the Internet from a server at Fremont, Calif., to the prospect's office.

The privately held company has been funded so far by individual investors, and Sikkens says the end of major development means the investors' payoff may be near.