Local entrepreneur Pat Croce remembers two things about Jan. 9, 2006:
His granddaughter, Pascale, was born, and he learned about a one-of-a-kind search-engine technology for live TV and radio that amazed him.
Croce, a former 76ers president, extolled the joys of being a grandparent on Michael Smerconish's radio talk show that morning. Three hours later, he met with Redlasso, a King of Prussia technology company with a search-engine capability for TV and radio unlike any Croce had ever seen.
When Redlasso founder Kevin O'Kane, former vice president and general manager of Philadelphia's Channel 57, typed the name of newborn Pascale as the search word, a split second later, Croce's interview with Smerconish popped up.
Today, we welcome into the world Pascale Sorg, whose grandfather is one of the fittest men on the planet, Smerconish was saying.
"It took my breath away," Croce said recently. "It was amazing that you could type in seven letters, and the words came up that were relevant to the letters. I said: 'Where did this technology come from?' "
After the demonstration of the phonetic search technology, Croce put in half a million dollars of his own money, becoming Redlasso's first investor.
Since then, Redlasso, originally called Phonetic Search Inc., has raised $6.5 million from several other investors.
Think of Redlasso as a Google for live-broadcast TV and radio. It's sort of like YouTube, but legal because the TV networks and radio stations support it and will get a share of revenue from ads that will eventually appear alongside their clips.
The problem now is that stories from local and national stations are uploaded to the Internet without the content owners' knowledge or permission. "So there's no way to track what's being aired, no way to monetize it for the guy who actually published it," said Al McGowan, Redlasso's chief operating officer and former founder of the media division of Traffic.com.
Redlasso's technology breaks up word sounds phonetically. In 2005, O'Kane learned of the technology and contacted a friend, Jim McCusker, an electrical engineer and software expert who had worked at Merck & Co. Inc. McCusker put together a team to apply what had started as a British military technology to the old media/new media worlds.
