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Forbes | Americas Most Promising Companies | Strietzel | Jonathan Strietzel | Big Stage

Jonathan Strietzel | Americas Most Promising Companies | Forbes

Jonathan Strietzel: Forbes Magazine has a circulation of over 900,000 and its website, Forbes.com reaches approximately 18 million people a month. Both the magazine and the website are for the world’s top business leaders and in the October 5th, 2009 edition of Forbes, Big Stage Entertainment was named as #18 in America’s Most Promising Companies.

“Our company is very proud to have been included in such a prestigious list by one of the premier business brands in the world. We know from the hours spent answering questions and filling out forms that this was a very rigorous process. We also know that we have a lot of work to do to build this business, but we’re pleased that our efforts to date have been recognized in this way.  A big thanks to my founding partner Jon Kraft for playing a key role in hammering though this rigorous Q&A while on vacation!”

Jonathan Strietzel, President and Founder

According to Forbes.com “We didn’t just look for the slickest technology, the largest addressable market, the fastest-growing top lines or the most storied management team. In the specific case of Big Stage, the Big Stage Founding team organized by Jonathan Strietzel, Jon Kraft and Jon Snoddy reflect such a management staff”

The method for determining the companies recognized on this new list was explained on the Forbes website as follows:

Forbes went hunting for small, dynamic companies with the kind of growth potential that makes venture capitalists salivate. Other lists of small or privately held companies tend to be ranked according to a single metric: annual revenue, or percentage change in revenue over a given period. Yet every serious investor knows that a cursory glance at the top line is a far cry from what it takes to evaluate the potential of any promising company.

To sharpen our search, Forbes teamed with The Venture Alliance, an advisory to early-stage companies. TVA has devised a rating system for young companies in order to more efficiently determine how fundable they are. The pool of candidates included companies launched within the last 10 years and that had not passed $25 million in annual sales. (Pre-revenue companies were allowed.) Prospects were scored on a host of characteristics, among them the size of the markets they serve, the strength of their intellectual property, the extent to which founders put their own capital at risk, the experience of their management and of their directors (or advisory boards), and their record in hitting product-development benchmarks promised to equity investors.

We collected the data via a detailed survey that takes roughly two hours to complete. Entrepreneurs who had raised outside capital gave business plans to TVA for further vetting; the rest completed an even more exhaustive survey. (Both surveys have subtle double-checks built in, to make sure the companies’ storylines indeed do track.) Our partner also brought in software experts and engineers to evaluate product plans (all signed nondisclosure agreements), and Forbes reporters interviewed all the finalists. The 20 highest scorers, listed here, appear to have a better shot at raising capital–and thus are considered more scintillating than their peers.

“We were very happy to learn that Forbes recognized the technology that Big Stage had developed over the past 3 years as a leader in its class, world-wide.  Its a wonderful tribute to the hard working engineering staff in our amazing company.  We thank Forbes and TVA for the opportunity and we are proud to grace the pages of such a prestigious magazine.”

Jonathan Strietzel, President and Founder

We cannot thank Forbes and Forbes.com enough for the honor of gracing their prestigious pages of Americas Most Promising Companies in 2009.

Starring You On The Big Screen

Forbes, CES 2008

Forbes, CES 2008

Louis Hau 1.9.08

CES 2008

Las Vegas, NV

How would you like to give yourself a starring role in your favorite videogame? Or music video? Or your favorite movie scene of all time?

South Pasadena, Calif., start-up Big Stage wants to help you do just that. The company has developed a technology that will allow anyone with a standard digital camera to create a life-like avatar of themselves. They will then be able to place that avatar on a blog, Web site or social-network page as a fun way of identifying themselves.

Even better: with a little know-how, users will be able to insert their virtual selves into a digital media file–or, say, place a 3D image of Intel (nasdaq: INTC ) Chief Executive Paul Otellini in the music video for Smash Mouth’s 1997 hit “Walkin’ On The Sun,” as Big Stage Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Strietzel did during Otellini’s CES keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday.

Big Stage’s technology has its roots in government-funded research in 3D imaging done at the University of Southern California. The work takes what had been a complex, time-consuming image-creation process and boils it down to a consumer-friendly means to create personalized avatars.

The company’s technology is currently focused on reproducing facial images, but full-body avatars are in the pipeline. Its avatar system will be available to the public in the second quarter of this year.

On Tuesday, Strietzel needed only a few minutes to create a 3D avatar of me and superimpose my face over that of Harrison Ford’s in a scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark. There I was, in a dank room, slyly replacing a coveted idol head with a small sack of sand. Damn, I was good.

As startling as it can be to see a moving 3D image of yourself, these are very early days for the technology, which is bound to become more compelling as the ability to simulate intelligence improves to create an even more realistic digital you.

What sorts of revenue-generating applications could a life-like avatar have? You don’t have to think too hard to come up with a pack: Videogame publishers could license the technology to give customers the ability to place their avatar inside a game. Similar uses could be attractive to online virtual worlds and social networks. And here’s one of Strietzel’s favorites: Allowing customers to insert themselves into famous movie scenes could give studios a new way of generating fresh revenues from existing film assets.

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