Singingfishs high-tech net helps users delve into audio, video data streams

What: Singingfish

Who: Karen Howe, CEO

Employees: 30

The pitch: "We're the Google of audio/video search," Howe said.

The business: Singingfish licenses its search engine to companies like Real Networks and portals whose customers use it to find audio and video files. Howe believes mainstream search engines could license the technology.

How it works: "We know where the rich oases of multimedia content are," Howe said. After dipping into the sites that Singingfish has identified as fertile sources for content, the search engine uses a unique technology to extract data about the files, such as their types and sizes, adding that data to its index. "If you didn't have that information and you did a search, you wouldn't find anything," she said.

Singingfish augments that data, too. "You can have great content, but if the creator has done a crappy job on the title or the data about the stream, you won't find it. That's why we flesh it out."

The depth: Singingfish has an index of almost 10 million files or streams that can be accessed via its search engine.

Ownership: Singingfish is a wholly owned subsidiary of Thomson Multimedia, which bought the company in 2000 for $30 million. All of Singingfish's funding comes from Thomson, but it doesn't split out financials.

Where the name comes from: "The flip answer would be there were some people with too much of a special beverage locked in a room for too long. They got silly." The name hadn't been used by anyone else, so it stuck.

How she got the job: Mike Behlke, the former president and founder of Singingfish, used his accounting background to bring the company to a sound financial position, but he decided early this year that the next step would be to focus on relationships and partners for the company. "He said, 'We need to get to the next level, and that's going to be market development,' " Howe recalls. "He looked at me and said, 'Tag, you're it.' " She was vice president of marketing until becoming the acting CEO in April. She received the title for good this month.