I saw David Caruso (in person) at CES in January.  He rolled into the press room and quickly attracted a crowd of people who wanted to shake hands with Mr. CSI: Miami. David and his posse of two, Nils Lahr and Frank Nein, wanted to generate some buzz about his video technology company/play, Lexicon Digital Communications.

"We're in stealth, look at the video on our website, it's really great, thanks, stay tuned, see yah," is about how the discussion ran. Oh, and I got a signed postcard from him.

Lahr, Lexicon's CTO, was CTO and co-founder of iBeam broadcasting and before that was a senior developer at Microsoft when VXstreme was snapped up by Microsoft wayyy back in the day. I remember iBeam quite well since I went head-to-head with them at SkyCache/Cidera during the dot.com era; we were both hocking solutions to deliver bandwidth rich content to the edge of the Internet through satellite broadband before the alleged bandwidth shortage turned into a fiber glut. 

Nein is the odd-man-in of the trio, handling PR for the young and stealthy firm, so I suppose we could blame him for the lack of information about Lexicon.  But I'm not sure.

If you visit www.lexicondigital.tv [1], there's a clumsy website and a small screen cryptic video filmed in and around Vegas.  Looks like more money was spent on props and making the video than setting up the website--definite faux pas, no matter how cool David is. Then again, Caruso also the mistake of bailing on "NYPD Blue" and doing "Jade."

With the flood of video tools in the marketplace and CDNs starting to give away deliver services, it's time for Lexicon to put their cards on the table. How does Lexicon hope to compete against Adobe, Apple, and Microsoft, not to mention all the other players floating around?

- Doug [2]