What Is Rearden Steel?

Sandwiched between articles on vacant office space and the market in used Aeron chairs, the press placed a few articles on new companies braving the chilly times to fit into all the space left available by the Internet bust.

The New York Times, News.com and the Wall Street Journal all published birth announcements for Rearden Steel Technologies, a new venture by

Silicon Valley veteran Steve Perlman, who says he has raised $67 million in first-round funding.

John Markoff in the Times said Rearden Steel would make "computerized technology for the home entertainment market," but News.com's Paul Festa zoomed in a little closer, saying it was probably a "television set-top box that will receive and record a wide array of digital programming" and do other stuff, too. Sounds a lot like TiVo-plus.

Festa even found a Gartner analyst to raise an eyebrow at the startup's chances to break into that market, but its investments from AOL and Cisco give it a few well-placed friends.

Markoff's report portrays Perlman as a real "geek" (complete with spaghetti spilled on his shirt) who has been waiting for a little elbow room in Silicon Valley and a "return to sensibility." Perlman said the boom as "the new California gold rush, and so many people came to Silicon Valley who were not technologists. ... We would call these people carpetbaggers."

They weren't all bad: Among those carpetbaggers was Microsoft, which bought Perlman's last venture for $425 million. Rearden Steel's name is borrowed from the protagonist's company in Ayn Rand's 1957 novel, "Atlas Shrugged," Markoff notes, even though Perlman "said he disagreed with some of the author's philosophy of corporate supremacy."

News.com and The Wall Street Journal extended the same courtesy to Sony and Accenture (nee Andersen Consulting), which announced the birth of a joint venture, Concadia Solutions, at the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas. According to the Journal's Theo Francis, Sony hired Accenture to find out how big the market was for digital asset management. The whole digital TV pie will generate $30.1 billion by 2005, Francis wrote, with digital asset management a slice of that. Both companies liked the answer so much, they decided to pool their resources. Concadia will help broadcasters and film makers convert their assets to digital format, relying on "Sony's expertise in video production with Accenture's management consulting experience." With a pedigree like that, the firm needs only one thing, according to the Journal: customers.