In June 1999, Narayanan Ram was selling a small act of disobedience: the right to stop a video. A picture would pass across a computer screen, and the viewer could go back, inspect it, keep it, even print it. The stream could carry on being a stream. You could take something home.
His company, SeeItFirst, offered tools for extracting clear still photographs from moving online video. For television stations, advertising agencies and web businesses, this meant that a clip could become a collection of pictures. For a viewer, it meant getting a little more authority over what appeared on the screen. The detail you wanted need no longer disappear just because the director had moved on.
Ram is now the co-founder and CEO of PurpleTeal, based in Fremont, California. But the earlier business provides a useful entrance to his career. It contains an engineer’s concern with a particular technical obstacle, a founder’s search for customers, and the less photogenic business of keeping a company alive when money becomes difficult to raise. The pause button turns out to be a surprisingly good place to begin.
A picture worth waiting for
Consider the proposition as Ram presented it in 1999. A user could move through video in either direction, select an image, enlarge it and save it. A web company could offer its audience a gallery assembled from a moving sequence. An advertiser could get more use from material originally made for broadcast. The same footage acquired another working life.
There is a pleasing practicality to that pitch. A video might contain the exact detail somebody needs, but finding the detail and obtaining a usable picture are separate jobs. SeeItFirst addressed the second job as well as the first. It promised something a customer could actually carry into another application, an email or a printed page. An image escaped the player and became useful elsewhere.
“all within today’s bandwidths”
Narayanan Ram, describing SeeItFirst’s proposition in June 1999
Those five words were part of his explanation of the service. They give the sales pitch its period detail and its discipline. A promise about online video had to fit the connection available to the person watching it. The company was offering a way to work within that limit. A better picture was attractive; a better picture that could actually arrive was a product.
The intended buyers were businesses: television and radio stations, agencies, portals and other commercial operators. Ram was pursuing production services and licensing arrangements. That choice put SeeItFirst behind other people’s experiences on the web. Its name might matter less to a viewer than the ability to capture the frame. The customer needed the capability; the audience needed it to work.
The engineering came first
Before SeeItFirst, Ram worked at Cirrus Logic between 1993 and 1996. His work included helping deliver the company’s first video-conferencing chip. He moved through engineering and management roles and left as director of video telecom products. His training includes a master’s degree in electrical engineering.
That background gives the later video business a concrete starting point. Video conferencing and interactive streaming ask different things of a product, but both involve getting pictures through a system with practical limits. Ram’s career crossed from working on the underlying technology to selling a use for it. The engineering problem acquired a customer, a price and a board of directors.
He founded SeeItFirst in 1997 and launched its first product in 1998. Over time, the business recorded more than 100 implementations across the United States, Japan and India. It also attracted investment from NBC/GE, MKS Ventures and Deutsche Bank. The progression is useful to keep in view: working technology, a released product, deployments and outside capital. Each required somebody beyond the inventor to participate.
The machinery behind the pause
A SeeItFirst patent, US6172672B1, describes the problem in wonderfully concrete dimensions. A video might arrive at 120 by 160 pixels while the display could support 640 by 480 or more. The screen had room for a better image. The continuous stream, constrained by transmission capacity, could not necessarily supply one at every instant.
The patent describes a client requesting a snapshot associated with a selected point in the video, with the server supplying the corresponding image. Put plainly, the moving sequence and the picture worth keeping could receive different treatment. You could watch at one level of detail and request more when something caught your attention.
The application was filed in December 1996 and the US patent was granted in January 2001. A related European application concerned providing higher-quality images from a digital video stream. These records put dates and mechanisms beside the company’s commercial language. They also make the problem legible without a sales presentation: sending every picture in greater detail and retrieving one particular picture are different demands on a network.
That is the attraction of examining a founder through an actual product. There is something to inspect. Here, the obstacle has dimensions, the proposed solution has a sequence, and the user has an action to perform. You do not have to accept a sweeping account of innovation to understand why somebody might want the thing.
After the demonstration, the company
By June 2001, SeeItFirst’s offering extended across licensed products, hosted applications, professional services and outsourced interactive video. The list is a reminder that a software business can have several doors. One customer wants a tool to operate. Another wants someone else to run the service. Both may be buying access to the same underlying capability.
The company’s listed executives included Michael Cornelio as chief technology officer, Harry Eaddy in sales and Scott Gordon in marketing, with Ram as chairman and CEO. This was a team with separate responsibilities. The technical demonstration had become an organization, complete with the tasks that a demonstration does not show.
Then came a harder test. Scott McGregor, who worked with Ram, later described his efforts to keep SeeItFirst going after September 11, 2001, when follow-on venture funding was difficult to obtain. McGregor recalled a successful restructuring and Ram’s ability to maintain investor relationships while developing partnerships and international distribution connections.
“great optimism”
Scott McGregor’s recollection of working with Ram during a difficult funding period
It is a compact character detail with a specific setting. Optimism in a product launch is easy to understand: there is a new thing to show. Optimism during restructuring has a different workload. People need decisions, investors need conversations, and a company needs enough continuity to keep operating. McGregor remembered Ram’s cheerful manner alongside those practical efforts.
SeeItFirst was acquired by the UB Group in 2001, and Ram continued as CEO until 2004. That additional tenure belongs in the story. An acquisition was followed by more years of running the business. His work there included both making something new and remaining responsible for it after ownership changed.
Another former business contact, Cheenu G Srinivasan, knew Ram through reselling SeeItFirst. His recommendation emphasized straightforward dealings with vendors, clients and employees. It is a different vantage point from an employee’s recollection of financing difficulties. Taken together, the two accounts describe relationships across the company’s boundaries as well as within its office. For a business selling technology through other organizations, those boundaries mattered. A reseller had to trust the supplier behind the product, just as an investor had to trust the executive explaining the next step. Both recollections attach Ram’s manner to a working relationship.
The next business needed people, too
Ram later co-founded PurpleTeal with Anand Subra. The two brought different working histories to their partnership: Ram’s included video technology and company leadership, while Subra had spent two decades at IBM across commercial and strategic roles. PurpleTeal’s US business dates to 2006, with its Indian company following in 2008.
The practical question of distribution remained. In 2021, PurpleTeal signed a partnership with Mondia to integrate and distribute its Tweak & Eat app through Mondia’s consumer network. South Africa, Oman and Saudi Arabia were named as planned first-phase markets. Ram emphasized the access to additional users that the arrangement could provide. A signed agreement and a planned launch are distinct milestones; the announcement described the intended route.
There is continuity here with the earlier career, although the products differ. SeeItFirst needed commercial partners that could put its capability in front of viewers. PurpleTeal also pursued partners with established audiences. The invention and the route to the customer remained separate pieces of work. A founder had to attend to both.
Ram’s career is particularly revealing in those connecting tasks: moving from engineer to manager, from product to implementation, from investor conversation to restructuring, from a company sale to continued leadership. The frame that can be saved is an appealing opening image. The longer story is about what happens after someone has seen the demonstration and asks how the business will run tomorrow.