Last evening I was chatting with Sanjay Subedhar, general partner at Storm Ventures, and he mentioned that one should we watching for Portal Player’s initial public offering. I had put it on my to-do-list, but my old friend Paul La Monica beat me to it. Portal Player has filed for an initial public offering, news which was lost in the single minded obsession with Google’s IPO. The company is looking to raise about $75 million, and wants to get a ticker called PLAY.

(The company has raised $60 million in VC funding since its 1999 inception, including a $42 million recap round in 2002. Significant shareholders include JPMorgan Partners, Shamrock Holdings, Investcorp, CIBC World Markets and LSI Logic Corp.) Since this is the season for concept offerings, why not look at the engine under the hottest device on the planet, IPod. Paul called Portal Player IPod’s Intel. He also pointed out that, “PortalPlayer gets most of its business from a Taiwanese company called Inventec. And Inventec is the company that makes this little device that you may have heard — it’s called the iPod.”

The company had about $21 million in sales in the first six months of the year. The company lost $8 million last year and another $3.3 million in the first half of 2004. It lost $25.3 million in 2001 and $22.5 million in 2002. Paul compares Portal Player to SIgmatel, a company that supplies chips to folks like Rio and Creative. However, i have once concern with this IPO – PortalPlayer’s heavy reliance on one client. I get a feeling this company has filed for an IPO, only to get a buyout offer from some larger rival, like Texas Instruments! He one needs to look for double entendre’s in the ticker symbol, PLAY, as IN PLAY (My previous article on Portal Player)