Patrick Grove, chief executive officer, of Catcha.com hopes to get between US$500,000 and US$1 million for the popular Website which will be spun off and be developed independently. 1mp3.com was recently listed among the Top 25 search engines for MP3 in the world by industry watcher MP3Now.

"We are the positioning the site as a hub for distributing music for Asian acts," Grove told Newsbytes. "It will be like an Asian- equivalent of Nasdaq-listed MP3.com. We will focus on unsigned acts in the region to put out their original music on the site and we are also talking to major established labels and distribution houses for partnerships."

Grove expects a paradigm shift in the next three to five years when established ways of distributing music today will be overturned and the Internet will be play a dominant role.

"When this shift happens, the leading distributors of music on the Internet stand to gain and we plan to be one of the key players," he said.

Earlier, Grove said Catcha.com was aiming for an IPO on the Nasdaq market by the year 2000 but a listing on a local bourse such as the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange or Singapore Stock Exchange was more likely.

He said Catcha was also planning to expand to country-specific portals for Australia, Philippines and Thailand in addition to its present portals in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia.

Chief operating officer Nic Lim said the company was also looking into having Chinese and Malay language versions of the Catcha.com.my portal soon.

Lim said the company had also applied to receive Multimedia Super Corridor status which qualifies them for tax breaks, world-class communications infrastructure and freedom to import foreign knowledge workers within the high-tech zone.

"We are enjoying tremendous exponential advertising growth rates of between 25- to 50 percent per month and have a hit count of 10 million per month," he said.

Lim conceded that e-commerce and banner ad market from local companies was still weak but he expects "the tide to change."

Set up in July by four entrepreneurs each under 25-years-old from Malaysia, Singapore and Japan, the company recently received venture capital amounting to 12.1 million ringgit (US$3.2 million) and is currently capitalized at 76.5 million ringgit ($20.1 million), making it one of the largest Internet companies in the region.

Funding came from a group of both local and overseas investors including Arboc Investments, an investment holding company for the Shaw family, Australian company Imperial Technologies, Geneva-based Alternative Investment Management Group, Hong Kong venture cap company Axiom Funds Management and private investors in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Catcha.com is targeting a third round of investment from institutional investors and merchant bankers.

Reported By Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com

03:00 CST