A partnership between successful web entrepreneurs Alan Larsen (Founder of Japan Works), Rob Adamson (Founder of XMLAuthor) and Dan Taggart (founder of MyFamily.com, Ancestry.com), StageGold is an exciting new platform allowing users to play and retrieve videos anywhere on the web. "The video hosting space is booming right now, and there is plenty of room for innovation and competition," said CEO Larsen. "We are only in the very early stage of defining this new and exciting space."

While much of what StageGold offers is similar to YouTube, such as the ability to upload videos, StageGold's features offer significant enhancements over competing players. One of those innovations is exclusive Point and Play technology built into the StageGold player that allows users to create virtual shortcuts to videos on many other websites. Another first is their Multi-source Playlist technology that makes it possible for users to create playlists that include videos hosted on multiple sites and play them in a single player. The StageGold video player can also be fitted with any of the 100's of customizable "skins" to set the perfect stage for any video. Finally, StageGold players function as a "mobile stage" for videos and can be embedded on any webpage simply and quickly. To make it easy to manage embedded players, any changes made to the player on StageGold.com are reflected wherever the embedded player resides on other sites.

In addition to their groundbreaking new video player, StageGold also offers CinemaForge, a powerful video converter that supports nearly every popular video format, including MP4 (h264), FLV, SWF, WMV, MOV, AVI, MPEG, RM, and ASF. CinemaForge has already garnered more than a million downloads on such sites as Download.com and Techrepublic.com. CinemaForge makes it easy to download videos from the web and convert them to play on virtually any video enabled device, or convert personal videos to upload to the web. CinemaForge can also be used to create movie slideshows from still photos with true alpha channel transitions. Users can download CinemaForge for free at www.stagegold.com.