Stephen Streater first retired at the age of 33. With $4m in his back pocket from the sale of Eidos, the gaming software company he founded in 1990, the technology entrepreneur decided to put his feet up. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t last. Just months later he launched Forbidden Technologies (LON:FBT) , a company that uses the internet – or the Cloud – as a platform for super slick video editing software. Whether you’re a major broadcaster, a journalist in a hotel room in Kabul or you simply want to make a professional looking video of your last holiday – Forbidden’s technology is becoming an industry standard.

Unlike the vast majority of its technology peers however, Forbidden has spent most of its life in full public view. Streater brought the company to AIM in 2000, at the height of the dot com boom, seeing a chance to ride the wave of cash that was being ploughed into tech stocks. The company floated at 4p and watched its price immediately surge to 280p before the inevitable decline. With 10 years of development work still ahead of it, shareholders that joined at the IPO have had to be patient – not least Streater himself, who still owns around 75% - a figure that is likely to fall in the near future as institutional investors join the fray.

With 10 years of developing its flagship FORscene software now behind it, Forbidden is beginning to ramp up its sales efforts with both broadcasters, consumers and through anticipated partnership deals with large systems integrators – IT groups that sell packaged services to major organisations around the world. Newsflow on that front expected during the second half of the year. What is certainly clear is that the explosion in the use of online video and the numbers of organisations that want to produce professional quality films, has come at just the right time for Forbidden. With the big names in professional post production technology – the likes of Avid (Nasdaq: AVID) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) – heavily reliant on hardware, Forbidden is almost on its own in the market for supplying advanced video editing software through Cloud servers that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Stephen Streater talked to Stockopedia about his plans for Forbidden, the opportunities he thinks are out there and…

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