Bigfoot Networks is looking to bridge the gap between high-end network processors offered by companies such as Cisco and low-end providers of the most basic networking components such as Marvel. Bigfoot is targeting the & World of Warcraft& users and the rest of the online gaming market first because it is the biggest potential market, but has an eye on business applications such as video conferencing and online enterprise applications, too.

With close to 12 million subscribers to the online game "wow  gold" there are plenty of users out there clamoring for top-performing gaming computers that don’t fall victim to excessive network latency.

Enter Bigfoot Networks. This 3-year-old company wants to do for online gaming what graphics card makers such as Nvidia and ATI (now a division of AMD) did for gaming graphics. Resource Library

Bigfoot offers a co-processor—the Killer NIC (network interface card) that optimizes networking performance on a PC by offloading networking functions such as Winsock processing from the main CPU. The result is an accelerated networking experience for network-intensive PC applications such as online games and voice over IP (VOIP).