Mar. 21--When it comes to technology companies, Houston is no Silicon Valley, or even Austin. Not yet at least.

But the nation's energy capital is home to dozens of hopeful entrepreneurs looking to strike gold with a hot Web site, software or mobile phone technology. Here's another installment of an occasional set of snapshots of local tech startups. Time will tell whether they catch fire or flame out.

Playnormous (www.playnormous.com)

Elevator pitch: "Our top priority is making our games fun so kids will want to play them. Learning about health doesn't have to be boring."

The idea: The site's parent company, Houston architectural firm Archimage, branched out to Web design a few years ago. It created Playnormous after getting a National Institutes of Health grant, and it grew from there.

Users: 11,000 per month

The brains: Playnormous President Jerald Reichstein runs the show, but he shares credit for creating and running it with a team of developers at the company.

The competition: Various hospitals and health care organizations and companies feature online games.

The money: "Nobody's really figured out how to make money from it yet," Reichstein said. Archimage's architectural profits help subsidize Playnormous, but the site also has received grant funding. It recently announced a new partnership with Humana, which is featuring Playnormous games on the Humana Web site. Playnormous is not seeking funding.

SnapStream (www.snapstream.com)

Elevator pitch: "Our product is a cross between a DVR on steroids and a search engine. We make it so a company, candidate, organization or other customer can easily search TV programs for mentions of things they're interested in."

The idea: SnapStream sells a server that can record more than 9,300 hours of programming. It creates an index of terms based on closed-captioning data, which users can then search to find clips they want. The clips can be downloaded, burned to discs or embedded into e-mail.

Users: CEO and President Rakesh Agrawal said the company has "a couple hundred" customers and declined to provide a more specific number. Most of the customers are government agencies, schools, universities and entertainment TV shows. Several political campaigns, including Hillary Clinton's, used SnapStream during the 2008 election cycle.

The brains: Agrawal co-founded the company with a friend who is no longer with SnapStream. They originally envisioned it as a consumer product but found more customers were from larger organizations. Agrawal received degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering from Rice University.