To hear Petr Stokuč tell it, life at a booming high-tech startup sometimes calls for troubling compromises. That lesson first hit home when his company installed the broadcast news technology software he and his partner developed for a television station in China.

"I had a hard time with it because of human rights," says Stokuč, 35, CEO of Octopus Newsroom. But he quickly snapped into pragmatic thinking, citing a Cranberries album to justify his position: "Everybody is doing it, so why can't we?"

His most recent client is no less controversial. In weeks, Al-Jazeera is set to launch its worldwide English-language channel, Al-Jazeera International (AJI), with a base in Washington, D.C. — and the proximity to the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is giving U.S. security officials a bad case of nerves.

Octopus, one of only six companies in the world making this kind of newsroom system for TV and radio broadcasting, will power its newsroom.

AJI's launch date has been postponed from the original plan of fall 2005 several times and is still not set in stone.

"We are waiting for our technical buildup to be complete and glitch-free," says Rana Jazayerli, AJI's PR executive for the Americas.

Although reluctant to speak about the project before it goes live, Stokuč admits that working with AJI has kept the 15 employees of Octopus busy and shuttling to the Middle East more than ever.

It's hard to envision the eclectic-looking Stokuč meeting with robed figures in Qatar. A huge fan of Robert Smith, The Cure's lead singer, Stokuč occasionally wears black eyeliner. He shaves his head and, for business attire, wears a black jacket and Dr. Martens boots without shoelaces. He has been known to oversleep and miss 4 p.m. meetings.

He may not quite be corporate material, but he clearly knows his code.

The history of Octopus reads like a Silicon Valley cliché. In 1998, two computer geeks in their mid-20s, Stokuč and his partner Jan Pulpan, programmed a newsroom system from the basement of their house for TV Nova, the Czech Republic's leading commercial station. Because the software they created can "spider," or pull in information from many sources — news wires, the media, the Internet, e-mails, faxes — into one place, they called it Octopus.

Today, some 25 major TV networks around the world run on Octopus and the former bedroom-based company has TV stations from Poland to India using the system. Some of those stations, such as Euronews, are widely accessible through cable, while the distribution of others, such as AJI, remains uncertain.

Because of the controversial nature of the station, owned by the Qatari royal family and accused by many of anti-American bias, many carriers may well decide not to offer it.

Jan Hlaváč, spokesperson for the cable company Karneval, says AJI will be available on the Czech market only if customers express an interest in it. "So far, we've received less than 10 requests," he says. "We might have to do focus groups to gauge interest among subscribers."

Pulpan, 31, who is Octopus' chief technology officer, has no qualms about enabling AJI to reach what customers it can, saying he is glad to be a part of history in the making: "Al-Jazeera International will revolutionize worldwide news."

Stokuč agrees that AJI will bring a fresh perspective to what he calls sterile Western news. "From the news now, the war in Iraq seems far. No blood, nothing. They will bring it right into your living room."

Global reach

The Octopus newsroom system is one of the tools that helps TV networks become global media. Among other things, its software allows reporters to upload their stories and communicate with their editors through a Web-based system, eliminating the need for e-mailing and faxing stories back and forth.

"Any update from a war zone can make it to the anchor's desk in real time," says Stokuč.

A sister company of Al-Jazeera Arabic, AJI is also headquartered in Doha, Qatar and has two other major hubs, Kuala Lumpur and London, ready to go live this fall to complement the one in Washington. With a team of more than 500 people, the network wants to market itself as a competitor to traditional Western news channels such as CNN and the BBC.

AJI has already recruited a few big-name Western journalists for their U.S. station, such as David Frost, Riz Khan of BBC and Dave Marash of ABC.

In order to add to their diverse team of reporters, Al-Jazeera's London office is headhunting English-speaking Czech journalists to become correspondents in this part of Europe.

Miloš Čermák, the strategic director of Czech weekly Respekt, recently wrote a column for Lidové Noviny about AJI's recruitment strategies in Prague. It was titled: "Looking for a traitor of the Western world. P.S.: Great pay."

Čermák wonders whether Al- Jazeera can truly become a global player. "If that's the case, a Central European correspondent would look great in their portfolio," he wrote.

Image problem

Although AJI indeed offers far better pay than Czech broadcasters, local journalists have been reluctant to take a job with a media outlet that some, rightly or wrongly, associate with terrorism. So far, no star Czech journalists have accepted, or at least have not publicly acknowledged doing so.

Čermák does not think news professionals are fair to reject Al-Jazeera. "Is it worse to work for an Arabic television station or to participate in entertainment shows?" he asks, hinting that many big-name journalists have no problem sacrificing good taste for money.

Stokuč says he doesn't understand why anyone would walk away from an unprecedented project such as AJI. "From a technical perspective, what we are doing here has no parallel," he says.

Still, he admits his professional ties to AJI have caused concern, especially among Octopus' U.S. counterparts. "When we started talking about Al-Jazeera at a trade show in Las Vegas last year, some Americans suddenly had to leave."

Meanwhile, the realities and diplomatic niceties of achieving international success have offered other lessons as well, says Stokuč.

"We are a small Czech company forced into globalization. Sadly, we had to open a London office and become a British company because foreigners don't trust Czech companies, and because this state does nothing for small businesses."