ABOUT THIS NEWSWIRE
Bill Ferster’s NewsWire is published bi-weekly and summarizes the important events in the convergent worlds of multimedia, video, animation, chips, mass storage and computers. There is no charge for this NewsWire and offered as a service of Return On Invention (ROI), a consulting group helping high- technology companies fully realize the potential from their investment in innovation. As experts in computer graphics and digital video, we focus on products used to communicate, edit, or manipulate complex information. You are encouraged to pass it along to anyone who may find the information useful. To subscribe, please send me an email at: bferster@crosslink.net or visit our web site at http://www.crosslink.net~bferster.
Long-time flight and military simulator manufacturer Evans and Sutherland (http://www.es.com) is seeking to reap some peace time benefits in the video business by opening its new Digital Studio business unit.The unit will attempt to leverage E&S’s strengths in real time 3D rendering. The first product is an NT-based Virtual Set system, called the “MindSet.” MindSet is aggressively priced at under $100,000, a bargain relative to its nearest competitors, weighing in at over $800,000.
Dynatech continues its hasty retreat from the world of video with its sale of NewStar, a maker of newsroom automation systems to Tektronix, and EMC, a maker of nonlinear editing systems to BroadWare.Tektronix (http://www.tek.com)is keeping the staff intact in Madison WI, and is closely integrating the NewStar and EditStar products with their very capable Profile video disk recorder.Amsterdam based BroadWare (http://www.brw@xs4all.nl/~brw) plans to resuscitate the EMC product through a series of software enhancements, culminating with a Windows NT version.
Nonlinear editor manufacturer Media 100, recently spun out from its parent company, Data Translation announced total net sales from Media 100 continuing operations increased approximately 68% to $50,826,000, up from $30,278,000 from continuing operations in 1995.Income from Media 100 (http://www.media100.com) continuing operations reached $4,833,000, or $0.57 per share, an increase of 106% from 1995 income on continuing operations of $2,345,000, or $0.35 cents per share.
Things were not as rosy for video equipment maker Accom (http://www.accom.com), who announced that its revenues for around $4.2 million, as compared to last year’s $5.5 million. Accom expects to report a loss per share for the first quarter of between $0.08 and $0.10.
In what is the strongest indication yet at the impending switch to digital TV, NBC purchased digital transmitters for its 11 O&O stations from Comark Communications.Comark (http://www.comark.com) is in partnership with NBC and CBS under the umbrella of Sarnoff Labs to develop HDTV/DTV technology in a government-backed venture.
Hammer, a division of StreamLogic (http://www.sledgehammer.com) has introduced products based on the largest single disk available, a whopping 22 gigabytes on one 5-1/4-inch drive. The drives units are available this February singly, or in RAID clusters at about $5,000 per 22GB.The Hammer 22000UN is a single-drive solution using Ultra Narrow technology. The formatted capacity is 21.7 gigabytes, and can offer seek times as fast as 3.375 ms and transfer rates up to 33 MB/sec.
Intel’s latest enhancement to the Pentium chip (http://www.intel.com) to enhance multimedia performance, MMX Technology, is starting to hit the streets in PCs priced the same as standard Pentiums.MMX allows the Pentium to perform operations on up to 8 pixels or colors simultaneously, making inner loops for applications such as 3D rendering and image processing and compositing.Software manufacturers, such as Adobe and MetaTools (http://www.metatools.com) are rallying around MMX to create versions of Photoshop and Kai’s PowerTools that will take advantage of the new instructions.The “average” increase in performance is clocked at 50-100% depending on function, but image processing and compositing programs can show up to 400% improvement over a standard Pentium.
Multimedia Accelerator chip maker S3 (http://www.s3.com) has set aside $20M for use in equity investing in graphics, video, audio and Internet software companies.S3 will make up to a 20% equity investment in various software start-ups, the first being a licensing agreement with Intervista Software Inc., a developer and marketer of 3D interactive multimedia tools.The equity program is an extension of the company's S3d Developer program, under which S3 has invested more than $6 million in 3D software/hardware companies.
AutoDesk (http://www.autodesk.com) has announced an intention to enter the consumer home-improvement market, initially with a product that will help home owners design kitchens using photo-realistic textures for appliances and wallpaper,
Softimage, (http://www.softimage.com) a division of Microsoft that makes high-end 3D graphics software has entered into an agreement with German-based Mental Images to closely integrate these their “Mental Ray” technologies into future Softimage products.Mental Ray is available on Windows NT, SGI and Unix systems and offers high quality rendering that can be easily partitioned to run on multiple processors and “render farms”; groups of computers dedicated to rendering portions of the same project.Hardware manufacturers such as DEC, Intergraph, NeTpower, and have developed high-performance, low-cost render farm systems, which can containing as many as 12 CPUs.
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