August 22, 2007
France's Actimagine To Raise Capital - Going International
We reported that Actimagine had raised venture capital last year from GRP Partners, the US venture firm that backed Starbucks, among others. We kept it on our radar ever since.
The four year old Paris-based company develops a software codec or vector graphics-in-a-small footprint technology -- enables users to put DVD quality movies on a mini memory card for mobilephones, running various operating systems, without having to run for the recharger, for example.
In the meantime, it did a deal with Adobe a few months later. Today it said in a statement that sales grew from €1.4M in 2004 to €5.2M last year, and it is now planning a new round of finance.
The startup recently appointed Henri Linde, the Thomson SA executive that built up that company's MP3 licensing business, to head up its US operations.
Read - Erfolg zeichnet sich aus: Video-Codec-Hersteller ACTIMAGINE wächst und gedeiht (pressebox)
View Actimagine
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April 12, 2007
Top Image Systems Buys UK's Capture Projects
Israel's Top Image Systems [Nasdaq: TISA) has acquired Capture Projects, a UK provider of document management solutions, for £1.8M, plus potential performance-based consideration.
Top Image sells solutions for managing and validating data entry. Its software does data capture, identification and storage in databases.
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November 13, 2006
Euro Rivals For Riya -> Pixsta and Polar Rose
Updated with Comment from Alexander Straub, who is a co-founder of Pixsta and an investor in Truphone, see end of this post.
At the a:c euro we like visual search, image search, anything to do with computer graphics, actually. Startups in these categories have the goods - like smart algorithms and brainy founders (in other words: Intellectual Property/High Barriers To Entry), and there just might be some new markets and applications emerging for these technologies.
We came across Pixsta this morning via Paul Jozefak's blog, which led us to Polar Rose. Pixsta is based in London, and Polar Rose, out of Malmo, Sweden. Both are developing image search products. 
Pixsta, which has a demo site, is looking to apply its technology to online shopping, similar to the idea behind Like.com (an application launched this week from US-based Riya). Polar Rose, which is soon to launch in beta, is about finding photos of people and its commercial plans are not public.
These technologies can be applied to a number of businesses areas, online retailing as suggested above, but we guess they could also be used in search tools for developers of logos and corporate identity art, and possibly in search engines for stock photo and graphic art vendors.
Pixsta Helps Shoppers Find Similar Items
On Pixsta's demo site, Chez Imelda, we decided to look for some orange sandals and found a selection without having to enter a single search word. It delivered up the results without a click through, showing where to buy the new footwear.
Here's how pixsta describes its software.
"Pixsta software reaches beyond the current text-based approach to search by automatically extracting visual content from images. we can organise large image collections into hyperlinked networks of visual similarity, so that users can browse the network to find images that come close to what they want, and also spark off new searches."
Our only criticism is the name of the company - maybe we're suffering from startup overload, but we find it hard to remember and the spelling tripped us up in our search for info on the company.
Polar Rose's commercial intentions are not public. Right now it is aiming to find out what people do with the application when it launches in a beta pilot. We couldn't try it but got some screenshots. Its search engine plugs into your browser, finds the faces in a photo, asks the user to confirm, or select the face to be matched, and then seeks similar faces on the web or locally.
Polar Rose Finds The Faces
Asks You To Select And Label The Image To Search For
And Serves Up The Resuls With Some Information From Other Users
Alexander Straub of Straub Ventures and a co-founder of Pixsta writes in:
Just to point out you can click from the image on www.chezImelda.com to the retailers site. When above the button with a mouse two little logo’s appear, one to drag and drop the image into a depository (just if you like it) or click to the retailers landing page.
Example of ChezImelda: You are looking for Crocs (the one Brad Pit wears – click on the orange sandal, you get an orange crocs, click on the crocs and half of the page is filled with the crocs in different shapes and colours. We basically offer 89 x 10 to the power of 10 = 89 trillion ways of shopping for 89,000 shoes. We need 89 trillion calculations to come off with the relative matrix of shoes all linked together by visual clues.
Update: VentureBeat has a thoughtful review of Like.com, and mentions Pixsta too.
Read - Visual Search Good For Shopping (venturebeat)
Read - Do I Really Like It (Paul Jozefak blog)
Read - Science Fiction News (Technovelgy)
Pixsta - visual browsing (Heiko's Blog)
Read - Suchmaschine erkennt Gesichter (DiePresse)
Read - Like.com Image Search Enging Launched (e-consultancy)
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September 08, 2006
Scottish ForthDD To Raise New Capital For HDTV Market Entry
The European TechTour is going to Scotland this December, as we posted yesterday, and one of the companies that will probably be there is Forth Dimension Displays (ForthDD).
The startup, formerly known as CRLO Displays, is going to be raising its second round of financing soon, in order to to back the launch of its all-digital microchip imagers into two high potentional consumer markets, namely high-definition TVs and miniature digital projectors.
The company, located on shores of the River Forth near Edinburgh, has been successful in getting its technology into military markets where it’s used in head-displays for simulation and training, as well as in medical diagnostics and surgical applications. Its California operations help reach these market niches.
But now its time to go large. The firm's CEO Leslie Polgar, who came on board shortly after the VC round, gave us an email interview recently. He said the firm had some encouraging interest from potential customers at a recent trade show where he demonstrated a 43” Rear Projection HDTV using his firm's technology.
“Our Time Domain Imaging (TDITM) technology is the best and fastest route for TV makers to market a HDTV at less than $1000 street price. The image quality we demonstrated was well-received by the many TV makers and industry analysts and experts who saw it in June.”
At the same exhibition (the SID Business Conference), one of ForthDD’s customers successfully demonstrated a full-color pocket projector using the TDI technology. He didn't mention it in the interview, but the "customer" he is talking about is Light Blue Optics, which is backed by 3i. We've covered it here earlier this year (See link below).
ForthDD raised an “A” round of financing in September 2004 from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures and Amadeus Partners. They invested $19M.
Polger said:
“The past twelve months have witnessed significant progress on all fronts: product development, manufacturing, market penetration as well as in people and infrastructure. So we are looking forward to raising our B Round of financing. In May, we were named a Red Herring Euro 100 Company winner in recognition of this success and of our prospects for the future. We expect to be a $100 Million revenue business by Year 2010."The company lays claim to 60 patents mainly on its single-chip liquid crystal on silicon technology The firm says it uses “the world’s fastest switching liquid crystal to achieve a 100% digital imaging solution” and has an advanced pilot-scale manufacturing operation at its Scotland location.
If Polgar is successful in leading his company to reach nine digit sales that would make a second success story for an Edinburgh area high tech in recent times, that is, since the tech speculation bubble burst.
The other is Wolfson Microelectronics, which supplies Apple and Sony with chips, had sales of about £100 last year, a market cap of £598M, and employs 300. It delivered its early backer Scottish Equity Partners a 70 times return on its investment. The chart shows a post-ipo performance that is looking good. Chart Source: DigitalLook.com
Read - Forth Dimension Looks For Big TV Share (ft)
Read - Light Blue Optics (a:c euro)
Posted at 05:17 AM | TrackBack | Permalink
July 19, 2006
French Video Codec Startup Taps Starbucks' VC
The US-based venture capital company that backed Starbucks and Costco has invested €3M in Actimagine, a French (now a Delaware company) startup that has developed a software video codec used by brand-name consumer electronics manufacturers such as Nintendo and Fisher Price to run movie clips on their devices.
The new capital is to secure the three year old company's sales channel in North American and Asian markets.
The Actimagine team has done what a lot have tried and failed to do, commercialize a non-standard video codec. It is a lean (fits on a 128MB memory card) all software solution that runs primarily with ARM chips. It also offers a content management system for movie and games contenet developers.
The firm's software can be used to store and playback movies from a memory card, as well as games.
It is now apparently winning licensing deals in the smartphone segment, it mentions Nokia and Sony Ericsson, due to its ability to enable handsets equipped with "standard batteries" to run "more than 7 hours of video playback without recharging".
Interesting to note that recently funded Mobitween, also French, uses Actimagine's content management software to develop Flash games for mobilephones.
Read - Video on Mobile: Actimagine Raises 3M Euro From GRP Partners (businesswire)
Read - Flash Games Mobitween Funding (a:c euro)
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April 11, 2006
Eyesquad's Cameraphone Lens Breakthrough Attracts Early Stage VCs
BayTech Venture Capital has led a €4M Series A investment in Eyesquad, a developer of micro-imaging optics gear targeted at cameraphones. Co-investor on the round is the Spanish venture capital firm, Adara Ventures. The capital will be used for R&D and to boost marketing.
It is still in stealth mode, so we rely on some input from its backers. Eyesquad has developed components that are the same size as existing cameraphone optics but deliver the kind of Zoom, Auto Focus, Close Up functions that digital still cameras have, without adding new moving parts and drivers.
Its edge is enabled by innovation in lens design, lens engineering and imaging software alagorithms.
The firm is headquartered in Munich, Germany, with R&D center in Tel-Aviv.
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February 27, 2006
Berlin's Magix Prepares 100M+ Euro IPO
The German multimedia software publisher Magix is expected to hold a significant IPO in the next couple of months. Reuters reports that the firm was expected to float at the end of March or the start of April and sell shares worth 100M to 130M euros ($119-155M).Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Cazenove are the banks that would manage the deal.
Magix was founded way back in 1984 and sells shrinkwapped software to retail consumers who want to send photos or other multimedia files to friends. The company boasts tennis great Boris Becker as an advertising partner.
Read - Germany's Magix considers IPO in first-half 2006 (Reuters)
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February 22, 2006
France's imaging wizardry pulls VC cash
Three French startups that specialize in digital compression and imaging technology have been funded in the past couple of weeks.
Are the VCs backing these ventures all hoping that French technology giant, Thomson, will soon be back in the market to buy up some more pieces of technology to support its morph from a television manufacturer into a broadcast and digital video giant? Last year it made a few VCs happy with its €100M (estimated) acquisition of Inventel and its buy of Cirpack.
We don't know the answer to that one, but we do know a bit about the recent investment activity. Let It Wave, a startup pushing a proprietary video compression technology, raised € 6M from iSource Gestion and Iris Capital this month, Dxo raised $10M in expansion capital to develop its photo enhancing software, and Ateme, a supplier of standards-based video compression tech raised €4M from Xange and Ventech.
Let It Wave was founded in 2001 by four mathematician founders (all from the same French polytechnic or university) to sell their video and image enhancement software and services to security, defence, seismic imaging, satellite imaging and medical imaging manufacturers . In the past, the firm positioned its product as a better but proprietary alternative to JPEG and JPEG 2000 standards. The VCs became interested when they realized that the technology could also be applied to a much larger market, the emerging high definition television (HDTV) broadcast market.
Let It Wave is going to use the capital to for product development.
UPDATE : We were wrong in our original description of Let it Wave's current products. Please see below for a correction. Our original assessment, in italics below, is also wrong as a result.
We've seen quite a few startups in this part of Europe come out with non-standard technologies for video imaging only to end up squeezed into a tiny niche within the much larger video market. It is not going to be easy pushing a non-standard video format on its own.
Correction:
"We do not offer video compression," said Alban d'Halluin, VP Marketing, in an email to the a:c euro. "It is true that in the past, Let It Wave developed image compression technology for ID photos, but our products for the HDTV market are chips that perform video super-resolution scaling," he said.
In other words, the chips perform a conversion from SD (e.g. 720x486 pixel images) to HD (e.g. 1280x720 pixel images) using deinterlacing and scaling algorithms.
Let It Wave is not going to use the capital to develop codecs, as we wrote, it is concentrating on developing chips that perform the conversion of SD sequences to HD, and with no need for compression or codec technology.
"Our chips will convert a decoded raw SD video stream into a raw HD video stream. Both input and output streams are raw uncompressed video," said Halluin.
The idea being that the chips can then be integrated into a TV chipset or into a broadcast box. "Every single flat screen TV has such a functionality included as flat screen TVs cannot display interlaced content and require a conversion to progressive scan and a scaling to the panel resolution.... We provide a finally good enough quality to manufactueres who have been seeking for such solutions for years and were compelled to use poor quality solutions," said Halluin
For small size TVs, there is a "single-chip" architecture, i.e. a single chip performs MPEG decoding, video processing (deinterlacing, scaling, enhancement) and panel control. For mid-range and high-end TVs, very often we see a multi chip architecture: one chip for decoding, a high quality video-processing chip (like ours) a panel control chipset. Then it is always a trade-off between quality and price.
Haluin added a comment on competitors too:
We have direct competitors who provide scaling and deinterlacing chips: Genesis (the famous DCDi by Faroudja chip), Gennum, Silicon Optix are the most famous. All these chips perform the same function: they take a raw video stream and output it at any specified resolution and any scan mode. They differ by their price (Let It Wave will offer a much lower one) and by the visual quality of the output. On that point, we offer a breakthrough technology (bandlet-based motion compensation techniques) which results are far better according to all the benchmarks made by broadcasters and industry leaders.
Wavelets are used in JPEG.2000 image compression and decoding does, while Fourier/Cosine transforms are used in JPEG image compression standard. Let It Wave developed the bandelets transform.
Read - DXO financing round (the a:c euro)
Read - Let It Wave financing round (Press Release)
Posted at 04:15 PM | TrackBack | Permalink
January 31, 2006
France's DxO Technolgies' pictures tell its story
Apax Partners has led a $10M expansion round for Paris-based DxO Technologies, a company that develops software to enhance, test, and correct the quality of digital images. DxO has a couple of product lines: software packages for professional and hobbyist photographers. An embedded system used in chips sold by Texas Instrument to digital camera manufacturers. And software to enhance images produced by the cheaper kind of optics used in mobilephone cameras.
It it seems that its the latter two product lines that attracted Apax.
“DxO Labs’ core technology consists in mathematically modeling major optics and sensors faults in order to correct them at a software level. This approach enables a reduced bill of materials, while obtaining previously unachievable performance. We believe that this new approach has the capacity to completely revolutionize the digital imaging markets,” explains Eddie Misrahi, Partner at Apax Partners France. “Tomorrow’s cameraphones or still or video cameras will be cheaper and lighter, while producing perfect image quality. It will take imaging to another level.”
DxO was founded by the same team that founded Vision IQ, a venture-backed software company whose technology was used in public swimming pools to detect suspicious non-movement, as in drowning. It seems to still be in business but most of its management are now at DxO.
Jerome Meniere, CEO and co-founder of DxO, left French private equity firm, LBO Europe, to form Vision IQ in 1995. He is an engineer, educated at the Ecole Centrale de Paris, with a business degree from Stanford University and Institute d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. CFO, Erick Poule is on his third venture with DxO. He was a founder of Vision IQ and before that he co-founded Effix, a real-time software supplier which was acquired by Reuters in 1993.
DxO's textual description on its web-site is heavy-going but example before and after shots make its story clearer.
