Online Technology March 2000
Seybold sees new Web-based services
By Lisa Larson
Prepress Editor
BOSTON -- While much of the Seybold Seminars show focused on new and better ways to facilitate Internet publishing, several announcements came from companies whose main business is Internet-based services.
Most visible of those companies -- thanks to several launch events at Seybold, including a live musical performance by the B-52's -- was Sprockets.com, a venture capital funded Internet start-up company that offers project collaboration and deadline management services.
Sprockets.com, which was named a Seybold Hot Pick, provides a "virtual workspace" designed to enable any team to efficiently manage, communicate and control internal and external resources to meet deadlines.
The Web-based service provides collaboration, distribution and bandwidth billing tools to assist organizations that work together to produce media-intensive projects with massive data transfer requirements and tight deadlines over the entire project cycle.
Newspapers could utilize Sprocket.com's service as a recipient of material on the back end of the production cycle, or could use the service to collaborate on their own projects, said Jonathan Agger, director of marketing for Sprockets.com.
Using scheduled deadlines, Sprockets sets a go-live date for projects and sets up vehicles for distribution, so that when a project is complete, Sprockets will send an e-mail from a distribution list, inviting people to go to a URL to obtain the completed project.
Advertisements and press kits could be broadcast in a similar way. A newspaper's advertising department could work in conjunction with an advertising agency to pull an ad from Sprockets.com when the agency has completed it.
The service could also be used by reporters, editors, photographers, illustrators and production personnel to collaborate on a project and meet scheduled deadlines. The project owner can set up levels of how they want everyone involved to contribute.
Sprockets.com will set milestones, schedule deadlines and facilitate conferencing sessions and discussion boards. If a deadline is missed, Sprocket.com's mission-critical deadline management service will notify project managers via phone, e-mail, fax or pager that the recipient has not received the files.
"Sprockets.com is also positioned as a front end for digital asset management and page layout packages," said Agger. "We are in discussions with several newspaper page layout and digital asset management system vendors. This will provide the ability to securely access assets from anywhere."
Anyone with Internet access can go to Sprockets.com and create a secure project, invite in team members, share and send files, collaborate, and create on-the-fly extranets that can distribute completed files to large, controlled lists of recipients.
As an application service provider, there is nothing to buy or install from Sprockets.com. The company charges project owners $10 a month to house the project, but anyone else who contributes to the project essentially uses Sprockets and all the tools for free. There are no per-user or site-licensing fees, although there are nominal transmission fees for bandwidth used in accessing projects and transferring files.
Based in Boston, Sprockets.com was founded by its chief executive officer, Patrick White, and co-founder and chief operating officer, Barry Horwitz.
White pioneered the development and use of data networks and distributed content solutions for the design and publication industries and chartered the start-up Digital Art Exchange, an early provider of applied high-speed data networks.
Prior to co-founding the new venture, Horwitz assisted corporate clients as a strategy consultant with Boston Consulting Group.
KnightRidder.com, the new business unit for all of Knight Ridder's Internet operations, selected OpenPages Inc.'s ContentWare 2.0 for its RealCities Network, a national network of 30 regional hubs on the Web.
KnightRidder.com plans to use ContentWare to manage its pictures, text and multimedia objects across all its products and sites, said OpenPages.
ContentWare is designed to give users the ability to build Web and print content simultaneously using one system rather than numerous incompatible solutions. The software equips customers with an integrated solution to manage all content-related processes including creation, workflow and delivery to Web or print products.
OpenPages ContentWare 2.0 was also selected by nwfusion.com, the online version of Network World magazine.
The Extensis Products Group of Creativepro.com Inc. added enterprise scalability to its Portfolio 5.0 digital asset management solution, which won a Seybold Hot Pick award.
Scheduled for release next month, the updated Portfolio product line will offer three product configurations.
Portfolio 5.0 operates as a standalone, in a peer-to-peer network environment or as the client for Portfolio Server. Portfolio Server 5.0 allows workgroups to share collections of digital media via the corporate local area network or the Internet. Five Portfolio 5.0 clients are included.
Portfolio SQL Connect, designed for enterprise users needing to connect Portfolio Server 5.0 with a Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle8i database, allows organizations to offer high-volume access to digital media via the corporate intranet or the Internet.
Iomega Corp. signed a sponsorship agreement with Creativepro.com for the companies to cross-promote each other's products or services on their corresponding Web sites.
Iomega will run Creativepro.com features on their Web site at www.iomega.com, and Creativepro.com will feature Iomega's Zip 250-megabyte drive and other Iomega products at www.creativepro.com.
Creativepro.com is a vertical Web portal that provides online information, products and e-services addressing the needs of creative professionals in the print and Web publishing communities.
RealTimeImage launched RealTimeProof, a Web-based soft and remote hard proofing service based on the same "pixels-on-demand" core technology the company used in its first software product, RenderView.
RealTimeProof offers imaging quality and collaboration tools without the capital investment and hardware configuration required by RenderView.
With RealTimeProof, users can view original production data in full resolution with a Web browser, even over a dial-up connection, said RealTimeImage.
The company subsequently announced it has forged a new partnership with Digital Art Exchange Inc., and strengthened its partnership with Vio.
Random Eye Technologies Inc. unveiled Random Eye images, which uses the Internet to enable users to select from archived images and view them in a random stream of compositions.
The software works by retrieving images from photo agency Web sites, CDs or the user's hard drive, and compiling entirely new photographic compositions at a rate of one layout every three seconds.
The process loads the images onto layers palettes that determine position, rotation, opacity and size. The user can intervene at any time to change the sequence of layers, request a specific topic search or add an image.
The company signed an agreement with Corbis Images to link Random Eye images to Corbis' royalty-free photo database, allowing users to search for and download Corbis images into the Random Eye images software program.