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eZedia News
eZedia makes software splash
Graphic tools signal new era for city firm
Winnipeg Free Press - Business
January 8, 2002
Martin Cash
WINNIPEG multi-media software company eZedia Inc. launched the latest version of its graphics tools yesterday at the Macworld conference in San Francisco.
The multi-media "authoring" tool unveiled yesterday allows users to converge video, sound, images and text into one format in a manner that is much easier than most computer users have experienced in the past.
"What we've done is provide a level of expertise that used to only be in the hands of the professionals." eZedia founder and CEO Stefan Embleton boasted yesterday. "For instance I can show a picture of my face and then put it on fire using an image of flames and I can put this composite together in a half a second and run it."
The seven-year-old company now employs about 20 people. It recently severed its relationship with its former California-based CEO, Art Monk, because as Embleton said, "we just couldn't afford million- dollar management."
The release of eZediaMX 3.0 for Mac operating systems signals a new period of growth for the company which has one of the oldest pedigrees in the software industry in the city. Embleton was the man behind Sun Valley Software, a company that did ground-breaking work in the education sector in the late 1980s. Sun Valley started putting together multi-media presentations for customers and the technology behind eZedia's product was born out of that work.
"The faster we were able to produce some of these things, the more cost effective it was," Embleton said. "So we developed a few tools that became the foundation for eZedia."
With the release of version 3.0, the company will focus on sales and marketing and the San Francisco show is an important first step.
"There will be 100,000 people there waving around their credit cards," he said. "I have a staff of about five people at the show and they have 500 copies of the package. I gave firm orders that they were not to come home with any nor were they to give any away." So far the company has seen its biggest success in the education market. The package is currently in use in 4,000 classrooms in North America, mostly in the U.S.
Lois Robinson, head of the technology department at Balmoral Hall in Winnipeg, said the ease of use allows students to be very creative with it.
"Our technology students are creating a multi-media portfolio of the work they have done at school this year," she said. "They can take audio clips from their band work or video of some drama production and, after collecting the media content, just drag and drop it into one file."
Kelvin Maloney, a board member of eZedia and the manager of private equity at the Crocus Investment Fund, said the company's growth prospects exist in the corporate graphic presentation market and the graphics intensive industries.
Maloney said Crocus, which along with its sister fund Manitoba Science and Technology Fund has invested a total of more than $3 million into the company, believes its investment could be a classic venture capital play.
"This is a company that could eventually yield a tenfold return, but it is not without a certain level of risk," Maloney.
martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca
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