Sonic Solutions, Novato, Calif., a leader in digital media software, recently entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the assets of Simple Star Inc., a privately held software products and online service provider based in San Francisco, Calif. Simple Star is the developer of PhotoShow, a storytelling platform and online community that enables consumers to turn photos and video clips into slide shows that can be watched on PCs, televisions, handhelds, or published to popular social media sites. PMA Newsline International recently spoke the Matt DiMaria, general manager, Roxio division, Sonic Solutions, about the SimpleStar purchase and the changing nature of software sales.

Roxio's Mark DiMaria says the packaged software business is going through some big changes.

Newsline International: Roxio is probably best-known for its disc-burning products. What products do you have in the photo space?

DiMaria: Within the Easy Media Creator products, we have a set of photo applications, the most notable of which is PhotoSuite. It provides the average, mass-market consumer a set of easy-to-use tools for performing basic operations like cropping and red-eye removal, but also a set of more advanced capabilities for those who care to fiddle a bit deeper.

  In addition, we've got some specialty products, like a panorama tool that would allow you to take composite images and apply some algorithms to construct a panorama of your photo collection. There's a set of applications within the Creator products that are targeted on the photo area.

Newsline International: How does SimpleStar's PhotoShow application fit in?

DiMaria: The PhotoShow service is at the core of what SimpleStar is all about. The core of the user experience was, in the span of about 30 seconds, to select a collection of photos and deliver those as a show, a produced piece with transitions, music and everything, and then be able to very quickly share that with any number of mechanisms, whether that's through an e-mail link to an embedded RSS video feed into a Facebook or other destination site. You also had the option of burning it to a DVD, so that video production could be sent to a fulfillment facility; the user would do the layout and the cover art, and it would send you back a Hollywood quality DVD package. Or you could download the lightweight PhotoShow PC application, which allowed you to burn it yourself on your local machine.

  They had a variety of mechanisms in place for sharing. The most notable, though, is it's a web-based experience with a Flash-based UI, and when you want more client-side stuff, you need to put it on your local PC. Another output option is to go to TimeWarner and Comcast [cable] set-top boxes, where it's a video-on-demand user experience, where the recipients, via a community-casting type of model, can go to a particular channel on their set-top box and get personalized PhotoShows of this weekends baseball game or what have you.

Newsline International: How is this going to integrate with your existing products?

DiMaria: The value to our customer is to provide the one place to go to meet all of your digital media needs. One of the gaps we had was in the online sharing, Web 2.0 style of digital media. This becomes a key piece in place now to allow customers to get their online digital media needs met.

  I should mention, as it is now, the PhotoShow name is a little deceptive, because it does handle short-form video. You can have video clips incorporated into your show. From a technical perspective, the end-user playback experience is a Flash video playback. We're going to expand that capability even further and we'll get it more deeply integrated into our product sets.

Newsline International: SimpleStar traditionally was a Windows-only publisher, but you have some Macintosh products. Do you plan to bring this to the Mac?

DiMaria: The answer is, yes. The one nice things about web-delivered experience is that it's platform agnostic, not only for the Mac, but also for mobile devices. You can look for us to take this entirely cross-platform as well.

  I think it's fair to say we are at the beginning of an evolving set of capabilities that will broaden, including physical goods in a variety of forms. The DVD is the most logical and, if you look at some of the other businesses we are involved in, like the QFlix business, for example, which deals with Hollywood or DSS encrypted content, there are other adjacencies we are going to look at.

Newsline International: Will SimpleStar be operated as a division or absorbed?

DiMaria: Last year, we structured the Roxio business into three lines of business. We have a web products and services business, a consumer products business, and an OEM business. The SimpleStar group will roll into an existing structure that we set up last November which is Web Products and Services.

Newsline International: How did the opportunity come up to purchase SimpleStar?

DiMaria: I joined Sonic in September of last year, and since then, we've looked at the overall strategy for Roxio. One of the areas we felt we should get more aggressive with was the online capability. In November, we set up the Web Products and Services Unit, and took as core group of employees and dedicated them into this area and began laying out our strategy. The SimpleStar acquisition fits within the context of a broader online strategy.

Newsline International: Are there more steps coming or have you rounded out the portfolio?

DiMaria: There's more we can do. There are so many things going on in the technology category, so there's more innovation that can be done. Also, consider China and some of the emerging economies in the world, their youth are getting handheld devices for video and photo capture with increasingly excellent quality, I think we're at the beginning.

  We're approaching that from a unique position, given we have some 300 million users in the world, using some version client-side software, and continue to acquire new customers at a high rate.

SimpleStar's PhotoShow interface now emphasizes sharing.

Newsline International: You have some challenges with other sites that offer similar photo services for free.

DiMaria: Today, users can access and author PhotoShows for free. Part of the new model we are all involved with is that the ability to offer the customer meaningful things with products and services is a key part of the customer acquisition strategy. It falls within the broader context of the open-source movement. You can't use traditional approaches to building that kind of business, like you would have used to build a PC packaged software business. They are different businesses and there are different customer demographics. Over time, it's enabling newer, more service-based revenue streams. It puts pressure on the vendors to deliver value to the customer that they are willing to pay for. Arguably, it gives us a much deeper opportunity to service the customer throughout the life of their digital media, rather than just buying a box of packaged software and have that be the only time there is a value exchange.

  There's also a tremendous value of online and mobile that are more business-to-business relationships. What's unique is we have an enormous audience for our client-side applications, and a world-class network of partnerships -- PC companies, CE providers, Hollywood relationships -- we are really confident in our ability to compete. Where there's value, there's business.

-- By Gary Pageau, publisher, PMA Publications

Japan-based HOYA Corp. announced it will sell its Pentax-brand mobile printer business to Brother Industries on July 31, reports JPEA International PEN News Weekly. It becomes the first business HOYA sells since merging with Pentax. The sale price was not made public. The business, which generated revenue of about ¥1.5 billion (US$14.3 million) in fiscal 2007, includes both mobile thermal printers and scanners.

HP Co., Palo Alto, Calif., will open a customer service facility in Rio Rancho, N.M., that will phase in 1,300 jobs over the next 4 years, according to the New Mexico Business Weekly.

  The announcement came from Gov. Bill Richardson's office. There were no details on where the new client service and technical support center will be located or how large it will be. Officials with HP are working with Rio Rancho officials and developers on a site and its design and construction. HP said it is also opening a new customer service and technical support center in Conway, Ark.

CEIVA Logic Inc., Los Angeles, Calif., filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Frame Media Inc., Wellesley, Mass., and Digital Spectrum Solutions Inc., Irvine, Calif., in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. CEIVA asserts Frame Media's FrameChannel photo sharing services and Digital Spectrum's Web-enabled picture frames and systems infringe CEIVA's United States Patent No. 6,442,573 entitled "Method and Apparatus for Distributing Picture Mail to a Frame Device Community." CEIVA 's patent involves systems and methods for distributing images to electronic picture frames.

  CEIVA 's federal lawsuit asks the Court for damages for patent infringement and for an injunction to prevent Frame Media and Digital Spectrum Solutions from making, using or selling infringing products or systems that infringe CEIVA 's patent. 

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