Recently in Rich Media Category

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that it has acquired privately held Auditude Inc., a provider of video ad management and monetization technologies for premium publishers and media companies. Supporting video ad management and monetization delivered via an open architecture platform, Auditude lets premium publishers and media companies create a high-quality, TV-like, multi-device advertising experience that is an essential component to viewer loyalty and attracting major brand advertisers. features of the Auditude platform include: easy integration into content management and other video operations systems; precise targeting capabilities; flexible ad placement and ad product offerings; intuitive sales rights management; access to and control of incremental advertising demand; and cross-device workflow. http://www.auditude.com/ http://www.adobe.com/

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Media Annotations Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of "API for Media Resources 1.0." This specification defines an API to access metadata information related to media resources on the Web. The overall purpose is to provide developers with convenient access to metadata information stored in different metadata formats. The API provides means to access the set of metadata properties defined in the Ontology for Media Resources 1.0 specification. Comments are welcome through 07 August. Learn more about the Video in the Web Activity. http://www.w3.org/2008/WebVideo/Annotations/, http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-mediaont-api-1.0-20110712/

Amazon plans to release a tablet computer by October, people familiar with the matter said according to the Wall Street Journal. While Amazon has long offered digital content on its website, it's hardware focus has been content-limited Kindle eReaders. As Amazon attempts to enter streaming video and other "richer" media markets, it sounds logical that they start selling their own hardware which can support and tie-in with these services (as they had done with the Kindle). The details of the Amazon tablet still remain vague before it's official announcement, but it is expected to run on the Android OS and is not expected to have features such as a camera. http://www.amazon.com/

Brightcove has announced Brightcove App Cloud, a content app platform for building and operating native apps and touch websites for Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets. App Cloud combines an HTML5-based development model with intelligent cloud services for cross-platform compilation, automated app distribution, analytics, advertising, and connectors for content management systems and other cloud services. Brightcove also introduced a new name for the company’s online video platform, Brightcove Video Cloud. Together, App Cloud and Video Cloud comprise the suite of Brightcove cloud content services for media companies and marketers to publish and distribute professional digital content. App Cloud automatically generates compiled Apple iOS and Google Android native apps and HTML5 touch Web experiences enabling customers to enjoy the benefits of both the app approach and the touch Web approach. To build App Cloud experiences, developers use HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and the App Cloud SDK to create templates that reflect their brand and desired functionality. The App Cloud SDK includes JavaScript component libraries for accessing native device capabilities, retrieving and submitting content, and composing cinematic, high performance user experiences optimized for touch screens on Apple iOS and Google Android smartphones and tablets. App Cloud is expected to become commercially available in the second half of 2011. The product is currently in private beta for approved customers and partners. http://www.brightcove.com

SDL, the provider of Global Information Management solutions, announced the acquisition of Calamares, a cloud-based platform that allows enterprises to centrally compose and distribute video and other rich-media assets. Calamares supports various media platforms, systems and devices- from the Web and mobile to Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and social media platforms. With the acquisition of Calamares, SDL extends its customer engagement offering to include video and rich media management. www.sdl.com http://www.calamares.com/

EndPlay, Inc., formerly Canvas Technology Inc., unveiled a new name and strategy to deliver a new WCM (Web Content Management) solution. The EndPlay platform currently powers the various websites of broadcast television stations in the U.S. The EndPlay platform is designed to handle large amounts of video content, text, social and other dynamic information. As its WCM solution evolves, EndPlay will partner with companies to manage the full spectrum of media publishing and monetization needs. EndPlay will be releasing its first major commercial product in Q4 of 2011. The EndPlay architecture is powered by Intelligent Rendering technology, which allows clients to create media-rich content, generate and distribute it on various devices, and put tools in place to easily monetize that content. Three key technology components make Intelligent Rendering possible: Intelligent Composition enables clients to generate media-rich content and generate and distribute it on virtually any device; Intelligent Monetization is EndPlay's combination of analytics, advertising modules and registration services, and partnerships in areas such as e-commerce, contextual advertising, ad serving, analytics and search; Intelligent Delivery ensures that this content is delivered in real-time, in a format that is customized to the receiving device; The EndPlay WCM platform is a transformational approach to the needs of today's demanding media and enterprise clients; EndPlay WCM utilizes a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model. http://www.endplay.com/

Brightcove, the online video platform, and Ektron, a provider of web content management, social software and marketing optimization solutions, announced an expanded partnership and integration that will streamline the online video publishing and content management process. Through the partnership, joint customers will be able to easily incorporate branded video experiences into their online properties and marketing campaigns through a new Brightcove widget for the Ektron platform, while also taking advantage of the features of the Ektron solution. Through the partnership, joint customers can leverage Brightcove’s media transcoding, management and publishing tools without leaving the Ektron user interface. Users can simply drag-and-drop a Brightcove widget into a site, page, or marketing campaign, creating a rich platform that can fuse text, audio, images and video into a transformative Web experience. Ektron also supports inserting Brightcove’s player embed codes manually for more customized video experiences. http://www.brightcove.com www.ektron.com

PDFlib GmbH announced the availability of the new product versions PDFlib TET 4, PDFlib TET PDF IFilter 4, and TET Plugin 4. The new versions are designed to be faster, more efficient and reliable content extraction from PDF documents. TET 4.0. PDFlib TET (Text Extraction Toolkit) extracts text, images and metadata from PDF documents, and makes them available as Unicode strings, plus glyph and font information as well as the position on the page. Images are extracted in common raster formats. TET optionally converts PDF documents to an XML-based format called TETML which contains text, image, and metadata as well as resource information. TET supports Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) text as well as right-to-left languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. TET contains content analysis algorithms for determining word boundaries, grouping text into columns and removing redundant text. Using the integrated pCOS interface you can retrieve arbitrary objects from the PDF, such as metadata, interactive elements, etc. TET is suitable for server use, as it is designed to be thread-safe and robust, with no memory leaks, and clean exception handling. New Features in TET 4.0 include performance enhancements and is faster for various classes of documents. Large documents with hundreds of thousands of pages will benefit from higher speed and smaller memory consumption. The results of PDF text extraction are enhanced with improved shadow removal, word boundary detection, dehyphenation, and super- and subscript detection. More workarounds for non-conforming PDF documents improve text extraction; ehilr the enhanced repair mode can successfully extract text from damaged PDFs. TET 4 rearranges bidirectional text in Arabic or Hebrew documents to the proper logical order. Unicode postprocessing controls offer folding, decomposition and normalization according to the Unicode standard which is useful to adjust the extracted text according to the requirements of the application. Based on patented TET technology TET PDF IFilter is an implementation of Microsoft's IFilter indexing interface. It works with search and retrieval products which support the IFilter interface, e.g. SharePoint and SQL Server. The new language detection feature automatically assigns the proper natural language to the text, which is important for proper word stemming and therefore will improve the search experience. TET is also available as a free plugin for Adobe Acrobat. This plugin allows interactive test and evaluation of TET's text extraction. The new TET Plugin supports Unicode syntax for search text and can highlight all search hits on a page. The TET Cookbook is a collection of programming examples which demonstrate the use of TET for various text and image extraction tasks. Several Cookbook samples show how to combine the TET and PDFlib+PDI products in order to enhance PDF documents, e.g.  add bookmarks or links based on the text on the page. http://www.pdflib.com/

Nuxeo, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) company, announced an update to its Nuxeo Digital Asset Management product with the release of Nuxeo DAM 1.1, as well launching the hosted version, Nuxeo DAM - Cloud Edition. This new release of Nuxeo DAM incorporates feature enhancements driven by early adopters and the Nuxeo developer community. Nuxeo DAM - Cloud Edition runs on the Nuxeo secure cloud services infrastructure, backed by Amazon web services. Nuxeo DAM - Cloud Edition offers a media management solution suited to small to medium-sized organizations with fixed budgets and limited IT infrastructure and resources. It is also ideal for businesses that need to collaborate with geographically dispersed customers, helping marketers and brand managers quickly catalog, process, store, retrieve and distribute rich media. Also launched today is Nuxeo DAM 1.1. The newest release of Nuxeo DAM includes feature enhancements driven by the feedback and requirements of early adopters: video enhancements, batch upload improvements and repository level integration with Nuxeo DM. Video enhancements include automatic generation of thumbnails that segment the content of a video file as part of the import process. These video chapters can be viewed individually, to locate scenes and find video segments to share among teams. The application gives instant viewing access to a video by beginning to play before the file is completely downloaded. New bulk import and editing functionality are additional time-savers for power-users. Nuxeo DAM can now import a larger number of files, with IPTC and EXIF metadata extraction and bulk tagging to speed up capture of digital assets. To ease large-scale media file processing, Nuxeo DAM also allows users to edit file descriptions, define metadata and adjust settings to a selection of multiple assets, putting more capabilities into the hands of content creators and consumers. For integration with other content applications, Nuxeo DAM and Nuxeo's Document Management applications can also share the same underlying content repository. Nuxeo's applications are built on the open source, Java-based Nuxeo Enterprise Platform, so that Nuxeo DAM can now be connected to a Nuxeo Document Management application or other Nuxeo EP-based application. Documents and files managed in a Nuxeo DM repository can be accessed from Nuxeo DAM without switching applications - or vice versa. http://www.nuxeo.com/

Shanda Online Holdings (SDO) announced that it has reached an agreement to take over domestic online video site Ku6.com's content management system PHPCMS. SDO will continue the operations and keep the staff of PHPCMS, moving them to its research and development center in Beijing after it is completed.  http://ir1.snda.com/ http://www.ku6.com/