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Apr 14, 2000 And Then There Was One egi.sys AG has acquired and licensed Poser, the 3D-character animation and design tool from MetaCreations. This means that MetaCreations has essentially sold all of it's technologies and applications except for one; MetaStream. MetaCreations e-commerce visualization business is centered on the Company's MetaStream technology for the streaming and display of interactive 3D virtual product presentations over the Web. Under egi.sys AG, Curious Labs, Inc. will develop, publish, market and distribute future versions of the Poser product. CEO Larry Weinberg, the creator of Poser, together with Steve Cooper, president, and Seath Ahrens, vice president of research and development, are co-founders of Curious Labs. Steve Cooper was the Poser product manager at MetaCreations and Seath Ahrens co-lead engineer. Curious Labs expects to hire additional marketing, sales, service and support professionals from MetaCreations, together with developers and engineers who have been associated with Poser to ensure the smooth transition and continued development of Poser. MetaCreations will continue to handle customer service for Poser until April 30, 2000, after which time egi.sys AG will provide full customer support. In addition, MetaCreations will provide technical support until May 19, 2000. egi.sys AG will handle technical support starting May 20, 2000. egi.sys AG has also agreed to honor support and upgrade privileges to registered owners of Poser 4, subject to proof of purchase and within applicable time limits. www.egisys.de
Fast Memory Stick Sony Corporation has made a $2 million equity investment in Lexar Media in connection with a strategic partnership to apply Lexar Media's high-speed flash memory controller technology to the Memory Stick. Lexar Media will license its controller technology to Sony with the goal of improving the read/write speed of the Memory Stick to download transfer 64 megabytes of data in less than ten seconds. As part of the agreement, Lexar has received a license to manufacture and market Memory Stick media under Lexar's brand. High-speed Memory Stick products will be backward compatible with current Memory Stick products and are slated for introduction in 2001.
 Cute Cube MicroNet Technology has announced SANcube, a FireWire SAN (Storage Area Network). The SANcube serverless storage network delivers up to 220GB online at up to 30MB/sec data throughput - a transfer rate up to ten times faster than typical Macintosh-based 100baseT networks. SANcube is slated to support mixed environments with Windows 2000 clients in Q3. SANcube consists of a centralized "data cube" that incorporates up to six high performance IBM hard drives yielding a capacity of up to 220GB of online storage. A sleek, compact cube (approx. 10x10x10 inches), SANcube weighs less than 30 pounds and visually complements the design of Apple's new Power Mac G4, Power Mac G3, PowerBook, and iMac DV systems. Users simply plug SANcube into their Macintosh systems with built-in FireWire, and install the SANcube software. SANcube also includes a customized version of the ATTO AccelWare SAN volume management software which gives one to four users fast access to DV video and graphic files. Users can configure SANcube as a single volume by striping the data (RAID 0) across the drives for enhanced performance and capacity, or duplicate or mirror the data (RAID 1) at high speeds for increased data protection. SANcube
will be available this month through MicroNet VARs,
Outpost.com, MacWarehouse, and select resellers. Suggested
retail prices are start at $1499 for a 70GB single user
system, and go up to $3899 for a 220GB 4 user system.
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