FROM THE OUTSIDE, what Elemental Technologies does is pretty easy to understand.
It’s Elemental: cutting-edge video processing
FROM THE OUTSIDE, what Elemental Technologies does is pretty easy to understand.
The Portland-based startup, which spun out of Pixelworks in 2006, produces the Badaboom Media Converter, a software program that quickly converts DVDs and other digital videos for viewing on iPods and other devices. ETI’s arsenal also includes the RapiHD Accelerator for Adobe Premier Pro, a high-speed video editing program for creative video professionals.
But peek inside, and ETI becomes a complex world of algorithms, graphics processing units and an advanced type of computer programming called parallel programming, where multiple instructions are carried out simultaneously.
Perhaps we’ll stay outside a little longer.
The company, which employs 14, closed its first round of venture financing in July with a $5.5 million investment led by Seattle’s Capital Voyager and Boston-based General Catalyst Partners. CEO Sam Blackman says ETI will use the funding to deliver its first products later this year via relationships it’s built with companies like Adobe Systems and Nvidia Corp.
“We are also going to use it to go after larger markets, including the Internet video space,” he says.
Blackman says ETI’s one-of-a-kind technology — essentially a graphics processing unit-accelerated video encoding/transcoding engine — gives the company an edge over competitors when it comes to performance, cost and flexibility. And though finding skilled parallel programmers is proving to be an on-going challenge, Blackman says ETI is at the front edge of tomorrow’s video processing.
“The wave of parallel computing is just beginning, driven by the physical limitations we are running into on the silicon manufacturing front,” he says.
“I can see all video processing moving into the parallel domain over the next few years, and Elemental’s software has the potential to be the fundamental technology for this shift. If in five years Elemental’s software is powering not just PC video but IPTV delivery, Internet video services and broadcast facilities, then we’ll have done our job.”
JON BELL
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