Multimedia authoring software specialist Macromedia Inc of San Francisco has made a quick trip down to San Jose suburb, Campbell, to sign an agreement to acquire iband Inc, a developer of Internet Web site development tools, for 860,000 shares worth $32m. Macromedia will be taking a $1,900m charge this quarter to cover merger-related expenses for iband, the developer of the Backstage family of tools for building dynamic Web sites. Still in beta test, Backstage currently runs under Windows95 and Windows NT and is compatible with all major browsers, Web servers, and databases. The Macintosh Designer and Unix server versions of the software are also promised for later this year.
