Executives from Kaleida Laboratories, the IBM Corp-Apple Computer Inc joint venture to develop multimedia products for computers, consumer electronics and communications industries, were in Japan last week to announce the formation of a hardware manufacturers alliance to support ScriptX, Kaleida’s newly developed standard for cross-system multimedia development and playback (CI No 2,177). The founding members of the alliance include Hitachi Ltd, Toshiba Corp, Mitsubishi Electric Corp and Creative Technology Ltd of Singapore. These early adopters will receive priority access to Kaleida’s technology and support services for a three-year period. While Nat Goldhaber, president and chief executive of Kaleida, was reluctant to give details of how much these companies paid to join the Alliance – which was not a consortium, said Kaleida – but it was considerably less than the several million dollars rumoured elsewhere. Other European and several US companies were invited and are expected to join the club too. However it is obvious that the hearts and minds of the major Japanese consumer electronics companies such as Sony Corp and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co have yet to be captured. Goldhaber admitted that Kaleida still had a few technical issues to resolve too – such as what compression technology would emerge as the standard, whether Microsoft Corp was developing any product which would be competitive – he thought not, and what exactly what be the killer application for multimedia technology. Large scale release of hardware product and multimedia titles are expected in time for Christmas 1994.
