John Sculley’s new charge Soquel, California-based Live Picture Inc, has now launched just the thing for users of the new Sega Enterprises Ltd camera – and Microsoft Corp has launched a rival product. Aimed at consumers, LivePix, based on the same FlashPix image processing accelerator as the professional Live Picture product, will be available in retail stores for under $100, and is designed to enable home personal computer users to stretch or enhance pictures, doctor them or drag and drop them into other digital photos for printing. A free trial is also available at http://www.livepix.com. Broderbund Software Inc, an investor alongside Eastman Kodak Co in Live Picture, will distribute the full version for the holiday season. Live Picture is working with Hewlett-Packard Co on appropriate picture printers, and teamed with Hewlett, Kodak, Microsoft and Netscape Communications Corp to discuss its use for publishing and distributing photographic images on the Internet, enabling people to include photographs in documents and transmit them with electronic mail. LivePix is initially available for Windows95, with a Mac OS version promised. Meantime, Microsoft which has endorsed the FlashPix format, has launched the rival FlashPix-based Microsoft Picture It, and says it will be available in stores by late October for about $80. It too enables the user to manipulate their photographs on-screen, correcting colors, eliminating red-eye and adding borders, text and other features.
