In a bid to improve the appearance and usability of e-commerce web sites, Oracle Corp yesterday announced plans to integrate Live Picture Inc’s imaging software in its next generation database, 8i. The Redwood City, California-based database giant said integrating Live Picture’s technology would allow companies to include high-resolution images on their web sites, without having to store large image files. Jim Steiner, senior director of product marketing for the data server division said the technology was primarily aimed at e-commerce providers. In the past it’s been difficult to present multimedia internet applications in good resolution, he said, but Live Picture overcomes that problem by allowing users to view images in multiple resolutions very quickly. Live Picture’s imaging software will be accessible through Oracle’s media-integration component, called Intermedia. The latter will be built into the Oracle 8i database and is designed to enable web publishers to develop and manage multimedia content such as audio, video, text and location queries. Citing the example of an online shopping catalogue, he said the new technology would enable shoppers to zoom in on a particular item, for example a skirt or sweater, and take a close-up look at the texture and stitching. It will enable e-commerce providers to give their customers a much richer shopping experience without making the images slow to download. Stenier said. Intermedia will be available as an option with Oracle 8i when it becomes available at the end of this year. Steiner said prices would be released at the same time. To take advantage of the Live Picture technology users will also need to buy the Live Picture Image Server, he said. He added that Oracle also plans to integrate more image file formats into Intermedia and that announcements would be made through November, starting with its user conference which begins on November 9 in San Francisco.
