Toronto, Canada-based SoftQuad International Inc has sold off the assets of its SoftQuad Inc web tools subsidiary and will concentrate instead on the childrens video game business it acquired last year with Alpha Software Corp (CI No 3,094). The subsidiary is responsible for the HotMetal HTML tool. The assets, valued at just $905,000, go to a new private company, the principal shareholders of which are an unidentified private investor and certain employees of SoftQuad. Also included in the deal is the sale of SoftQuad UK, the European distribution subsidiary. The new company assumes substantially all the assets of SoftQuad Inc and SoftQuad UK, and has issued 19% of its shares to SoftQuad International. By selling the assets, and not the company itself, the parent company retains the Canadian tax loss carry forwards associated with SoftQuad Inc. SoftQuad is a 12 year-old company which began life selling versions of the Unix text formatting utilities nroff and troff. It moved on to selling SGML authoring tools to government and other markets, and brought the first version of HoTMetaL out at the birth of the web, in spring 1993. Last year it acquired Alpha Software, and attempted to break into the speech recognition market. Last week the company was de-listed from Nasdaq because its share price had fallen too low. The latest version of the company’s web authoring tool, HotMetal PRO 5.0, began shipping last month.
