From Raging Bull:
By: CEO2BE
Reply To: None Wednesday, 31 Mar 1999 at 3:02 PM EST
Post # of 83
This stock is on a roll for a reason. They have a LOT going for them. In this short article I'll touch on a few points. I am composing a web page on the DD I have done and will now share. I am into the this stock for the reasons below and they are fundamentals of the company, not hype. When I have more time, I'll post to the board and the web page the rest of the data I have uncovered over the last month on this company. First, let's talk compression…
They (Image Power) have compression technology that is superior to what's on the market at present because they have developed an encoding algorithm to compress data that works really, really well.
SO WHAT?? What is the big deal about compression?
This is the reason you should care, explained in plain English. Many, if not all of you have used compression technology; it exists in many forms and many programs, such as WinZip, WinRAR, TAR etc... Let's use the most common program, (common to millions of users) in our example, which is WinZip. How does it work exactly? It uses a compression algorithm to compress data. I'm sure most people that have used the Internet have seen or heard of WinZip. You have a big file, need to make it smaller so it's faster to send around. "Just run WinZip on it!!" The program squeezes the extra space out of the file and it's smaller as a result. The process is actually MUCH more complicated than that, but that explanation is way beyond the scope of this discussion. For those that have used the program, you know it can work well or not so well, depending on what kind of data you are trying to compress. It can work very well (text files, great size reduction) to hardly at all (mp3's, very little, less than 2% usually).
WinZip will also compress images, both black & white (i.e. faxes) and also color (i.e. JPEG, tiff, GIF etc...) and at VERY DIFFERENT RATIOS. This is what's important and turns out very important. WinZip (WZ for short from here on in...) will compress the images with good efficiency. Depending on what WZ "sees" when it reduces a program, it uses the same compression technique for the entire file. But the same compression technique is not always the best method if you have mixed images (images with both color & B/W, like a magazine page). See the white paper on Image Power's website (now working…)
Well, using Image Power's method, you can get anywhere from 10 to 50 times BETTER compression. I know because I downloaded their demo and tried it for an entire day myself, last week. The software will compress all different types of images, from B&W (ie FAXES), color images and mixed formats. The more you force the compression factor (you manually set it) the more space you save, but you give up on image quality. Using their software I tried all sorts of compression ratios (you can manually set the values). Using conservative values (10-15 times compression) I could not tell the difference between the original file I started with and the compressed image, even at 400% zoom. I went from a 1.1 MB (that's 1,100 k) to a file that was only 50k. See the implications? At normal zoom, I could go to 35 times compression and not notice any image degradation. Past that, you can start to see the difference but consider what this means. More pictures into smaller area. Faster loading web pages. Digital cameras that can store WAY MORE images before they are downloaded. Starting to make sense?
But, here's where it really gets fun, scanned images. Remember poor old WZ from above? On scanned images that are mixed, it doesn't do so well if you have color with B&W on the same page (magazines, company reports…) Guess who does do it better? With Image Power's software, you can compress images at tremendous ratios because their software uses DIFFERENT compression techniques on the same file, depending on what the image types make up the file. In other words, it uses the best method on the B&W areas and the best compression method on the color areas. WZ (and other programs like it) use a single compression method on the entire file, based on what the majority component is, which is not as efficient. Image Power is excellent at compressing mixed image files. Now think document archiving, data warehousing, paperless office? I bet you've heard those terms before. Enter in Image Power…
Later on today I'll post on the issue of Image power and their connection to eFax and companies like eFax. It's not what you think, it's much more than just a fax to email service…
Stay tuned. CEO2BE
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