What Image Power is all about in a nutshell…
(copied from Stockhouse thread)
Image Power is a high technology company dedicated to making the world of data transmission and storage better. Image Power is about data compression. Image Power is a company that will allow you to put more "digital stuff" into a smaller container (disk drive). In the digital world, saving disk space means saving money. In the world of computer networks, smaller data means faster transmission times, which means faster downloads. Faster downloads (because of the compression) means that things speed up, both on the Internet and on the phone lines. And who doesn't want faster downloads and smaller transmission times?
What kind of data and compression does Image Power work with?….
I'm sure that you've heard of the program WinZip? . You have a big file, need to make it smaller so it's faster to send around. When it's "zipped up" the program takes up less space on your hard drive. How does it work exactly? It uses a compression algorithm to compress data. The program squeezes the extra space out of the file and the result is you end up with a smaller file. The process is actually MUCH more complicated than that, but that explanation is way beyond the scope of this discussion. For those of you that have used the program, you know it can work well or not so well. This 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). :-{
Ok, so how does Image Power fit into the picture (no pun intended )? Image Power works it's magic on digital images, like pictures taken from digital camera, scanned images (like a magazine page, photos, documents) and faxes. Generally, although programs like WinZip can handle scanned images, they're not very good at it (in some cases they're downright awful). This is where Image Power comes into the equation. Image Power is to image data as WinZip is to regular text data. Image Power uses a new and improved generation of compression formulas to essentially "throw out" all the wasted space in an image file and which makes it smaller as a result. If you're simply storing the file on a storage medium (ie disk drive, tape backup etc…) you can now get a lot more files in the same space as before. If you're sending the file to someone over a network it gets there faster because it's smaller!! Both of these benefits means DOLLARS SAVED!!!
Hold on just a second!! Can I please have some "non-techie" examples I can sink my teeth into…
OK, consider this real world analogy. Take your big, thick family photo album with all your pictures in it. What would you think if you found out there was a new way to get all those photos into a book that would be 50-200 times smaller? And when you opened this new photo album, the pictures look exactly the same as they did in the old thick book that was 50-200 times bigger? Sound interesting? Depending on what kind of pictures you had (black & white or color) and how much you wanted to compress them, you will be better off by a factor of anywhere from 50 to 200 times LESS SPACE than when you started. The level of compression you desire depends on exactly how much you want to compress the images. (Past a certain unrealistic point you do start to loose some image quality, at the very high compression levels.) Sound interesting? Would you want to have one of these "new photo albums" I think so, I know I would…
Give me some real-world applications of the technology for me to consider?
In the digital world, Image Power does for digital images what I described above in the photo album example. Anywhere there are digital images stored (hard drives, tape drives, network drives, web servers etc…) they can now be made smaller ($$$ savings). They also travel faster now because their size is smaller. Have you ever heard someone exclaiming "Hey! I'm running out of room on this hard drive!!", or "I wish I could download stuff from the web faster :{ ". With Image Power's technology you can do both, save space and download faster. Perhaps they have found "a better mousetrap?" I personally think so…
Now lets go a step further. How about pictures in digital cameras? You can bet Image Power works magic on those pictures too. Digital cameras using Image Power's technology could potentially store a lot more photos before they had to be downloaded to a laptop or desktop. The numbers of digital cameras sold every year are increasing in leaps and bounds. It is predicated that soon digital cameras will soon surpass sales of the old "film" based cameras. Hmmmm, this sounds like it this may be worth looking into…
Scanners will benefit also from Image Power's technology. Scanners take a "digital snapshot" and save this image to a disk drive. Image Power's technology will compress the image to the maximum possible efficiency, much better than anything currently on the market. By comparison, WinZip (WZ) will also compress images, both black & white (i.e. faxes) and also color (i.e. JPEG, tiff, GIF etc...). The problem is that WZ compresses these images and at VERY DIFFERENT RATIOS. 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).
Well, using Image Power's method, you can get anywhere from 50 to 300 times BETTER compression. I know because I downloaded their demo and tried it for myself (and there's a really good white paper report on this on the company's website). The software will compress all different types of images, from B&W (i.e. 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. Compression means saved disk space.
"FAXING!! WHAT'S ALL THIS I"VE HEARD ABOUT FAXING AND IMAGE POWER?"
It's very important as far as Image Power is concerned. Remember that faxes are simply scanned images of paper documents in digital form. If you're sending a fax over a phone line (POTS) then you're sending a digital image from Point A (phone #1) to Point B (phone #2). Ever been watching a fax machine send a document and it goes really fast when there's a lot of white space or it slows down to a snail's pace over photograph or image? That's compression at work for you. On the blank spaces it goes fast because the fax machine can compress that part of the image very well. On photos or images, today's fax machines operate using standards that are very inefficient and that's why they slow down. By using page decomposition (i.e. using the best compression methods depending on what is being scanned, photos or text) and their new compression algorithms, the end result is faster faxing!! Now when was the last time you heard "Wow!! I wish that fax had taken LONGER to get here!" The implications of this are huge. How many fax machines are out there in the world today and how many faxes are being sent around the world as you read this? How many faxes have YOU sent in the last day? In the last week? How many faxes has your company sent in the last year? By utilizing Image Power's technology, all of these faxes can be sent faster which means saving money.
But wait, it gets better. What about all the other companies that are doing online faxing or e-faxing, such as eFax? How about Jfax? Callwave? Fax2Net? Use Yahoo and search in their business directory under Business_and_Economy/Companies/Office_Supplies_and_Services/Administrative_Support/Fax_Services/
As of the other day, I counted 50+ entries (52 actually) in that category. (That doesn't include all the hardware manufacturers, which is an entirely other new market…) Guess where they have to go to get this new technology if they want to incorporate it into their systems? That's right, Image Power, that's where. WHY? Because using Image Power's technology, all these faxes will become smaller and travel faster.
Image Power is in development of a free fax to email service, much like you've seen in the press with companies like eFax and Jfax. A free service, you will apply online for a phone number that you can give out and all faxes sent to that phone number would be sent directly to any email account in the world that you specify. If you're doing business overseas and people in NA have to send you a fax, the call to them is not an International call but rather to your fax number back in NA. You simply retrieve it from your email the next time you check it. For the "mobile warrior" or "dispersed sales force" the cost savings will me enormous. This business model alone has propelled the stock of eFax from $1 to the $20-$25 range virtually overnight.
OK, so what now?
What you do from here on is up to you. All I have done is to describe what Image Power's technology is capable of doing. Everything I've touched in this posting you can find (in greater detail) in my previous posts. Now you must make your own decisions. If you think the way that I do, then the choice is clear. Every application and/or process that Image Power can effect is growing.. Faxing in the business world is not going to slow down anytime soon and because of Image Power, "color faxing" is fast becoming a reality. Digital cameras are rising in popularity. Scanner sales are rocketing to new record levels year after year.. Digital archiving, paperless offices, data warehousing all will benefit from image compression. WebPages that contain pictures and images will download faster. The list goes on and on and on…
If you were to take any one of the several examples I list in the previous paragraph, that reason alone would justify in investing in Image Power. Added all together, and you have a "no-brainer" in my opinion. Image Power is set to change the way that images are sent, received and stored that will be an an order of magnitude in improvement over what exists today.
The market has placed a value on this company that I believe far under estimates the potential represented here. When the market begins to realize the full potential Image Power has to offer the digital imaging world, that will change very, very quickly. The "blue light special that is on right now" will soon be over for good. Then the price will rise to levels that properly reflect the true value and change Image Power will soon deliver.
As always, I wish you the best of success and I look forward to the days and weeks to come. Have a great weekend.
CEO2BE |
