Murray Lyons
Point2 Technologies Inc. is starting to reap ongoing revenues from
licensing its photo formatting software to retailers.
The
Saskatoon software company developed technologies for resizing and
“uploading” photos as an Internet application. Companies first used
Point2 software to sell heavy equipment and later, real estate online.
The technology is now being used by retailers offering online photo
services.
Point2 announced Wednesday a deal Siberra Corp., which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy Canada Ltd. (Best Buy also owns the Future Shop brand in Canada).
Siberra
is serving Best Buy and Future Shop stores, plus Shoppers Drug Mart,
with software that allows customers to send digital files to the stores
so that high-quality prints can be made from digital camera images.
Brendan
King, chief operating officer for Point2, says the company will get
substantial ongoing licensing revenues for its photo upload technology.
Point2 has patents for its photo upload technology in Canada and the United States, and has a patent pending in Europe.
In
early December, Point2 signed a licensing deal with Shutterfly, Inc.,
which is a large-scale American digital photo processing retailer.
King
says companies such as Shoppers Drug Mart’s EasyPix.ca or
Futurephoto.ca from Future Shop allow customers to download the
licensed software, which automatically resizes and reformats digital
picture files so they can be easily uploaded to retailers for further
processing.
With many
digital cameras having high resolution images that can produce a
computer file that is five megabytes per photo, King says the computer
file size of each photo needs to be resized so it can be uploaded more
easily to the Internet. “They send it up the Internet pipe in a size
suitable for their purposes and then resize it at the other end,” he
said.
The patented photo
upload technology was developed in the late 1990s when Point2 was
developing software for heavy equipment retailers. As a result,
Caterpillar Corp. became the first user of the Point2 software and
remains licensed to use it.
King
says the technology to resize photos automatically had to be developed
because it was too daunting to the owners of heavy equipment
dealerships to go through the steps to resize a photograph so it could
be uploaded to a website. The technology allowed Point2 to create
similar software for real estate agents, who can quickly post photos of
the houses they have for sale.
King says about half of the 100-person workforce at Point2 is now involved in supporting the Point2 Agent software, which was launched three years ago. It is now used by 70,000 real estate agents worldwide.