Fun Facts to Know and Tell by Denise Caruso c. 1990 Media Letter A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY Everyone says that pornography is a compelling force in getting consumers to buy new technology. Much as I hoped it wasn't true, I was informed by an anonymous (more like "chicken") source last week that an Italian company has released "A CD-ROM Unabashed History of Photographic Erotica." The company claims the six-volume series is the first set of "electronic books" in CD-ROM format, and costs $300 per disk. I'm not sure if prurient interest is the way I'd personally choose to drive the CD-ROM market, but there you have it. Despite the subject matter, however, a fascinating feature of these discs is that buying them grants you the right, with a few restrictions, to print, copy or publish the material contained on them with impunity. Since anyone interested in this stuff will certainly copy it anyway, such a licensing deal may preserve some semblance -- illusion? -- of control over how it's distributed. In certain cases, such schemes make sense, and some other vendors have already caught on to similar ideas. For example, Passport Designs' newly formed Music Data Company in Half Moon Bay, CA, is using a similar license agreement for its new "MIDI Records" product line. Music Data is selling more than 300 complete professional arrangements ranging from pop to classical, in the form of MIDI sequences shipped on diskette. You can do just about anything with the sequences, including use them for performances. And as I mentioned last issue, Pixar is also preparing what it calls "appearance libraries" of Renderman images. GO FOR THE F/X The competition for that $10,000 prize on "America's Funniest Home Videos" is about to escalate. Within a couple weeks, I hear that Digital F/X -- the Mountain View company headed by former Atari whiz Steven Mayer -- is announcing a complete turnkey video editing system for the Macintosh II that costs around $10,000. Though I couldn't get much detailed information about the hardware-software combo I understand it's simple enough for a novice video buff to create his or her own video, either from scratch or by cutting and pasting existing footage. Dedicated professional video production equipment usually costs between $100,000 and a million dollars. Obviously the new Digital F/X box doesn't do everything that a professional system can, but my sources say its features are pretty comprehensive -- including sequencing, editing, selecting, reviewing, video encoding and decoding, VCR control, rendering graphics to video and a minimal amount of the expensive, hardware-intensive, special-effects capabilities that Digital F/X sells via its high-end Composium and Paint F/X products. DESKTOP VIDEO FOR THE REST OF US Farallon didn't mean to have it work out that way, but its "technology demo" at the Digital World conference in late June ended up being something of premature product announcement. Tyler Peppel, head of Apple's multimedia marketing, demonstrated a new Farallon product -- scheduled to ship this fall, sources say -- that looks to be "desktop video editing for the rest of us." The software, written by Farallon software wizard Jay Fenton (co-founder of MacroMind and author of the Playground programming language for Apple's famous Vivarium project), allows you to edit Video 8 or standard VHS tape from one deck to another in any combination using a Mac II. Farallon is shouldering a noble burden with this product. Since both decks require use of a serial port (as do a bunch of other devices), creating what's fast becoming known in the multimedia world as "serial port fu," the company is said to be working on a splitter to run decks off a single port. Peppel, in a valiant but extraordinarily futile attempt to shield the unannounced product, said its code-name was "Kubrick," in honor of Stanley. But the real code-name is "Hitchcock." BIG NEW DEALS FOR DYN-ED It's probably no surprise to the cynical industry watcher that Cupertino-based DynEd is hardly even known in the U.S., but is selling its products at an enormous clip in the Far East and Europe. DynEd already announced that its executive language training courses on videodisc and CD-ROM will be distributed by Sony Enterprise of Japan and Hay Space of Italy. But the fastest-growing company says now that Fujitsu has also expressed serious interest in having DynEd port a version of the company's "Functioning in Business" and "Interactive Business English" courses to the FM towns machine. DynEd's basic courses were originally designed for the Japanese business market by company founder Lance Knowles, who served for five years as director of the Language Institute off Japan in Odawara. During his stint at the Institute, Knowles discovered first-hand that Japanese firms spend a whopping $800 million a year to teach their employees to speak English. So three years ago, he started following the march of CD-ROM technology in the trade press and cooked up a way to make effective electronic education aids using a combination of CD-ROM and laserdisc technologies. After his pitches to Apple and IBM fell on deaf ears, he went back to contacts at Sony, who first thought his idea was impossible. When he whipped them up a prototype, however, the electronics giant was intrigued enough to make a $300,000 investment in DynEd and place an advance order for products. Though the product is interesting enough by itself, DynEd's authoring system, which uses proprietary drivers to pull data directly off the videodisc and CD-ROM without going through the computer's central processor chip, moves "very fast." Dave Welsh, head of marketing for DynEd, says the system has great potential as a commercial package, but can't fund it yet. Despite their educational overtones, DynEd's products were not sufficiently interesting to grab the attention of Apple, even though Welsh was a Stanford classmate of Larry Tesler, Apple's advanced technology director. He's also had a hard time with IBM, at least until last week. That's when IBM decided to schedule an August meeting in Cupertino to discuss the possibility of DynEd creating a Hispanic version of its language courses to teach English as a second language. "That deal is our great American hope," Welsh says. "Everyone overseas wants to work with us, but no one in the U.S. wants to help." THAT'S WHAT E-MAIL IS FOR Considering the critical role that raw information plays in the interactive multimedia world, I was very surprised, as was Savitar's Sean Callahan, that no one has responded to his offer to be a clearinghouse for discussion on the problem of intellectual property rights in multimedia. In his "Forum" piece in last month's issue, Callahan proposed that the multimedia industry start a lobbying effort to resolve the problem before information providers cut off their supplies of content. This issue needs your attention. If you don't think so, just wait until you get sued for using someone else's material illegally. Contact Callahan (Applelink: Savitar; Presslink: Callahan; Connect: SEANCALLAHAN or America Online: Savitar) and get the ball rolling on this vital issue.