Scoop-of-the-Month Club by Denise Caruso c. 1990 Media Letter WOW! CD VIDEO ROMS? It's not certain yet that the newborn child will have all its fingers and toes, but I hear that SuperMac Technologies of Sunnyvale, CA, is trying to convince Apple Computer chairman John Sculley to unwrap the swaddling clothes at August's Macworld Expo in Boston. If he's convinced, he'll be doing a "technology demonstration" of SuperMac's new hardware and software product that enables an hour-plus of full-motion, 24-bit video to run off a CD- ROM. The product will likely consist of a video card that can acquire and play back 24-bit, 30- or 24-frame-per-second video with the effective resolution of a television signal (NTSC), in a 512x304-pixel window that's about the size of a Mac Plus screen. It also supports a full audio sound track, equivalent to television or the best you can get out of a Farallon MacRecorder. Three technologies are at the core of the yet-unnamed product -- compression, graphics acceleration and mass storage utilization -- which help fit video onto a hard disk or CD-ROM, fill the screen at full-video frame rates and allow for high efficiency transfer rates off a CD-ROM or hard disk. For those who'd like to see more mass appeal for interactive multimedia, such a product may provide the functionality of hypermedia-on-laserdisc without having to invest $1,000 in a bulky laserdisc player. This could result in something like "interactive Nova" running off you CD-ROM drive or some other, more interesting piece of hardware like the hand-held CD-ROM player that's already being marketed in Japan by Sony. Not to mention that the compact disc has become a very cheap distribution mechanism. (It's pretty much common knowledge by now that a CD-ROM costs $1 to print, whereas a laserdisc costs up to $100.) Though the installed base of CD-ROM drives is higher on the PC side of the fence than the Mac, SuperMac remains a diehard Mac-only company and is not believed to be actively developing the technology for the IBM side of the fence. But I hear the folks there may be willing to deal on a license . . . WINDOWS ON THE MARCH Microsoft is letting no grass grow under its feet in the multimedia market since its May announcement of Windows 3.0. Word is that the Redmond, WA, software giant will be releasing two separate multimedia developers kits in early fall. One will contain, among other things, all the finished drivers for Win3 applications by Authorware, Farallon and MacroMind, as well as for CD-ROM, MIDI musical instruments and others. The other developer kit will be shipped containing device drivers for Philips, Nintendo and digital signal processing chips. As is usually the case with Microsoft, the kits are selling at a high price -- about $1,000 each -- and are shipped only to companies who were Windows beta sites. In addition, my sources say that the Windows multimedia operating system platform will be released in the spring. Microsoft is allegedly pushing hard on hardware vendors like Compaq to put sound chips on the motherboard, and is working on Texas Instruments to get its TIGA specification optimized for the Windows environment. In other words, there is a veritable tidal wave of multimedia development happening for Windows; I hear that Windows contract programmers are getting $200 an hour for their much-requested time. That's compared to about $75 an hour for Mac developers, according to one firm's numbers. MARC CANTER, MEDIA MOGUL? MacroMind, the San Francisco firm that's pioneered desktop multimedia from the pre-buzzword stage (hmmm, maybe it's their fault . . .), is expected to soon announce that it's branching out. Rumor has it that MacroMind is about to enter the business of producing "content" for multimedia presentations, and is getting involved in some other pretty interesting areas as well. MacroMind is about to start creating and selling its own "clip media" libraries, the multimedia equivalent of the clip art packages which have been so successful since the advent of cut-and-paste applications. The libraries will eventually include gigabytes of canned business animations, background photos, textures and the like. And yes, MacroMind does already sell one such package called MacroMind CD-ROM, but it hasn't been particularly successful and will be revised and re-released by the end of the year. The move by MacroMind is probably a harbinger of things to come. With intellectual property rights a thorny and unsolved problem, there's a lot of money to be made providing unfettered access to the visual stuff of which multimedia is made. The idea is already popular with some major hardware vendors rumored to be adding large dollar amounts to their system software contracts with MacroMind to help fund acquisition of clipstuff. Things should get even more interesting if company founder Marc Canter actually does end up sitting on the board of Degraf/Wahrman, as is expected, helping the master animators productize their scarily realistic "electronic puppet" technology. VULCAN MIND MELD A new book by Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Schrage may have squarely hit one of the core issues of the multimedia industry. Called Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration, it's about how media shape the process of collaboration in business, science and the arts. Schrage, who spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab exploring technology transfer for the lab, was fascinated by great collaborators in the history of science such as James Watson and Francis Crick. He discovered that all successful collaborators had in common a "shared space" where they worked. "The shared space is actually a medium," Schrage says. "And what you find out is that if you alter the properties of the medium, you alter the quality of the collaboration." Today, he claims, technology has made such collaboration not only more feasible, but can boost it to even higher levels. Watson and Crick's shared space was the metal DNA models they crafted based on their experiments, which let them work outside of the mental and physical isolation of their usual mode of work. "Now we can build those models on our Sun workstations," he says. The problem, however, is that despite the sophistication of technology, most computer systems are still designed for working in isolation. "My design on your screen isn't the thing -- the deal is to enter and manipulate shared space," says Schrage. An entire chapter of Shared Minds addresses the problem of building collaborative architectures, designed to support the processes of interactions -- conversations, arguments, agreements. This concept, fully realized, will be of infinite use to users of multimedia workstations, since it's clear (at least to me) that we've gone about as far as we can go in this business working alone.