by Denise Caruso DISC-BASED OPERATING RUMORS Though my information on this is pretty sketchy, I hear that IBM Corp. is very close to announcing a CD-ROM bearing a decompression algorithm fresh out of Watson Labs which allows full-motion video to decompress and run in 25 percent of the screen. This sounds pretty hokey until you factor in the platform it runs on: an 8 MHz 286 machine with 640K of RAM. The idea is to be able to play back compressed video without a significant hardware investment, so as you might guess, the product is aimed primarily at the education market where such PCs already abound. Price to schools will be $99, all other pay $150. It's logical that IBM will also license the algorithm to CD-ROM producers. As this issue was going to press, I also heard that Philips was on the brink of announcing a dramatic reduction in cost for its CD-I authoring system, to about $19,600. Philips may also be working furiously on a conversion capability for CD-ROM to CD-I, in an attempt to position CD-I as a universal CD device. It's not clear whether this conversion would simply make a CD- ROM disc playable in a CD-I player. WHAT DON'T THEY CONSIDER SYSTEM SOFTWARE? Word on the street is that growing numbers of Apple Computer's once-loyal development community have just about had it. The new low-end Macintoshes, scheduled for release in mid-October, contain additions to the Mac system that cannibalize shipping products by third-party developers -- some of whom actually broke the multimedia market open for Apple in the first place. For example, though Farallon wouldn't comment, it's widely known that parts of the Emeryville, CA-based firm's audio product line is about to be usurped in a big way by new, built-in Macintosh sound capability. Sources tracking such developments say that one likely reason for Apple's actions is a reaction to the widespread belief that Microsoft's new Windows products is going to slash into Apple's Mac sales. "They're making reactive decisions without consulting senior management in the third-party community," said one insider. "Many developers in the Macintosh community are asking themselves, 'Where does Apple draw the line between system software and application software?'" This is an especially good question at a time when Windows programmers are in such demand that they're getting paid about four times more an hour than Macintosh programmers. It doesn't seem to me like a very good time for Apple to test developer loyalty. UNBRIDLED RUMORS I hear that Radius is preparing a new NuBus card for the Macintosh that's being described as "MacroMind Director in hardware." And don't worry, there's at least one other serious contender to the Director throne on the way, though probably not on the Macintosh platform . . . A Canadian company called MACsetera is preparing a new read-write optical disk drive, called the Genesis 6000i, that can suck in and write CD-quality sound in real time, for around $5,000. Using the AudioMedia board from Digidesign in a Mac IIci, you can use the Genesis to store your sounds instead of buying gigabytes of Winchester storage to accomplish the same task. Now, if it just recorded that music in CD-ROM format . . . Digital F/X finally introduced its long awaited Video F/X desktop video product, but I hear it wasn't quite ready to show a nifty hardware-software combo that will ship as an option. The program, now in beta testing, allows you to speed the editing process by manipulating video images digitally on the (faster than a VTR) hard disk. The changes you make to the "virtual" video are frame-accurate, so you can easily update your production tape. LEAPING INTO THE FOREFRONT Remember September 1, 1990: it's a date that will someday be commemorated as very important to the multimedia industry. That's when the Associated Press news service flipped the switch on a new system to begin shipping its vast quantities of daily news photographs in digital form. Within a year, the new network -- called PhotoStream -- will make available tens of thousands of digital pictures to its nearly 1,000 subscribers. Many photographers and multimedia producers are closely monitoring the results of this move. Until now, AP has had pretty good control over how its photos were disseminated and to whom. But with photos in digital format, unauthorized duplication is bound to become a problem. And then there's the question of where and how they'll archive the millions of existing AP photos. There's a proposal on the table now to help AP set up a giant, online digital archive for all its subscribers, but of course that raises lots of interesting questions about digital document formats for multiple media types and the like. How the AP handles these questions will be a bellwether for whether digital photography can become a viable -- read "profitable" -- market, and for whom. IT WAS BOUND TO HAPPEN San Francisco-based clip art company FM Waves, which bills itself as "Art with a Capital A," was a big hit at Macworld Expo with its $495 "Artware" CD- ROM of images, and its monthly subscription service that provides a new disk stocked with timely (political) images. I asked if they'd considered creating a slightly different product, also with great potential -- animated clip art images to be used in multimedia productions. "Funny you should ask," said co-founder Michael Segal. THE DYNAMIC DUO PUBLISHES AGAIN Tony Bove and Cheryl Rhodes, the dynamic duo who delivered you the first journal on desktop publishing (called aptly, Desktop Publishing -- later bought by IDG and renamed Publish!, which recently lost its exclamation point), have just had their umpteenth book hit the shelves. This one is called Macintosh Multimedia Handbook, published by Que Corp., and is an exhaustive survey of everything about the "M" word on the Mac. If you've ever met Tony & Cheryl (who also put the "M" in "mellow"), you'll be surprised at the rather garish cover on the book -- a plastic Darth Vader with red neon eyes, sporting yellow earphones. "The cover is the only thing we didn't design," says Rhodes. Covered in the book is everything from creating interactive media to organizing and storing information. And if this wasn't enough, their book on MacroMind Director was printing as this went to press, and should be out in two to three weeks. HAD ENOUGH OF THE EXPO CIRCUIT? Don't freeze that calendar yet. There are a couple of interesting shows taking place in the month of October that I probably don't have time to attend, and neither do you, but you should know about them anyhow: € ETRE, the first European Technology Roundtable Exhibition, will meet in Opio, France, from October 14 to 16, sponsored by Dasar Inc., a Palo Alto, CA- based consulting group that specializes in global ventures. (President of Dasar is Alex Vieux, entrepreneur and California-based correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde.) The idea behind the conference is to bring American and Asian technology innovators face-to-face with European customers, as we draw closer to 1992 and a "unified" (at least economically) Europe. The participant list is a veritable Who's Who in the computer and electronics business. Two special panels, "Multimedia: Explosion or Illusion" and "Graphics and Entertainment," will be chaired by Michael Rogers, senior writer and technology editor for Newsweek. (Inexplicably, MacroMind declined to attend, even though invited repeatedly.) € InterTainment '90, the 3rd annual International Conference on Interactive Entertainment, will take place from Oct. 29 to 31 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, co-sponsored by NYNEX (not necessarily a surprise). Speakers from more than 100 companies will report on research findings and talk ideas. Session topics will include: interactivity in the new home entertainment/information center; CD-I workshop; DVI workshop; "fiber to the home" services report; CD-ROM entertainment; producing for interactive TV; hyperfiction; multimedia design techniques; and "Adventures in Hyperspace" (sigh). Call conference director Sally Chin at (212) 382-3929 for information. NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. . . Eastgate Press in Cambridge, MA, is about to make its second foray into the realm of interactive fiction with a new novel, Afternoon, written expressly for the media of hypertext. Company founder Mark Bernstein says Afternoon is the firm's second attempt at such a feat. Its first, a campy film noir called Sucker in Spades, barely made a stir. But he believes Afternoon author Michael Joyce has created a fascinating story -- a day in the life of an English professor who passes a car accident on his way to work. He later realizes the car looked like his ex-wife's and that he may have witnessed the death of his son. Bernstein says Joyce is interested in the surreal aspects of being able to thread prose together in more than one way. You double-click any word in the text, and by doing so create a connected pattern that catapults you to different places in the text. The Macintosh-based product is based on Eastgate's own technology, called HyperGate, and has been used by the company for years to build training materials and briefings. Bernstein says one of his main interests is to ascertain on the job, if you will, what connotes a "good" interactive novel. "One reason we want to cultivate hypertext fiction is that so much of what we know about writing was discovered by writers of fiction and poetry," says Bernstein. "Let's face it, this medium needs legitimacy badly. And a successful artistic creation would go a long way."