SoftKey International Inc is not going to sit around and slowly fade away as one of its constituent companies – and the one whose share quotation it took – WordStar International Inc did. For its first big move since the three-way merger, the Cambridge, Massachusetts company has acquired two privately-held consumer multimedia software companies and created a new division SoftKey Multimedia, out of them. The two are Aris Multimedia Entertainment Inc of Marina del Rey, California, and Compact Publishing Inc of Washington, DC. SoftKey issued an aggregate of 872,229 shares for the two, valuing the transactions at a total indicated value of $11m. Aris and Compact had reported aggregate revenues of $4.2m for their most recent fiscal years.SoftKey says that the creative talent required in the new field includes artists that can master complex authoring systems as well as video editing and sound mixing, and that the new division will be driven by author-artists. The transactions immediately add 21 new multimedia titles to SoftKey’s current list of over 180 consumer products.
