The Canon Sales Co Inc arm of Canon Inc has bought a 10% stake in Scottsdale, Arizona-based Interactive Media Technologies Inc and 9.9% of the company’s Interactive Media Intelligence Inc software subsidiary. Interactive Media’s major product is the IMTX 8000 media integration system, claimed to be the world’s first hardware-software multi-media system, designed to enable desktop users to produce studio-quality videos and business presentations at a fraction of the time and cost involved using current technology. In April, Tandberg Educational Inc signed to manufacture and distribute up to 30,000 of the IMTX 8000 for the educational and corporate training markets workdwide and for the personal computer market in Europe (CI No 1,398). Canon is already a major investor in Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer Inc, which specialises in workstations oriented towards multi-media applications.
