ScanSoft Inc, the Peabody, Massachusetts-based digital imaging and optical character recognition software company, has acquired and licensed photo imaging software products and technology from MetaCreations Inc, it emerged last week. ScanSoft will take over MetaCreations’ Kai Super Goo, Photo Soap 2 and Power Show applications for both Windows and Macintosh systems. Super Goo is for liquid photo imaging, Photo Soap is a photo editing package and Power Show is for multimedia presentations.
The deal involves $2.6m in cash and up to $950,000 in assumed liabilities. It also includes incentive payments to Carpinteria, California-based MetaCreations of up to $1m, depending on financial performance. Customer support will stay with MetaCreations until the end of the year. ScanSoft says it expects the transaction to be neutral to slightly positive on total year 1999 earnings, and accretive thereafter.
ScanSoft intends to combine the products with its own optical character recognition and document imaging software, and says the move will create a single source for imaging software needed by the 10m mass market scanners and 1.8m low-end digital cameras expected to ship in the US this year, according to figures from InfoTrends Research Group. ScanSoft says it’s on the look out for new partnerships with digital camera manufacturers, and will also sell the software to its existing desktop scanner partners.
Metacreations’ OEM customers include Microsoft Corp, Intel Corp and Eastman Kodak Co. The company was formed from the merging in May 1997 of MetaTools Inc and Fractal Design Corp (CI No 3,172), since when it has never really found its feet. One high point was Microsoft’s licensing of the Metastream 3D file format for use in its DirectX set of multimedia APIs. Metacreations says it will now focus on 2D and 3D professional graphics technologies, and its internet business for e-commerce visualization. That technology comes from a more recent acquisition, Portola Valley California-based Canoma Inc, for which it paid $1.75m in January 1999. Yesterday, the company launched a set of Adobe Photoshop plug-in image effects called KPT X, designed to be bought and downloaded from the company’s website.
ScanSoft was a subsidiary of Xerox Corp until late last year, when it was merged into scanner company Visioneer Inc’s software business, retaining the ScanSoft name. Its plan is to deliver software products to retail, OEM and corporate markets and supply software for Xerox’s multifunction product lines. Its other partners include Brother International Corp, Canon Inc, Epson Corp, Compaq Computer Corp and IBM Corp.
