Later today, enterprise content management juggernaut Open Text will announce to the world that it has acquired Toronto, Canada-based Vizible for an undisclosed sum. I’d never heard of Vizible before, but now that I have I’m stunned that this 10-year old company received so little attention for its achievements so far.
Vizible essentially transforms consuming just about any type of content into a rich, visual 3D experience and thus aims to ‘humanize’ how people interact with digital media.
The company breaks the Web into basic units which it refers to as “cells”, which can be virtually any type of media: text, images, audio, video. Once the media has been placed in a cell, that cell can then be tagged, categorized and manipulated in a number of ways. The units can be filtered, searched and organized; they can also be coded to respond to input, linked to other content, or viewed in a three-dimensional space along with other cells.
The technology was used by AT&T (an investor in Vizible) for its 3D browser initiative Pogo, which we covered when we learned the company’s business development unit was working it, although the project never actually came to fruition; the website PogoBrowser.com now redirects to AT&T Music.
Open Text, a publicly-traded company, will fold Vizible’s products into its own digital media solutions, which help its customers manage rich-media content. All Vizible employees will become part of the company’s Digital Media group and remain in the Toronto area, where Open Text also has an office.
Interesting, thanks for the info.
Is there a screenshot you can put up of their technology?
ill give my comments only after that
Go to their site and check out the demo video. How can you pass judgement on a dynamic UI technology from a screenshot?
Well this is just a Cooliris with additional 3D layouts. I am just wondering what their patent is about.
.. nothing really new, really.
OpenText are perhaps interested in solutions that aid in traversing the semantic web, when it comes to how rich media is created and distributed.
Open Text buys tax credits. This was likely the same situation as previous acquisitions (small companies with multi-million dollar lose carry forwards at 10 cents on the dollar). SHHHHHHH! don’t tell revenue canada
Big deal. You can do this using Unity3D practically overnight. I can build a pretty simple 3D educational game in one night and keep my day job. With the professional version of Unity3D you can stream videos just like their example. I feel sorry for those investors. Not to say that what they initially did wasn’t great and I’m sure the designers are quite skilled. However, you can hire programmers instead of wasting money on entire companies now.
From what I’ve gathered, the team that founded this company didn’t raise all that much funding, and most of it came from some angel investors in their first years as a company (early 2000). AT&T was most likely a strategic investment tied to the Pogo Browser project.
The latest numbers I was able to dig up was that Vizible had $10 million in revenues back in 2007.
Totally agree. This is at best a tech *demo*, not a product or anything game-changing!
This was a fire sale of assets. Vizible effectively closed its business and laid everyone off at the end of last year. They shopped themselves after the AT&T deal went south. I would be shocked if OpenText paid more than $1 million for the assets.
That was my first reaction too, but they haven’t gotten back to any of my questions about this so far. Will update if and when they do.
a great union for this two companies/
I’m sorry but what do you mean by “transforms consuming just about any type of content into a rich, visual 3D experience” ?
@Robin. I have friends that worked at Vizible that provided this info. The company was mismanaged and their revenues never materialized. They essentially bet the company on the AT&T deal and the Pogo browser project. When that didn’t work out and AT&T pulled out of the deal, Vizible was left with no money and no plan…just a few (probably unenforceable) patents.
Your article glorifies the company (”innovator”) and makes it seem this was a huge deal for Vizible’s shareholders when in fact Vizible was a complete failure and the shareholders got wiped out. You should do your research before you publish.
I tire of these disgruntled employee comments…
I too know Vizible …. they performed.
…deal with your anger management problems “true pic”….please.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this was a firesale. I used the Pogo browser as part of their beta program, and didn’t come away super excited. Basically it was a FF’ish clone with a “3D Homepage”. Additionally the technology to implement a 3D experience was not straightforward in my opinion.
Mickey mouse applications and tools that’s not used to address real usage issues will remain as they are. Let’s see if OpenText can harness on the purchase and integrate it into their suite of product for the business community.
I know the guys at Vizible as well, they are a strong team of smart entrepreneurs that were in the 3D visualization game for media way ahead of the curve. Congrats to them on a successful exit, OpenText is a great home for their core product, I hope it becomes a successful business unit for OpenText.
Damn there is a lot of negativity in the TC comments these days.
Good coverage Robin, thanks.