Khronos Group Gains Diverse New Members and Broadens Standards-based Ecosystem

7th August, 2007 – SIGGRAPH - San Diego, CA – The Khronos™ Group is delighted to announce that Anark, Antix, ArcSoft, GraphTech, Mentor Graphics, SoftBank Mobile and SRS Labs have joined the existing Khronos membership to help define open standards for the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on platforms ranging from embedded systems such as mobile phones to high-performance desktop and workstation systems. All Khronos members are able to join any working group to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications and conformance tests - further details are at www.khronos.org/members/. Additionally, member-company Ardites announced a consultancy service offered to any company interested to accelerate the development of products using mobile Khronos APIs.

“At SIGGRAPH 2007, Ardites Ltd announced a software consultancy and service model to support hardware vendors, device manufacturers and application developers to effectively utilize the Khronos APIs. With profound experience in key technologies and mobile multimedia ecosystem challenges, Ardites is capable of reducing the time-to-market, support multiple operating systems and improve the performance and security of the end product. By providing training, designing, integration, implementation and testing services, Ardites complements and strengthens the Khronos ecosystem,” said Jarkko Kemppainen, business and competence unit manager at Ardites.

“Khronos is a forum for industry-leading companies to cooperate and create open standards that drive commercial opportunities for our members and the wider industry, and we welcome our new members that bring expertise and key market insights to help ensure Khronos standards continue to evolve to meet market needs,” said Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group and vice president of embedded content at NVIDIA. “Our new members include mobile carriers and vendors for 3D authoring tools, mobile middleware and operating systems from all around the world; illustrating how rich-media authoring and acceleration is becoming vital to multiple industries. Also, an increasing number of member companies such as Ardites and Futuremark are offering consultancy, development and benchmarking services for Khronos APIs – all very vital in encouraging a broad range of products to rapidly and effectively use Khronos open standards.”
“OpenKODE has been developed to provide an essential consistency of service across an increasingly diverse range of mobile and other connected digital devices. We look forward to our highly experienced team at Antix taking an active part in the further development of this important standard,” said Tim Renouf of Antix Labs and the specification editor for OpenKODE.

“We have seen tremendous growth of Multimedia applications on the mobile handset in the past few years. With the introduction of standards like OpenMAX and OpenKODE and their gradual adoption by mobile chip and hardware companies, software companies are liberated to focus energy on product innovation and creativity rather than on lengthy integration with different multimedia hardware,” said David Cao, ArcSoft Vice President of Mobile Business. “The work of the Khronos Group helps to streamline mobile phone development so that different well-segmented software expert companies can work seamlessly together and time-to-market can be significantly reduced. We look forward to seeing an industry-wise adoption of these standards.”

“Khronos is elevating the bar in how standards are defined and created by taking into consideration the entire developer ecosystem,” said Peter Ostrin, CEO, GraphTech Computer Systems. “They're enabling innovation through the economic support that comes from being able to deploy new technologies across the widest range of platforms, and we are excited to join the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member.”

“We have been impressed by the Khronos Group’s proven ability to define advanced standards for mobile media acceleration, deliver them quickly to meet emerging market needs – and to prevent fragmentation within its standards to provide a stable programming environment,” said Hiroshi Ohta, executive vice president, product and service development, SoftBank Mobile. “We have confidence that Khronos will continue to provide the foundation specifications for advanced media acceleration that will enable us to create a thriving developer community for the POP-i platform - and we are pleased to announce that we are joining Khronos to support and encourage its ongoing activities and the OpenKODE standard.”

See Khronos at SIGGRAPH 2007, San Diego; August 7-9 2007
Any members of the press and industry are invited to visit the Khronos Booth #227 to see demonstrations by Khronos Group members and to attend these Khronos events:
SIGGRAPH Course “3D Ecosystem” Tuesday 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM – Conference room 4
Khronos Handheld API BOFs: Tuesday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos “Kodebusters” Party: Tuesday 6:00 PM-8:00 PM – Conference room 2
Khronos Japanese BOF: Wednesday 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM – Conference room 2
COLLADA Toolchain BOF: Wednesday 2:00 PM - 3:45 PM - Conference room 2
COLLADA Demo Party: Wednesday 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM - Conference room 2
OpenGL BOF: Wednesday 5:15 PM – 7:15 PM – Conference room 2
OpenGL Party: Wednesday 7:15 PM – 8:30 PM – Conference room 2

More details at http://www.khronos.org/news/events/detail/san_diego_siggraph_2007/

About The Khronos Group
The Khronos Group is a member-funded industry consortium focused on the creation of open standards such as OpenGL®, OpenKODE™, OpenGL® ES, OpenMAX™, OpenVG™, OpenSL ES™, OpenML™ and COLLADA™ to enable the authoring and acceleration of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices. All Khronos members are able to contribute to the development of Khronos specifications, are empowered to vote at various stages before public deployment, and are able to accelerate the delivery of their cutting-edge media platforms and applications through early access to specification drafts and conformance tests. More information is available at www.khronos.org.

About ArcSoft
ArcSoft, Inc., founded in 1994 and headquartered in Fremont, California, is an industry leading software developer of multimedia technologies and applications across desktop, embedded, and mobile platforms. ArcSoft offers a full line of high-performance imaging, audio, and video solutions within an extremely small footprint, bringing an exhilarating rich media user experience to mobile phones. ArcSoft mobile multimedia solutions are developed to support the Khronos Group’s OpenMAX standards. For further details, please visit our corporate Web site: www.arcsoft.com.

About Ardites
Ardites is a consultancy company focused towards mobile software development. Ardites is a privately owned company, based in Finland and among the fastest growing companies in its industry sector. Ardites was established in 2002 and joined with the Khronos consortium in 2007. Ardites is offering services to all levels of mobile software development, such as IP providers, Operating system providers, OEMs and operators. Ardites’ portfolio, consists of, training, design, implementation and testing services. Web site: http://www.ardites.com.

Khronos, OpenKODE, OpenVG, OpenMAX and OpenSL ES are trademarks of the Khronos Group Inc. Web3D and X3D are trademarks of the Web3D Consortium. COLLADA is a trademark of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. used by permission by Khronos. OpenGL and OpenML are registered trademarks and the OpenGL ES logo is a trademark of Silicon Graphics Inc. used by permission by Khronos. All other product names, trademarks, and/or company names are used solely for identification and belong to their respective owners.