Dear Customers:
Over the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge
in technology innovation that is powering advances in the
digital imaging marketplace. As users of that technology, we
have become accustomed to having the tools at our
fingertips, and rarely think about what was the state of our
graphical work tasks only 10 years ago.
But over 10 years ago, Celartem Technology, Inc. was
thinking about the future trends whose seeds were just being
planted. The company’s founders at that time could
eventually foresee that an all digital workflow would become
the standard for the community of graphical professionals
worldwide. It would just take a matter of time for imaging
technology to begin to mature and for the computing
infrastructure to finally be in place for seamless sharing
of digital files amongst all users.
Today we are the grateful inheritors of much that has been
done by imaging and computing professionals worldwide. Tools
for digital content creation, management and distribution
are increasingly more feature rich, and users are expecting
more sophisticated products to fit into their work
environments.
Celartem Technology exists as a strong player in this
challenging and ever changing world of graphical
professionals. We are commercializing our unique technology
portfolio into market focused tools and applications on an
international scale. In the visual professional community,
there really are no geographic borders to the creation of
digital imaging content.
Over the last few years, our strategy has been to acquire
some important American software companies that were
successful in focusing on our core customer segments. These
acquisitions have paved the way for Celartem Technology to
provide applications across much more of the customer value
chain. The content life cycle from creation, collaboration,
management, and secure distribution have products and
technology that span all stages of value creation.
Our technology portfolio includes several key imaging
components, from file formats with unique and innovative
properties (PixelLive, MrSID, DjVu) to image processing
algorithms (scaling, compression, optimized viewers) that
are world class. PixelLive, an original invention of
Celartem, was developed for high quality image encoding,
viewing and secure distribution. PixelLive has been widely
accepted by professional photographers and museum archivists
for long term storage of their digital archives. MrSID, our
multi-resolution, tiled, and lossless image encoding
technology is a de facto standard in the geo-spatial
industry used by the US government and others for handling
gigabyte size image data in a performance responsive way. In
addition, DjVu, our ultra-compression and distribution
technology for document images has been widely recognized by
the industry for its facile handling of content in networked
applications. On the application side, digital asset
management and distribution continue to be the platforms
that all of our companies focus on.
The business team at Celartem Technology, Inc. has also been
solidified this year with the addition of some new imaging
and software industry professionals to the team. This team
is focused and committed to producing significant growth and
progress to our above mentioned goals. We all are intent to
provide applications and technology that are customer and
market driven.
Internally we have quite a global team, with employees from
all parts of the world. The management team consciously
works to achieve cross-cultural understanding across all our
collaborative teams, each respecting and learning from the
contributions of each culture. In this way, we are able to
bring our excellent internal methods to the development of
products that also must exist in an international world
market.
Now that Celartem Technology continues to develop in a
positive direction, our next step is to increase the speed
that is needed to reach our goals. In terms of financial
results for the last six months, we beat our original
forecasts both in the bottom line and in cash flow. We will
continue to make every effort to meet the financial goals
for this full fiscal year while formulating a mid-term
business plan for next year’s fiscal plan that leads to our
ultimate goal.
Our starting point in Japan over 10 years ago was to be a
leader in the full graphical communications workflow by
providing very high quality technology to the encoding,
handling and viewing of digital imaging content. We are now
realizing that vision by our strong Japan-US collaboration.
We are honored to share our vision with all of our
stakeholders. Celartem Group is becoming a strong player in
the ever expanding world of visual communication. We highly
appreciate your continued advice, understanding and support.
April 2004
Yasuo Kano
President and CEO
Celartem Technology, Inc.
About
Celartem
