The Data Compression News Blog

We know that the great recession of 2009 has caused slashes in staffing at companies large and small, and it appears that Euclid Discoveries (discussed in great detail here) has had to cut back as well.

Euclid has a list of key bios on their web site, and as of today, December 7, 2009, that includes just three people:

• Richard Y. Wingard, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
• J. Robert Werner, Co-Founder & President
• Charles P. Pace, Chief Technologist

What’s strange is that this list of key bios used to be a lot longer. Using the beloved Internet Archive, we can take a look at the same list from just two years earlier, and wonder what happened to:

• Steve N. Hutchinson, Executive Strategist
• Anne Marsden, Chief Marketing Officer
• John Weiss, PhD, Chief Algorithmic Mathematician
• Igor Najfeld, PhD, Algorithmic Mathematician
• Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, PhD, Chief Consulting Scientist
• Jeffrey V. Roberts, Director of Engineering
• Anne Watelet, Technical Process Manager
• Renato Pizzorni, Lead Software Engineer
• Darin DeForest, PhD (ABD), Lead Algorithmic Engineer
• Richard Gyger, Technical Lead
• Elizabeth Marmion, Director of Operations
• Bentley Pace, Knowledge Manager

I don’t know whether any of these people were cut loose, or whether ED just decided to clean up a rather long web page. And a check of LinkedIn shows that there are at least a few people who still list themselves as employed at ED:

• Bill Wilmoth, Information Technology Analyst
• Nigel Lee, Chief Algorithmic Engineer
• Anne Watelet, Technical Process Manager
• Jeffrey Roberts, Director of Engineering
• Bentley Pace, Knowledge Manager

I would be very surprised if all twelve of these people were full time employees at Euclid. Carrying that many big salaries would have created a pretty rapid burn rate, and I don’t think the company could have sustained it for this long.

The big question is whether what we are seeing now is the death rattle of a company cutting expenses to the bone, or whether there is just a lot of smoke and no real fire. Whichever it is, Euclid Discoveries is, as always, not saying.

This article in the Washington Post reports that On2 is being purchased by Google for $106 million in stock.

On2 has a really excellent video codec with some advantages over industry standards from Microsoft and the MPEG. But the relatively small price for a well-established and sporadically profitable company points out the difficulty faced when trying to sell video compression not backed by industry standards groups.

One often used metric on a buyout is the cash value per employee. In this case, it’s roughly $1.75M for each On2 employee. Just to contrast, earlier this year my employer, Cisco Systems Inc., acquired Pure Digital, makers of the Flip video recorder. In that case, the payout per employee was roughly $5.8M per head.

Probably not apples-to-apples, but something to think about.

David Scott has written a bijective BWT transform, which brings all the advantages of bijectiveness to BWT based compressors. Among other things, making BWT more suitable for compression-before-encryption and also give (slightly) better compression.

Jarek Duda’s “Asymmetric Binary System” promises to be an alternate to arithmetic coding, having all the advantages, but being much simpler. Matt has coded a PAQ based compressor using ABS for back-end encoding. Update: Andrew Polar has written an alternate implementation of ABS.

So many of today’s files are already compressed (using old, outdated algorithms) that newer algorithms don’t even get a chance to touch them. Christian Schneider’s Precomp comes to rescue by undoing the harm.

There aren’t too many companies working on cutting edge codecs, and of those few this one is hiring. Best of luck.

Its old news that China has developed their own Advanced Video Standard to avoid high licensing fees. English translation of the standard is now available, along with the IPR policy. Finally something technical that you can get your hands on to feed your appetite.

If you are in any way interested in data compression, DCC is a place where you really want to be. Where else can you expect to meet so many people who can all get so excited about saving 5 more bytes. Submissions for DCC 2008 are due by November 12.

Jeff Gilchrist has released mpibzip2, a parallel implementation of the popular bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses MPI and achieves significant speedup on cluster machines.

A New Zealand based company, NearZero has nothing to show after more than 6 years and $5 million of investor money. Liquidators called in (Update 11th Nov 2007: Liquidation ordered).