MatrixView Launches SQZit, Same Mistakes Repeated
Posted by Sachin Garg on 5th September 2006 | Permanent Link
MatrixView recently announced another offering which seemingly goes beyond just image compression, which has been their focus till now. They have been around since quite some time but their technologies have always been seen with suspicion (same is true this time). Not because they are any technological breakthrough, but its the way they have presented themselves.
We have talked about this many times earlier, and others have too:
MatrixView may need to work hard to establish its bona fides. It has already been tarred with the same brush as several ‘breakthrough’ video compression ‘technologies’ which did not live up to their claims. The most notorious of these, to Australians at least, was Adams Platform, but there have been plenty of others. According to one, albeit anonymous and undated web page, the MatrixView technology is little more than existing compression algorithms cobbled together.
It is understandable that press releases have traditionally contained only abstract results, like 3 times faster, 75% savings etc…
Same is true with them also:
SQZit uses a patent-pending compression technology, adaptive binary optimisation, to compress files up to 300 percent faster than current technologies, according to MatrixView.
“Performance results have shown that in image management, SQZit is able to gain savings of up to 40 percent on existing technology and can reduce storage needs by more than 75 percent,” he said in a statement.
Its fine with press releases, but when I can’t see concrete compression ratio and time comparison results on known and publicly available data sets on their website, it raises that “suspicion” bar a couple of notches higher (heck, there are no test results whatsoever).
They have blamed former employees saying that they had been seeking to undermine the company image. While this might be true, I am also not very impressed by them.
What kind of researchers don’t perform tests, and is publishing those results going to leak their IP? They claim patents on it anyway, so why the worry? And the low-road promotional tactics don’t help much either.
CEO, Noel Robertson, told iTWire:
“At this stage of its early commercial release, SQZit competes very favourably with Stuffit [a marketing leading file compression product] in the area of JPEG re-compression. However, we believe SQZit will quickly surpass anything currently available in the market due to continuing improvements in its performance and range of applications.”
I sure wish them luck, but how many times must a company repeat same mistakes before it learns.
September 7th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
They don’t have anything worth showing. So we don’t see any results. Simple
September 10th, 2006 at 1:48 am
Even if they have anything worth showing, they aren’t showing it good enough.
Another question left unanswered is that when they say “3 times faster, 40% savings”, which existing technology are they comparing it with?
October 24th, 2006 at 6:09 am
A path breaking algo is what is claimed - and all they come up as application is for “ultrasound” bilevel images?!?
They don’t provide a demo that enables anyone to test out performance - let alone test results etc.
I think that Arvind - the inventor should ensure that he puts up atleast a demo/ eval software to let users see what is possible by his claimed “invention”!
December 19th, 2006 at 1:57 pm
there full of poo