Elemental Technologies, Inc.

Infobox Company
company_name = Elemental Technologies, Inc.
company_
company_type = Private
foundation = 2006
location = Portland, Oregon (incorporated in Delaware) USA
key_people = Samuel S. Blackman, Chairman and CEO
Jesse J. Rosenzweig, CTO
Brian G. Lewis, Chief Architect
num_employees = 14 (2008)
industry = Video software
products = Media Converter
homepage = [http://www.elementaltechnologies.com/ elementaltechnologies.com]

Elemental Technologies, Inc. (ETI) is a software company headquartered in Portland, Oregon that specializes in providing massively parallel processing (MPP) solutions. Founded in August 2006, Elemental has focused on using the capabilities of graphics processing units (GPUs) to perform video encoding, decoding, transcoding, and pixel processing tasks on commodity hardware. [cite web|accessdate=2008-08-11|url=http://elementaltechnologies.com/how_it_works.php|title=Elemental Technologies - How it Works] The company has named this software platform RapiHD and uses it as the core technology for its first release, the Badaboom Media Converter.

History

Elemental was founded in 2006 by three engineers formerly of the semiconductor company Pixelworks: Chairman and CEO Sam Blackman, CTO Jesse Rosenzweig, and Chief Architect Brian Lewis. [cite web|accessdate=2008-08-11|url=http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2006_Oct_16/ai_n27037999|title=Pixelworks Invests in Elemental Technologies Inc. |publisher=BNET|date=2006-10-16] Doubling in size over the past year, Elemental moved its headquarters in July 2008 from Harrison Square to its [http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&mrt=all&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=107022878492469677434.0004548747f2dcf80e9a8&ll=45.510978,-122.681837&spn=0.02021,0.031071&z=15| current location] on SW Hall in downtown Portland.

Funding

Elemental received its initial investments in 2007 in the amount of $1.05 million from three angel funds: the Seattle Alliance of Angels, the Oregon Angel Fund, and the Bend Venture Conference. [cite web|accessdate=2008-08-11|url=http://blog.oregonlive.com/siliconforest/2007/12/elemental_technologies_lands_1.html|title=Elemental Technologies Lands $1M|publisher=Oregonlive.com|date=2007-12-14|author=Mike Rogoway] In July 2008, Elemental announced it had closed its first round of venture capital financing, receiving $5.5 million in investments from General Catalyst Partners of Boston, Massachusetts and Voyager Capital of Seattle, Washington.

Products

Badaboom Media Converter
On August 12, 2008, Elemental released the beta version of its Badaboom Media Converter in partnership with NVIDIA Corporation. Badaboom, which runs on the NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs, uses Elemental's RapiHD Video Platform to transcode video files from several formats, including MPEG1, MPEG2, H.264, WMV, VC-1, FLV, and RAW, into the H.264 format for devices such as the iPod, iPhone, and Sony PSP. The converter enables the user to transcode high-quality video 18 times faster than with CPU-only implementations. [cite web|accessdate=2008-08-12|url=http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1213610051114.html?_templateId=320|title=Graphics Evolves Beyond Gaming With New NVIDIA Geforce GTX 200 GPUs|publisher= [nvidia.com] |date=2008-06-16|author=Bryan Del Rizzo] The CUDA-enabled GPUs, which include the GeForce 8 series and above, Quadro and Tesla, provide several advantages over traditional general purpose GPUs, such as faster downloads and readbacks to and from the GPU, using the standard C language, and exposing a fast shared memory region.

RapiHD Accelerator for Adobe Premiere Pro
To be released in the fall of 2008, the RapiHD Accelerator for Adobe Premiere Pro will allow users to render Blu-ray quality AVC/H.264 files in real time as well as scrub multiple streams of AVCHD and HDV video while freeing up the CPU.

ee also

* AVCHD
* H.264/MPEG-4
* Device list

References

External links

* [http://www.elementaltechnologies.com// Elemental's official website]
* [http://www.badaboomit.com// Badaboom]