What’s New in Home Entertainment
Corrections or additions?
This article by Barbara Fox was prepared for the October 23, 2002 edition of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Life in the Fast Lane
Gravity Shift Solutions, a 15-year-old multimedia firm,
has moved from 182 Nassau Street to the home of Newton Interactive
at 2425 Pennington Road in Pennington. The combined firms are now
known as Newton Gravity Shift and have 50 people in 12,000 square
feet.
Peter Sandford and Robert Christensen, founders of Gravity Shift,
went to Rowan College, Class of ’83 and ’84 respectively. Christensen
had been a producer and director at Press Broadcasting Company in
Asbury Park, and Sandford had worked in Philadelphia at WTXF, Channel
29. They founded the firm as RAC Productions in 1987 and moved to
Nassau Street in 1998, then changed the name. Now Gravity Shift offers
technology-driven E-business applications for Web applications, interactive
programs, video, and event-based media.
“The majority of our work is web-based, but we are still doing
multimedia work,” says Sandford. Gravity Shift’s clients include
the Vanguard Group and Rutgers University, and it produced a CD-ROM
on diversity training for the state of New Jersey.
Debra Newton, founder of Newton Interactive, grew up in Dayton, Ohio,
and says she absorbed the entrepreneurial spirit from her father,
who had a tool and die company. “I lived and breathed having a
business and seeing the time and energy needed to grow and maintain
a company,” says Newton She dropped out of school and 12 years
later — by then single and with a seven-year-old child — went
back to college and graduated from St. Mary’s College in California.
She did meeting management for a large labor law firm, and then moved
east to do pharmaceutical marketing for Carter Wallace. She founded
her company as Newton Resource Group in 1991. Even before this merger,
it showed five-year growth of 479 percent and placed 465th on the
latest Inc. list of 500 fast growing companies.
Newton Interactive lists its core focus as digital media solutions,
specifically Internet-based technologies, particularly (though not
exclusively) for the pharmaceutical industry. Among Newton’s products
is a custom training and learning portal, Assessor, that combines
a test-taking system with web-based course content. This tool can
cut down the time it takes for teachers to grade tests.
“We had done some work with Debra recently, and the more we talked
the more it made sense for us to do this. It started taking shape
in the spring of this year,” says Sandford. “Newton Interactive
has concentrated on health care, and the combined entity offers a
stronger, more viable partnership within pharma. But it will also
leverage the solutions that we developed for the healthcare environment
outside of health care.”
“The merger gives us not only new market areas and expanded products
and services but it also lets us tap proven talent,” says Newton.
“Growth puts formidable demands on any management team, and a
CEO who is the `chief everything officer’ is not effective.
“To organically grow a company takes hours and hours of commitment,
and it can be difficult to find the right people,” she says. The
right person can be another entrepreneur, someone who has been in
the trenches and understands the risks and the time commitment required.
“Often,” says Newton, “our real work starts at 6 p.m.”
“When I talked to Pete and Bob in the spring about bringing the
two companies together, I was delighted to recognize that they are
on the same business wavelength as I am. Also we found our corporate
cultures to be very similar, which has made for a seamless merger.”
Everybody is doing what they did before. Christensen is leading the
creative, technology, and production services, and Sandford is taking
some of the sales management load from Newton. “There is little
duplication in the other staffing areas,” says Newton, “and
we didn’t have overlapping clients, so we can play off the strengths
of the two companies.”
Newton Gravity Shift, 2425 Pennington Road, Pennington08534. Debra Newton, CEO. 609-818-0025; fax, 609-818-0045. Homepage: www.newtongravityshift.comTop Of PageChameleon MovesDaniel P.T. Thomas has quadrupled his space with a moveof six people from 500 square feet at 947 Wall Street to Main Streetin Kingston. Though like most companies, his has been buffeted bythe winds of the recession, he is jubilant about his current expansion.He attributes it to the fact that his agency is in tune with whatclients need. “They want small, niche, specialist, and affordable,”he says. “They hear of us by word of mouth, and though we aresmall we are up against major agencies for big accounts.””Our strength is marketing communications in the widest senseof the world — electronic media, print, sales aids, detail aids,”he says. “Like many agencies we have learned our way into pharmaceutical.I’ve gotten into every big pharma company in the last year and amchipping away slowly. Places like that are ripe for the picking ifyou know what you are doing. They are all very conservative and theylove letting us loose.”The son of a British military officer who served as the Queen’s Chaplain,Thomas declined to take the ordained path — to go to the Britishmilitary academy at Sandhurst. Instead he went off on his own to London,found a job at Ketchum Advertising, and put himself through collegevia night school. When he moved to Princeton he was a vice presidentat QLM Marketing at Research Park, and he founded his own firm in1996. Now he has six employees and 2,000 square feet at his new location.His current work is a varied lot. It includes internal and externalnewsletters for Bristol-Myers Squibb, sampling and displays for theCoty’s “Move” fragrance to be used at teenage concerts, juiceboxes for Flemington-based Johanna Foods, and corporate redesign andadvertising for Techne, the Washington Road-based laboratory equipmentmaker.What’s missing in the market right now is “personality,” saysThomas, and that’s what he aims to supply.— Barbara FoxChameleon Marketing Inc., 4595 Route 27, Kingston08528- Daniel P.T. Thomas, president. 609-921-6588; fax, 609-921-6516.Home page: www.chameleon-inc.comTop Of PageName Change:Root to Princeton ImagingScholars and purists tend to cling to the paper copiesof their favorite journals. And why? Not just because they treasurethe boxed sets, but because the electronic versions don’t always renderthe true colors faithfully. If you are studying birds or tumors, youwant to be sure you are looking at the right shade of red.For the last 10 years Root Technologies has focused its business onconverting journals and other paper documents to electronic formsof all kinds. To represent its business focus, Root Technologies ischanging its name to Princeton Imaging. Its clients come from allindustries, but the company has a particular focus on scientific organizations.”We image documents for archival use or sometimes to Word, Excelor other electronic form for further use by our customers,” saysCEO Tom Johnson. Digitizing scientific journals, he says, is not somuch of a commodity business as you would think, because having todo the photos and getting the true colors really separates out theamateurs. “There are many tradeoffs involved in file size andquality, and we have technical edges over our competitors,” hesays, “because a lot of what we do is custom work, and if we needto we write our own software. Our competitors use off-the-shelf software,and when it can’t do what they are looking for, they are stuck.”National clients include AT&T, Lucent, Kraft, Playtex, Monsanto, andthe military. Lucent Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-MyersSquibb, and Merial are among the many Princeton-based scientific clients,and the firm also does litigation support for Herrick, Feinstein.For the Acoustical Society of America it made a 10 CD set of journals,dating to 1929, and it also did a large online library of mosquitostudies for the Smithsonian Institute. Available on the web are thelargest online collection of ornithological papers, the result of120 years of journals from three societies (elibrary.unm.edu/Condor/)and Rutgers’ Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities (harvest.rutgers.edu/projects/spectator/).Among Johnson’s more esoteric offerings is a 600 DPI face-up bookscanner so it can work with rare and valuable books. Other servicesinclude turnkey document archival and delivery systems, large formatscanning (engineering drawings up to E size), recovery of damageddatabase files or files specific to an outdated software, high volumedocument scanning up to 400 DPI, putting scanned documents on theweb with DjVu conversion, high volume Acrobat PDF conversion, andeven conversions to HTML. “Automatic HTML conversion tools doonly part of the job,” says Johnson. “We can convert spreadsheetfiles and even complex tables.”Johnson’s new web page (www.princetonimaging.com) has a helpfulglossary of document imaging terms for those who have always wonderedhow to tell a TIFF from a GIF, and he also explains some more unusualesoteric terms, such as “dithering” and “lossiness.”Some excerpts:Resolution : the number of dots per inch (DPI) that werestored during scanning. The greater the number, the greater the amountof visible detail, and the more space the image will occupy.This is why images that a company displays on its website are almostnever suitable for printing in any publication. Most images displayedon screen use from 72 to 100 DPI, but any common printer needs atleast 300 DPI.JPEG : image file format best suited for photographs. Itis not appropriate for text because it supports “lossiness,”which means it will throw away some detail to achieve better compression.TIFF (Tag Image File Format : standard format that incorporatesmultiple compression techniques, allowing the user to specify thebest format for a type of image, and that one file can contain multipleimages.GIF : file format used on the web that uses LZW compressionand is good for color and grayscale images. It is “lossless,”which means it will not compress as well as JPEG, but it will retainall of the image’s quality. In black and white it does not compressas well as GF.GF Compression : produces good results for black and whiteand is frequently used as an option in TIFF files for black and white.It is also used in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files.Skew : during printing or scanning the contents of a pageare almost never exactly vertical. De-skewing is a process where thecomputer detects and corrects the skew in an image file.Anti-Aliasing : smoothing curves and diagonal lines byadding pixels of intermediate shades or colors around the line.Dithering : adding more colors or shades of gray to anexisting image to improve the appearance of the image. Can be thoughtof as the inverse to quantization.Johnson’s father was an optical engineer, working on lasersand lenses, who also did computer work. Tom went to Kean College,Class of 1980, and the Stevens Institute of Technology, and then heworked for Bell Labs and BellCore. He opened the business in 1987in Middlesex as a generalized computer consulting firm, moving toResearch Park in 1996. His brother Gary joined the business two yearsago, and two other brothers also work in this eight-person business.”We definitely don’t want to grow a lot,” says Johnson. “Ourgoal is to look for the right kinds of projects and focus on whatwe do well — what is fun and interesting.”To herald the new name, the firm is issuing its own CD, the 1902 Searscatalog, complete with illustrations of funky sinks and quaint bathingsuits (www.PrincetonImaging.com/cdrom/sears/). “It is fun andinteresting, and it can be used as clip art — there are so manyfigures on every page,” says Johnson. The CD sells for $25 andships November 15. The next publication, at the end of the year, isa CD-ROM version of the famous 1911 Century Dictionary.Johnson offers some advice for the amateur who wants to put hard copyinto digital form. “Learn how to properly use a scanner,”says Johnson. “Make sure you understand the best kind of scanningand the best compression for your particular job. If you don’t dothat, you could end up with very large files that don’t look as goodas they could.”Princeton Imaging/ Root Technologies Inc., 14Wall Street, Princeton 08540. Thomas D. Johnson, project manager.609-430-1320; fax, 908-359-9250. Home page: www.PrincetonImaging.comTop Of PageWhat’s New in Home EntertainmentCall a spade a spade and a toy a toy. That’s what PaulCottingham thought when he renamed his company PHC Toys. Cottinghamsells, services, and installs home theaters — everything frommodest to grandiose. One customer has the equivalent of a $50,000drive-in theater in his back yard. “This is something people want,not what they need,” says Cottingham.Cottingham has moved his business from 1 Circle West in Penningtonto the Glen Roc Shopping Center. But don’t just stop by — makean appointment, or you are likely to find that he is out on the road.He markets his business by word of mouth and even in this recession,the calls keep coming in. He sells equipment direct from the manufacturer,anything from $500 to $250,000.Rentals are available for big screen outdoor parties. For one suchrental, a Halloween party, Cottingham played all the B movies —Bride of Frankenstein, War of the Worlds — and put up a temporarycardboard screen. “Our client, an attorney, liked it so much wefabricated a permanent powder coated screen for him.” Theowner can float on a raft in his swimming pool while viewing a 17-footscreen with Dolby digital surround sound.Cottingham has aspirations of opening a drive-in movie theater, completewith sushi and Italian food, but the economics are daunting. “Itseems as though Hollywood gets 95 percent of the door. But you cancharge for parking based on the fact that the land costs you money.Monday night football would be cool to have outside.”He offers tips to future owners of a surround-sound system at home:When prewiring, you of course need to think about placement of electricalswitches. But also decide where you will put the television, telephone,networking computers, nanny cams, and inside and outside speakers.”People finish the basement and sheet rock the ceiling, then callme and say they are ready,” says Cottingham. “I have to askthem how much they like that sheet rock.” To wire a home for fiberoptic after the sheet rock is up costs double.If you think you might want to install fancy wiring at some latertime, take pictures before the sheet rock goes up, to show where allthe wires and pipes are. Or call Cottingham to take the pictures.”Later on, we have a picture of the wall, cut a hole, and thewire is right there for you,” says Cottingham.He also does what could be called “prophylactic” wiring. “Ifwe wire 8 or 10 rooms for music and they say they don’t want telephoneor speakers in the garage, I just do it. Because sometimes you can’tget there again.””Some of the architects are starting to realize that they shouldget in touch with us in the planning stages,” he says, “becausequite often we will move a fireplace or a window because it is inthe wrong place for surround sound.”Cottingham’s father, formerly a mounted policeman in the West, hada Lawrence-based detective and insurance investigation agency. At40, he is married and has three school-age children. He was a managerat Sound Automotive for 10 years before going out on his own. Thoughhe was self-taught, certificate courses are now available throughthe Custom Electric Design and Installation Association.Most electricians hook up “black and white” wires, not fibers,says Cottingham, and they don’t do structured wiring for communicationsdata. “They do the high voltage 110 for the television sets andwe do the low voltage, 12 volts, for the LCD panels. You could practicallystick your tongue on our wire. We have put flat screen TVs near jacuzzisin the master bedroom.”Popular now: plasma screens and DLP digital light processor projectorsfor 120-inch screens. “We are doing a lot of media rooms —dedicated rooms for surround sound and family entertainment. The LCDtechnology is so good that you no longer need one of the giant boxeshanging from the ceiling.””The market is constantly changing,” says Cottingham. “Everyday there is something else you can have.”PHC Toys, 212 Scotch Road, Glen Roc Shopping Center,West Trenton 08628. Paul Cottingham, owner. 609-883-4477; fax, 609-883-2230.Home page: www.phctoys.comTop Of PageMillstone’s Young OwnerAt age 26, Tara Kolb has joined Mike Kendrick to buya printing business, the Millstone Group, at Research Park. Formerlya Minute Press franchise at the Princeton Shopping Center, the MillstoneGroup is a family business, founded 30 years ago by John and JoanEmmerick as Minute Press (no relation to the national franchise, MinutemanPress). The company does graphic design, marketing strategy, and designfor corporate, business-to-business and consumer clients.The team of Kolb and Kendrick is also a family business, because Kendrickis Kolb’s maiden name; Mike is her uncle on her mother’s side.”I’m a partner during the day and an uncle at night,” saysKendrick. He has had his own printing business, Kendrick Graphics,for seven years, and by partnering with his niece he acquires printingcapabilities plus the services of a staff designer and photographer.”I had agreements with a lot of different companies, but to haveit all `in house’ is nice,” says Kendrick.Kolb, 26, was just out of college when she was hired as art directorat the Millstone Group. “It was a great opportunity, and not eventwo years later John and Joan were mentioning retiring,” she says.”They groomed me to take over the company. They wanted to makesure it would run the same way they had run it for the past 30 years.They did a lot of traveling, and I would be two or three weeks bymyself, so it was a natural transition.” Other potential buyers,she believes, would probably have bought the firm for the client listand broken up the company.”Ever since I was little, I could copy anything you gave me,”says Kolb. Her father and grandfather worked for USX in Fairless Hills,as did Kendrick’s father. She graduated in 1998 from the Universityof the Arts in Philadelphia. While going to school, she was a designerat MetLife in the Carnegie Center, and she moved from that job tothe Millstone Group.She is expanding the company to add four-color and six-color printingand digital capabilities and is aligning it with Kendrick Graphics,which has contracts for printing for many of Philadelphia’s sportsteams.Her clients, which include schools and professional offices, havenot been seriously affected by the recession. “We will do design,photography, or printing for anybody who walks in. Not many placescan you find that all in one company,” she says. Sam Stia, onthe faculty at Mercer County Community College, takes care of thephotography.Kendrick grew up in Bristol and took a customer service job in theairline industry straight out of high school. When deregulation came,he worked at a family member’s packaging company and began his salescareer. After a stint at another company as marketing manager he wentinto the print brokerage business, working for Curtis 1000 as thePhiladelphia sales representative. “I thought I was going to retirethere but in 1995 there was a change in the company’s philosophy andI thought it was best to go out on my own.”He and his wife, who is also in the printing business, have two teenagechildren. “My wife is the one who talked me into going into myown business. I had had a number of offers from other printing companiesbut they were for starting up new territories. She said, `If you aregoing to do it for them, why don’t you do it for me.’”Millstone Group, 45 Wall Street, Research Park,Princeton 08540. Tara Kolb, president. 609-924-1502; fax, 609-921-7037.Top Of PageName ChangesPrinceton Multimedia Technologies company is changingits name to better reflect what it does — develop health and nutritionsoftware, including packages for research nutritionists. The new namewill be VioCare.”Vio is derived from the Latin word `vivo’ which means life,”says Rick Weiss, president, “and we combined it with `care’ tofocus on technology tools to support healthcare organizations, diseasemanagement, clinical trials, and clinical research, — throughelectronic health relationship management portals (EHRMs).”The firm is working with the Princeton Medical Center, the PrincetonRegional Health Department, and other community groups to providea website for the Lighten Up Princeton effort, which is in progressnow through December 17. “This project provides service to thecommunity and give us some exposure, and it starts building a naturalrelationship with a local hospital,” says Weiss, a graduate ofCarnegie Mellon (Class of 1980) with master’s degrees from PrincetonUniversity.One of Weiss’ four employees has spent most of his time for severalweeks on the community website, but this pro bono effort is actuallypart of his business plan, says Weiss, who works with research hospitalsaround the country. “Hospitals can use health portals like thisone to be the `glue’ between the patient and the doctor,” saysWeiss. “The website can deliver tools that the patient needs,and the individual has power over the data.” For instance, www.lightenupprinceton.comhas tools for calculating ideal weights and resting metabolism rates.It offers chat pages for exchanging recipe ideas and other weight-losingtips, and a tracking program.Another way to help doctors communicate with their patients can bethrough a pocket PC. From the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute,Weiss’ company has a $200,000 grant to help consumers track theirdiet on the pocket PC. He is working with Steven Heymsfield, a bodycomposition and obesity expert at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital. “Oursystem provides feedback, and the information can be uploaded to awebsite so the healthcare provider can see your records and send informationto you. Education on portion information, licensed from the U.S.D.A.,will be incorporated into the tracking program,” Weiss says.Princeton Multimedia Technologies Corp., 145 WitherspoonStreet, Princeton 08542. Rick Weiss, president. 609-497-4600; fax,609-497-0660.Top Of PageStock News:OrchidPosts New PlanOrchid BioSciences makes its payroll by using its existingtoolset, SNP genotyping services, to do clinical-quality geno-profiling.And though they may have the among best tools on the market now, thesetools are fast becoming out of date. So rather than spend lots ofmoney on continuing to develop the tools — and miss its promisedtarget of profitability by 2003 — Orchid announced earlier thismonth it would ditch the tool business and concentrate on its highgrowth service business, genotyping. It will sell its Orchid LifeSciences business unit.It also added a new person at the top, George Poste, as chairman,leaving Dale Pfoste as president and CEO. Both names are pronouncedthe same way, as in fence post.Orchid has a much publicized contract to do identity genomics forvictims of the World Trade Center, but it also works in the profitableareas of forensic, paternity, agriculture, and HLA testing for organtransplantation. Orchid’s GeneShield unit is working on ways for genomicknowledge to make medical care — diagnostics and healthcare —more appropriate for each individual.Pfost predicts revenues will reach $65 million this year. In the lastyear he trimmed the workforce from 700 to 540, and of those laid off,80 were in Princeton. About 100 people work on College Road now. Healso cut expenses by about $2 million per quarter. Nevertheless, thecompany’s stock is trading at 50 cents, compared to its high of $55in 2000, just after it went public.George Poste, 58, is the former president of research and developmentand chief science and technology officer at SmithKline Beecham. Hehas been a member of Orchid’s board of directors for two years. Hechairs the task force on defense against bioterrorism for the UnitedStates Department of Defense.A naturalized American citizen who was educated in England, Postehas a degree in veterinary medicine and a doctor’s degree in virologyfrom the University of Bristol. He has been associated with 29 successfuldrug and vaccine registrations in the United States and internationally.He is non-executive chairman of diaDexus, the joint venture in moleculardiagnostics between GlaxoSmithKline and Incyte Pharmaceuticals locatedin Santa Clara, CA, and non-executive chairman of Structural GenomiXin San Diego. He has published over 300 scientific papers and co-edited15 books, primarily in the fields of cancer research and drug delivery.In 1999 Poste retired from SmithKline Beecham, where he had been for20 years in such posts as chairman of R&D and chief science and technologyofficer. That year he was awarded the honor of Knight Commander ofthe Order of the British Empire, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth in 1999for services to the development of biosciences. He is now CEO ofHealth Technology Networks, a healthcare consulting group based inPhiladelphia and Arizona. It focuses on the genetics, computing, andother advanced technologies for healthcare R&D and Internet-basedsystems for healthcare delivery.Poste is expected to expand Orchid’s commercial applications of itsgeno-profiling technologies. “For Orchid, no individual couldbetter embody where we have been and where we are heading than GeorgePoste,” says Pfost. “George has been one of the most prescientleaders in the field of genomics, molecular diagnostics and pharmacogenetics— precisely the markets that represent Orchid’s future,” saysPfost.”I believe no other company is as well positioned to emerge asthe premier company in the use of geno-profiling to improve the diagnosis,classification, and treatment of disease and to drive the rationaluse of prescription medicines for optimum treatment outcomes,”says Poste.Orchid BioSciences Inc. (ORCH), 4390 Route 1 North,Princeton 08543. Dale R. Pfost Ph.D, president. 609-750-2200; fax,609-750-6402. Home page: www.orchid.comTop Of PageTech Who’s WhoJoe Alea is the new executive vice president of product developmentat University Square-based Princeton Softech (www.princetonsoftech.com).He comes from Concerto Software, a $100 million global provider ofenterprise and mission-critical customer interaction management (CIM)systems, He also worked at McKesson, Lockheed-Martin, and GouldComputers. Don Cohen, a co-founder of Princeton Softech, hasbeen promoted to be CTO and executive vice president of product integration.On December 1 James B.D. Palmer will replace Peter Ringrosewho resigned in July as head of the Pharmaceutical Research Instituteat the Route 206 offices of Bristol-Myers Squibb. The 49-year-oldcomes from GlaxoSmithKline, where he was senior vice president fornew product development. He has a medical degree from Aberdeen Universityand began at Glaxo in 1985.Top Of PageDeathsCharlotte D. Solomon , 54, on October 16. She was a programadministrator with Educational Testing Services.Carolyn E. Messerknecht , 39, on October 17, from injuriesreceived in an automobile accident. She was a product manager fora division of Siemens Medical Systems.Next StoryCorrections or additions?This page is published by PrincetonInfo.com— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.
