Nice little plug for MCRE in this month's Fortune as one of the coolest companies in the country.
***** July 7, 1997
Cool Companies, Part 2
Metacreations
Visual Computing Software
It's seven in the evening in the sleepy Southern California beach town of Carpinteria. While some of the locals are squeezing into wet suits to catch a few sunset waves, engineers Ben Weiss and Andrea Pessino are just beginning their workday at MetaCreations.
Ben and Andrea aren't vampires. That's just the way life is for employees who report to Kai Krause, chief design officer at MetaCreations, the product of a recent merger between two hot visual computing software companies: Fractal Design and MetaTools. "People are most creative when they're able to forget about the constraints of time, which I think working through the night does," explains Krause. "Plus, there are no distractions like ringing phones."
His method may seem mad, but it works. MetaTools' first product, an enhancement for Adobe Photoshop called Kai's Power Tools (KPT), is used by more than 50% of Photoshop devotees. The software enables graphic designers to add sophisticated special effects to their work, ranging from curling paper to scaly skin. KPT has been used to design everything from Issey Miyake clothing to CD covers for bands like Toad the Wet Sprocket.
Last year Krause's team produced a CD-ROM bestseller, the appropriately named Kai's Power GOO. The software turns computerized images and photos into virtual Silly Putty that users can manipulate for the pure amusement of seeing oddities like a leering Mona Lisa. The company's newest product, Kai's Photo Soap ($50), is designed to help anyone clean up photos for catalogues, greeting cards, websites, and more. It will go head to head with photo-editing bestsellers like Adobe PhotoDeluxe ($50), Microsoft Picture It! ($55), and MGI PhotoSuite ($50), which share in an $18 million market.
Taking on powerhouses like $786-million-a-year giant Adobe, MetaCreations is stepping into the big leagues of graphics software. Says CEO John Wilczak: "We want to corner the market on 2-D and 3-D visual computing." To that end, the company last December bought Real Time Geometry in Princeton, N.J. Real Time's Russian emigrant scientists are among the world's best 3-D graphics researchers (chief scientist Alexander Migdal was a quantum gravity theorist for the Soviet space program before moving to the U.S. in 1988). Seems MetaCreations has found a few more employees who have no problem leaving the surfboards at home. --Erin Davies
Metacreations Carpinteria, Calif. Founded 1992 Rev.: $62.3 million Employees: 300 Nasdaq: MCRE www.metacreations.com |