Disks at centre of a burning business proposition

By ADAM GIFFORD

If they don't have a printer driver they need, most people will download it from the manufacturer's site - right?

Not so, says Allan Morton of Auckland firm Media Technology, which has built up a tidy business burning Hewlett Packard drivers to CD and delivering them overnight.

"They can download for free, but more than half the people prefer to pay to get a disk overnight," Morton said.

And not just HP drivers. Media Technology, which has become a listed company through a reverse takeover of the shell company Strathmore, is finding effective ways of delivering software in New Zealand and Australia for a wide range of companies.

"It's not just replication. We had to think about how these customers go to market," Morton said.

Take Sensis, Telstra Australia's directories subsidiary, which has put its Whereis map data into digital format for in-car navigation systems.

Morton said that when the opportunity arose to make the Whereis disks, the potential market for Sensis appeared to be a one-off sale to the 30,000 Australians with in-car navigation.

"We thought there was an ongoing business in this, but how do you update the maps? For Sensis, the money is in the data, but they had no mechanism to track the customer - the customer is owned by the car retailer or the aftermarket, not the people who own the map data."

Working with Sensis senior product manager Arthur Constantinou, Media Technology built a fulfilment system to reach the 50 per cent of BMW, Lexus or Mercedes owners shown by test-marketing to be willing to update their in-car navigation data each year.

When a customer places an order on the Whereis website, the information is sent to both Whereis and Media Technology, which burns, packs and sends the A$345 DVD.

Updating the data on the in-car system is important because it is used not just for plotting the route from A to B, but for finding the nearest place to park or the best motorway exit - and that can change from month to month.

While in-car navigation is now limited to top-end marques, Toyota is talking about putting systems in its new Corollas.

"It is not inconceivable in a few years we could have a million maps out there," Morton said.

Media Technology's fulfilment processes change for each customer, so it built its own back-end systems rather than buy packaged e-commerce software.

Morton said such packages contained more features than the company needed, and did not address some of its unique requirements.

Instead, it takes the Visio planning documents developed during consultation with customers and exports the business rules into websites created around Microsoft Biztalk Server.

The money is processed on the customers' sites or ones they specify, leaving Media Technology to burn, pack and send the disks.

A keen student of Moore's Law, which governs the relationship between price and storage capacity, Morton is not afraid disks will succumb to broadband any time soon, "just because for $1 you can store and distribute 5 gigabytes. You can't get that off the net for that price".

Media Technology started out as Software Images, putting data on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks.

As each new digital replication standard has emerged, it has invested in the technology to meet likely demand.

"I used to draw digital convergence diagrams, and say, 'The next industry to emerge will be games'. Then I said next is the telecommunications industry, and we made millions of floppy disks and then CDs for companies like Voyager and Xtra," said Morton.

"People said movies have too much data. I said 'just wait,' and next minute they turn up."

He is picking the next move will be replicating data in bulk onto SD (Secure Digital) flash memory cards, once they become cheaper.

Media Technology