A few comments to some of the conferences and vendor exhibitions we have participated in.
Following the acquisition by Enigma, Synex was represented in the Enigma booth as well as at the reception on Monday Dec. 6 where Enigma's CEO Jonathan Yaron outlined the future plans in a short speech. The pleasant evening was accompanied by the tunes of a jazz band.
The XML conference has grown sustantially: the vendor floor hosted roughly sixty booths.
The 1999 XML
Europe conference was held in the remote but beautiful Granada, located by the Sierra
Nevada and home to the Alhambra. The conference exhibition hosted a substantial number of
companies and contributed to make this event a worthwhile visit.
As usual, Synex exhibited in the Inso booth, showing Synex ViewPort version 2.1 alongside other Inso products such as DynaBase and Balise. The number of attendees was similar to previous years, though the location of the venue made for somewhat problematic and uncertain travel plans.
The Swedish SGML/XML User's Group's annual conference keeps growing. The success of last year's conference imposed a change of locale to Kista (a suburb of Stockholm), which would allow for more participants; the number of attendees was about 300, making this event rank second to XML Europe.
The Windy City surprised us with its fair weather. Despite the name
change to XML'98, it seems this year's conference was slower than earlier, perhaps due to
other on-going conferences and exhibitions?
The ViewPort highlights demonstrated in Chicago consisted of the prototype Windows CE implementation and demos of the upcoming version 2.1 features such as Unicode support, improved CGM level 3/4 graphics, and case-sensitive names for XML.
A quiet moment in the booth at XML'98
The Air Transport Association held its 1998 Fall TICC Week in Manchester, including a vendor exhibition on September 28-30 featuring about a dozen companies. Synex and Inso exhibited together, choosing the occasion to present for the first time publicly a prototype implementation of Synex ViewPort running on the Windows CE platform.
Birmingham and the Seybold/IPEX'98
exhibition welcomed the Inso contingent warmly, augmented for the occasion by Synex and newly acquired colleagues from
Bitstream regarding the MediaBank media
asset management system. Together, we did a smashing exhibition in well-visited
booths; the ViewPort news presented were version 2.1, featuring Unicode support, improved
CGM level 3/4 graphics, as well as case-sensitive names for XML.
The French capital welcomed the SGML/XML community with excellent weather
and ambiance. The conference held at the Sofitel Rive Gauche had a varied programme,
complemented by a well-visited vendor exhibition covering two and a half days. Synex
exhibited in the Inso booth, showing Synex ViewPort alongside other Inso products like
DynaBase and DynaText.
The SGML Sweden'98 conference held at
Berns' Salonger was as usual a leisurely affair with two days of solid programme, a
well-represented vendor exhibition, and lots of fun. We showed Synex ViewPort, which could
also be seen at work in over half of the other vendors' exhibits. The number of attendees
were about 180. For the first time, we also represented Inso's products through Inso's
acquisition of the company.
This conference marked the breakthrough of XML, as indicated by the name
change of the conference itself. At the Synex booth, we showed Synex ViewPort version 2,
release 12 featuring initial XML support. Benefiting from
the XML limelight, the newborn interest was reflected in the attendance and exhibition
which were larger and better than ever before, totaling roughly 1500 attendees.
Synex
Information President Hasse Haitto held the keynote at this SGML Open For Business
seminar, held jointly by the the
Belgian and
Luxembourgian Chapter of the International SGML Users' Group on November 5, 1997. Also
present was Itedo Software's CEO Dieter Weidenbrück,
explaining the CGM standard, its relation to SGML, and demonstrating the integration
between Synex ViewPort and the new IsoView technology.
For the second consecutive
year, Synex Information exhibited
at the annual SGML Asia/Pacific conference, held at Forum the Grace Hotel in
Sydney, Australia.
The conference was a success, but the weather could have been better—it rained for an entire week. Synex Information announced its cooperation with the German company ITEDO, creators of the popular ISODraw CGM editor. The integration of ViewPort and ISOView technology demonstrated new levels of text / graphics integration and linking, with all hyperlinks defined by SGML markup, even governing the behavior in cross-graphic hyperlinks.
As the previous year, Synex chose the European conference for a major announcement, pre-viewing version 2 of Synex ViewPort, featuring myriad enhancements to the flagship product.
In March, the Swedish SGML User's Group once again held its highly appreciated
conference at Berns' Salonger. The two-day conference exhibition attracted about 20
vendors, four of which demonstrated Synex ViewPort-based applications—new since last
year: SigmaLink from STEP Stürtz
Electronic Publishing GmbH, and Infraview
from Enator's Information Management business
unit.
In February, Documation'97 hosted a
three-day vendor exhibition at the Santa Clara Convention Center which we attended.
Documation attracts a bit more varied audience compared to the GCA-organized SGML conferences we normally participate in. The exhibition was good, and California weather in February is pretty much like Swedish summer.
The tenth anniversary of SGML was celebrated at the Hynes
Convention Center in Boston, in the third week of November. The two day vendor
exhibition was larger than ever before. The Synex booth was well visited, with visitors
treated to a tasty menu of sample applications highlighting
features of Synex ViewPort.
This time, we focused on encryption features and ViewPort's configurable entity management (see our White Paper on the subject, presented at the conference Poster session). Applications using Synex ViewPort could be seen e.g. in the Vicom Multimedia, Sörman Information and Citec Information Technology booths.
Sydney shone its kind sun upon us for most of this
September week. Our travelers are happy to bring you the following recommendations: Don't
miss the Lord Nelson Brewery, the Sydney Harbor Bridge, and the
Sydney Tower. If you're into eating, try Daniel's Steak House; the newly opened Planet
Hollywood is cool, as is the Sydney Hard Rock Cafe. The Art Gallery of New South Wales and
the Opera House are worth a visit too (it rained for two days) - did you know that the tiles of the Opera House come from Sweden? And yes, you can eat
kangaroo.
The conference, held at the Hyatt Regency near King's Cross (Robert G. Barrett has written a number of colorful books that will put you in the right mood for a visit) wasn't half bad either!
The Munich vendor exhibition attested to
the market breakthrough of Synex ViewPort—read all about it in the Seybold Report coverage!
See also the paper on Electronic Delivery Systems, Browsers, and Viewers delivered by Synex Information President Hasse Haitto.
In February, Synex Information exhibited
at the SGML Sweden '96 conference. A 23 vendor large trade show contributed in
making this event one of the most successful Swedish SGML conferences since the founding
of the Swedish SGML User's Group. No less than four new products built using Synex
ViewPort were presented by as many vendors.
Keynote speaker and Exoterica President John McFadden chats with Synex President Hasse Haitto.
At SGML'95, we demonstrated the Synex ViewPort Sample Tour, a collection of
ViewPort-based applications including the world's first SGML game! Synex Information
and Information Dimensions Scandinavia AB (IDS) issued a press release about the delivery of a database system to AMA (Arbejderbevagelsens
Media Archive) in Denmark.
The second international conference on HyTime was a treat—still a pretty small conference, but you could get a feel for how HyTime will be used. We participated in the informal table top demo and had a paper presentation: "Lessons learned from an implementor", which were some reflections from the HyTime support we built into Synex ViewPort (and made available to the general public through SoftQuad Panorama). Yuri Rubinsky of SoftQuad had a paper on how Panorama made it possible to combine HyTime addressing with URLs.
The initial effort of implementing HyTime support in SoftQuad Explorer made a
splash at the HyTime conference of the previous year, being the first end-user application
with HyTime functionality. It wasn't much really, but the excitement was tangible - HyTime
had arrived.
Synex ViewPort, the SGML/HyTime Browser Engine was announced at this
conference. It also became painfully clear that the SGML community has outgrown Gmunden.
See also the paper "SGML is indispensable: here's living
proof", by Steve Pepper of Falch Infotek and Hasse Haitto
of Synex Information.
Montreux by the lake Geneva shore was charming as always. We demonstrated Explorer; work on what would become known as Synex ViewPort was well underway, as we developed Panorama.
At Documation'94, Synex Information and SoftQuad International announced the distribution of SGML Darc under the marketing
name of SoftQuad Explorer.
Our first product, SGML Darc, was previewed at the SGML'93 table-top vendor exhibition.