Way back in the digital Dark Ages of the early 1990s, some of my colleagues left Aldus, a digital publishing pioneer, to found a company called MetaBridge. Their goal was to develop a “cross-media” publishing platform that would enable content owners and publishers to readily adapt content for optimal display across multiple resolutions and aspect ratios. They foresaw a time when digital content would be delivered to many different devices and readers, proliferating well beyond the early PCs and Macs that shaped our early thinking about one-to-one and one-to-many communications across a digital network.
Alas, MetaBridge’s founders were almost two decades ahead of their time. Had the iPhone, Kindle, Nook, netbooks, smartphones and “magazine-friendly” tablet computers been on the market, the folks at MetaBridge would have had a fabulous business. Instead they suffered the business fate of visionaries who are way out in front of the market. The company’s IP and technology assets were acquired by others, and the company disappeared from view.
Let’s hope there are equivalent tools on the market in 2010, so content doesn’t have to be hand-crafted for adaptation across multiple devices with widely varying screens and performance characteristics. Otherwise, we’ll be looking at a scenario that ties content to specific display devices, forcing consumers to make trade-offs between devices based on content preferences. Except for the device manufacturers, no one likes those lock-in strategies.
