Census Technology

Intereting article on the improved data collection methods being used for the 2010 U.S. Census.

More on XPS

Don Fluckinger of the PDFZone does good work. Here's his latest on XPS and the effect it will have on the PDF market.

North Carolina Unhappy with ACS

Bad news for ACS - the State of North Carolina is unhapply with its efforts at setting up a system for processing Medicaid claims. At least I think it's a claims processing system - they call it a "billing system."

Ralph

Aurde, Inc.

Last month, we ran a brief in DIR discussing some of the ties that document conversion specialist Audre, Inc. had with convicted former California Congressman Duke Cunningham. This Vanity Fair article gets into it in more detail. Wow, it seems Duke's road to ruin began with quesionable conversion deals with Audre and later a company called ADCS. Check it out for yourself.

Ralph

Hummingbird-Open Text

I guess we should have seen this coming after Symphony's relatively modest offer to acquire Hummingbird a few weeks back. But Open Text appears to be after their Canadian counterpart again. If you remember, back in the day, the late-1990s, Open Text tried a hostile takeover of PC Docs, whose management ran away from them like its hair was on fire. PC Docs instead accepted from Hummingbird, which was not a direct competitor, like Open Text was. I seem to remember that maybe PC Docs executives felt they'd have a better chance of staying on board if they took Hummingbird's offer over Open Text's. Open Text, of course, then upped their offer and made one last gasp at acquiring PC Docs. Things got kind of nasty before PC Docs finally went to Hummingbird - and PC Docs management team ended up mostly being shown the door anyhow. Well, seven years later, guess what, Open Text is trying another guerilla takeover of PC Docs - this time bidding on the entire Hummingbird entity. Symphony is just a holidng company, so the Open Text acquisition probebly makes more sense. However, Open Text has offered Hummingbird shareholders a dollar more per share, or a 4% premium over the Symphony price, so it might not be worth it for Hummingbird to change suiters at this juncture. If Open Text gets offers somewhere in the 10% range, look for this deal to be a slam dunk.

Ralph

LizardTech Re-org

This is an odd story about LizardTech that recently came across the wire. It seems Carlos Domingo, who had been pretty much running the show in the U.S. has stepped upstairs to the position of chairman and is moving back to his home country of Spain. Didn't see LizardTech at AIIM this past year, after visiting with them the past couple years at the event. It seemed like things might have been going better after they won the New Yorker archive project. As a market for their mixed raster content DjVu format seemed finally to be developing. Hopefully this will continue under the new management. Of course improvements in PDF have someone marginlized the company's fringe file format.

Ralph