Panasonic and Picsel Tie Up For SD Memory Cards

Matsushita Electric, best known for its Panasonic-brand electronics and communications products, and Picsel Technologies, a pioneering provider of embedded software, today announced that the two companies entered into a licensing agreement to embed Picsel Browser and Picsel File Viewer on Panasonic SD Memory Card products. Under the agreement, Panasonic will globally market the Picsel PoweredTM SD Memory Cards, which will greatly enhance the Internet Browsing and File Viewing capabilities of mobile information devices.

“Our partnership with Picsel makes their advanced software technology available even more widely for mobile information/communication devices using SD Cards, which is now the most popular format of flash memory cards. With the 614 SD Association member companies (as of July, 2003) and 880 SD Card applied products worldwide (as of March, 2003), there is a wide range of advanced mobile equipments for Picsel Browser and Picsel File Viewer to be embedded, such as smart phones, PDAs and car navigation systems. As a leading supplier of SD Memory Card products, I am confident that Panasonic can enhance the customer’s value of their technology products with the SD Card,” said Shigeru Omori, Director of Matsushita’s Corporate Industrial Sales & Marketing Division.

“This venture with Matsushita highlights the scalable and flexibility nature of Picsel solutions, which now introduce new and unique content distribution channels for hardware manufacturers and network operators”, said Imran Khand, Picsel Chief Executive Officer. “Our ubiquitous content delivery platform is fast becoming the content platform of choice for the mobile industry, delivering unprecedented levels of rich content to the mobile user”.

Picsel’s technology allows mobile device users the freedom to utilise any form of digital content in a seamless and highly interactive mobile user environment. A revolutionary content enabling platform, Picsel supports the following digital formats: Video (MPEG compatible, plus other Industry standards), the Microsoft Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDF, HTML (and mHTML), Flash, Plain Text and Standard Image formats– all without content re-engineering or source applications residing on the device.

Developed specifically for resource-constrained devices, Picsel’s content delivery platform utilises minimal processor and memory footprints to deliver a revolutionary mobile user experience. Picsel applications can also be loaded onto a wide range of devices and platforms, pre or post device production– and are fully scalable and extensible to meet the specific requirements of client demand and device design.