Todd Lawrence Carter

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Todd Lawrence Carter
Todd Lawrence Carter.jpg
Carter speaking at the 2017 Digital Asset Symposium at MOMA in New York City on May 5, 2017
Born
NationalityAmerican
OccupationTechnology entrepreneur
Known for Tagasauris

Todd Lawrence Carter is an American technology entrepreneur. He is best known as the CEO [1] of the New York City-based technology startup company Tagasauris that he co-founded in December 2010.

Contents

Background and education

Carter was born in Trenton, New Jersey and grew up in a household of inventors. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] His family moved to Perkasie, Pennsylvania and later to Orchard Lake, Michigan where he finished West Bloomfield High School. Carter attended the Universities of Michigan and Massachusetts where he majored in international relations and the University of Dijon (France).

Career

AXS

Carter began work on his vision of hypermedia around 1990 as a product manager for Berkeley, CA-based AXS. AXS developed some of the earliest software for image databases for Apple's Macintosh computer and Carter was instrumental in the commercialization of these products, NewPhotoAccess, PhotoProcessor and OnlineReader within the media and publishing industry. In 1992, AXS introduced its File Concatenation Protocol ("AFCP) for embedded metadata which was subsequently adopted by Reuters, Agence France Presse and Hasselblad Electronic Imagining for application on the receiving end of their digital photo wire services and products.

Carter served as the technology development Director of PressLink, Inc., a Washington, D.C. area based Knight-Ridder digital content distribution company. PressLink aggregated digital information graphics and images from a network of more than 40 information providers and made them available online on an à la carte basis to newsrooms in more than 300 cities in 70 countries worldwide.

In order to virtually integrate PressLink's vast online databases with networked Macintosh computers that were common in the newsrooms of the day and enhance the ability to create a better newspaper in a shorter amount of time, Carter formed a collaboration with an ex-Apple Advanced Technology Group (ATG) software engineer, Dwayne Bowman to develop PressLink Explorer. In October 1994, Carter and Bowman launched PressLink Explorer, [8] a mixed media search and retrieval system that allowed users to rapidly browse, search and access downloaded material while working within other applications, such as Adobe Photoshop or QuarkXPress.

PressLink Explorer consumed and persisted metadata using the AXS AFCP standard with a custom Claris XNTD to convert AFCP to plaintext for indexing via an AppleSearch server. Carter and Bowman envisioned archives of newspapers as information sources in a distributed, revenue-generating on-line system, electronically accessible other papers, other businesses and the public. This vision was in-part informed by an ATG client application known as Rosebud, [9] which in combination with an AppleSearch server, delivered a personalized newspaper where stories were collected into a multi-column display that looked like a real newspaper, along with a personalized banner across the top.

BusyBox

Inspired by the potential of networked multimedia and the release of NCSA Mosaic, first browser to display images inline with text instead of displaying images in a separate window, [10] Carter formed his first technology startup company, San Francisco, CA-based, BusyBox which he co-founded in 1995 and served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President up through the company's initial public offering in 2000.

While at BusyBox Carter pioneered the development of digital media technologies for still image and video distributed over the Internet. At that time, the digital media market included photographs, video and music content. From 1995 to mid 1999, Carter and BusyBox developed the technologies and e-commerce functionality needed to catalog, display, preview, sell and download digital photographs for some of the largest and most active online digital photography libraries. Beginning in 1998, intense consolidation within the stock photography market resulted in a rapidly shrinking pool of potential new customers for BusyBox's stock photography products and services.

In late 1998, Carter realized that emerging broadband infrastructure would allow digitized media of all types to become available to not only the professional market but also to the emerging, desktop consumer market. During 1999, Carter lead BusyBox to use its knowledge and experience in building and managing high-volume, transaction photo library Web sites to develop an end-to-end (preview to download to purchase) Internet solution for video. Only this time, BusyBox would own the video content thereby expanding its revenue channels from licensing technology and managing sites to wholly owned, royalty-free (unrestricted) content sales, thereby providing an opportunity for greater profit margins.

Carter represented BusyBox as a delegate to ISO/IEC 15938 responsible for the MPEG-7 multimedia content description interface standard.

Carter served as vice president of Internet products and strategy of plain sight systems, during which time he co-founded Owl Multimedia Inc. In late 2007 Owl Multimedia and Creative Commons launched Owl Music Search. [11] [12]

Tagasauris

More than a decade of experience with multimedia on the Web produced insights that led Carter to the creation of Tagasauris, Inc. Tagasauris provided media annotation services using a combination of crowdsourcing, gamification, machine intelligence, and semantics to create and discover key tags for characteristics of the media object that is being annotated. [13]

On Apr 25, 2012, Carter addressed the UC Berkeley School of Information Dean's Lecture Series, Empowering Libraries, Archives, and Museums with Crowd-sourced Human Computation and Linked Open Data [14]

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language</span> XML-based markup language for multimedia presentations

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language ) is a World Wide Web Consortium recommended Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language to describe multimedia presentations. It defines markup for timing, layout, animations, visual transitions, and media embedding, among other things. SMIL allows presenting media items such as text, images, video, audio, links to other SMIL presentations, and files from multiple web servers. SMIL markup is written in XML, and has similarities to HTML.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fractal compression</span> Compression method for digital images

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QuickTime VR is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewing of objects photographed from multiple angles. It functions as plugins for the QuickTime Player and for the QuickTime Web browser plugin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaleida Labs</span> Defunct American software company (1991–1996)

Kaleida Labs, Inc., formed in 1991 to produce the multimedia cross-platform Kaleida Media Player and the object oriented scripting language ScriptX that was used to program its behavior. The system was aimed at the production of interactive CD ROM titles, an area of major effort in the early 1990s. When the system was delivered in 1994, it had relatively high system requirements and memory footprint, and lacked a native PowerPC version on the Mac platform. Around the same time, rapid changes in the market, especially the expansion of the World Wide Web and the Java programming language, pushed the interactive CD market into a niche role. The Kaleida platform failed to gain significant traction and the company was closed in 1996.

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Monsoon Multimedia was a company that manufactured, developed and sold video streaming and place-shifting devices that allowed consumers to view and control live television on PCs connected to a local (home) network or remotely from a broadband-connected PC or mobile phone. It was one of 5 major transformations initiated by Prabhat Jain, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur with 5 undergraduate and post graduate engineering degrees from Cal Berkeley and Univ of Vienna, Austria. On the even of Cisco acquiring Monsoon in 2017, EchoStar, the new parent of Sling sued Monsoon for patent infringement, having obtained confidential information about the date of the acquisition by Cisco from a Monsoon employee under murky circumstances. Monsoon settled the lawsuit by agreeing not to sell its products in the USA simply because it did not have the legal funds to fight mighty Echostar's legal maneuvers. EchoStar thus successfully removed its only competitor from the market place. This meant Monsoon's death knell.

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MicrosoftEncarta is a discontinued digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also available online via annual subscription, although later articles could also be viewed for free online with advertisements. By 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive content, timelines, maps, atlases and homework tools.

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Verbum was an early personal computer and computer art magazine focusing on interactive art and computer graphics. It was edited and published from 1986 until 1991 by Michael Gosney. It, along with Info 64, was one of the first periodicals to be entirely based on desktop publishing techniques. Referring to itself as a "journal of personal computer aesthetics," Verbum was notable for placing more emphasis on creative aspects of its subject matter in contrast to the overwhelmingly technical content of other publications.

References

  1. ". Humanities and Technology Unite, Tiffany Crawford Published Nov 20, 2012
  2. . Grinding machine, Mitchell Carter Published Jun 16, 1936
  3. . Device and method for trenchless replacement of underground pipe, Robert Ward Carter, Robert Williams Carter Published Oct 23, 2003
  4. . Device and method for trenchless replacement of underground pipe, Robert Ward Carter, Robert Williams Carter Published Feb 25, 2003
  5. . Device and method for trenchless replacement of underground pipe, Robert Ward Carter, Robert Williams Carter Published Sept 24, 2004
  6. . Trenchless water pipe replacement device and method, Robert Ward Carter, Robert Williams Carter Published Oct 5, 2004
  7. . Method and apparatus for replacement of underground pipe, Robert Ward Carter, Robert Williams Carter Published Dec 16, 2004
  8. Knight Ridder Inc – ‘10-K’ for 12/25/94
  9. The Virtual Community:Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
  10. Berners-Lee, Tim. "What were the first WWW browsers?". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 2010-06-15.
  11. / Owl - Find music through music Paul Lamere Published Nov 24, 2007
  12. Creative Commons and Owl Multimedia Introduce the World’s First “True Music Search Engine” Eric Steuer Published Dec 7, 2007
  13. Bud Mathaisel and Galen Gruman. Getting past the hype of gamification PWC Technology Forecast (Fall 2012).
  14. Todd Carter " UC Berkeley School of Information (April 25, 2012)