Latitude buys Wanadu for its PowerPoint-Flash technology

Latitude Communications, known for its MeetingPlace Web conferencing application, Thursday announced an agreement to acquire Wanadu, a developer of Flash-based content creation and delivery products. 

MeetingPlace includes all the standard Web collaboration tools -- presentations, white boarding, instant messaging, document sharing -- as well as integrated audio. Wanadu brings to the table iCreate, a product that converts Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to XML then Macromedia Flash to provide a rich multimedia experience. It also sells iConference, a clientless Web conferencing tool. 

“When you think about what people do with conferences, the majority just use PowerPoint. It’s the medium for knowledge exchange,” says Wanadu CEO George Bolanos, who spent much of his career at Netscape Communications, prior to launching Wanadu in 2000.

Unlike PowerPoint presentations converted to GIF and JPEG files for use on the Web, Flash PowerPoints retain all the original hyperlinks, fonts, colors and animations. “When you use GIF and JPEG, you dumb it down, lose the intelligence,” Bolanos says.

One of PowerPoint’s capabilities is to incorporate interactive Flash objects. Wanadu’s technology, called Wanadu Smart Objects, lets you retain those Flash objects, and connect them to back end database-driven systems. By creating a Smart Object that talks to SAP or Siebel, for instance, you enable data functions associated with the back end functions. This allows users to make changes to Flash PowerPoint presentations in real time, enhancing online collaboration. 

“This is what business integrated conferencing is all about,” Bolanos says. “The capability is there now, but nobody’s doing it yet.” 

Latitude, which is publicly held with revenue of $40 million, will acquire Wanadu’s assets in exchange for an undisclosed amount of cash and a percentage of future revenue from sales of Wanadu products in 2003.  The deal is expected to close by early next month.

"This will keep Latitude in a good strong position while Microsoft thinks through the Placeware purchase," says Eliot Gold, president of TeleSpan Publishing, a teleconference market research and consulting firm. "We don't expect Microsoft to have a fully featured offering using Placeware for another two to three years."