NICTA spins off compression technology

Stuart Corner
Friday, 18 June 2010 12:34

Business IT - Technology

NICTA has spun-off another piece of its intellectual property into a start-up company, Cohesive Data, that will initially offer its technology to US mobile carriers.

The core technology to be commercialised by Cohesive Data is a data compression technology for XML files that reduces their size to about one tenth and enables the compressed data to be indexed, searched and updated - without first needing to be expanded.

NICTA has already commercialised the technology in the form of an iPhone app, TiniWiki, (www.tiniwiki.com) that compresses the entire content of Wikipedia to a size that enables it to be stored, searched and updated on the phone, reported by iTWire in May 2009.
Cohesive's aim in promoting the technology to US mobile operators is that they will deploy it to enable users to download a wide range of content, such as news feeds, that will be kept up to date on the phone, generally by downloading when the phone is in a WiFi zone, or at off peak times.

NICTA has provided seed funding and will take equity in the company in return for providing software and intellectual property.

Dr Raymond Wong, who led the NICTA project team that developed the software, will join Cohesive as its CTO along with three members of his team. R&D will continue to be undertaken in Australia from new offices in the Australian Technology Park in Redfern.

Cohesive is NICTA's fifth spin-off since its formation in 2002, the others being Audinate, 7-ip, Monitoring Division and Open Kernel Labs. OK Labs has develop a micro kernel OS for cellphones that has been installed in 500 million devices worldwide.

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