Company Name

NewTek, Inc.

Address

8200 IH-10 West Suite 900 San Antonio, TX, 78230
Additional office in San Francisco

Telephone

(210) 370-8000 / (800) 843-8934

Fax

(210) 370-8001

Year Founded

1985

Senior Management

• Tim Jenison - Chairman & CEO
• Donetta Colboch - Executive VP sales and Marketing
• SteveDoubleday - CFO
• PK Katbamna - VP Sales
• Brad Peebler - VP Marketing

Employees

85

Company Highlights

• Introduced DigiView for the Amiga platform in 1986
• Shipped Video Toaster in 1990 for Amiga
• Launched Lightwave 3D in 1995 for all major platforms
• In March 1998 shipped Inspire * In August 1998 ship Aura
• In August, 1999 shipped Video Toaster for NT

Product

LightWave 3D

Product Overview

LightWave 3D, now on version 6.0 has a number of new features:

• Radiosity and caustics rendering
• a 160-bit IEEE floating-point rendering pipeline
• sub-pixel displacement rendering for the creation of realistic volumetric surfaces such as water, clouds and gels with incredible precision and speed;
• advanced HyperVoxels for direct ray tracing of volumetric surfaces
• a volumetric lighting model

Character animation tools called IntelligEntities, which include:

• Skelegons are a new type of entity that appear to behave like traditional 3D bones but consist of a new type of polygon. They are saved as part of the object so that a character always has an intact skeleton. As modifications are made to a character the bone structure is automatically updated.
• Endomorphs allow the change of expression, mood, or action by training a single model.
• Multi-meshes embed multiple layers of geometry into a single object.
  

Key Features

• HyperVoxels is LightWave 3D's proprietary rendering technology
• Multi-threaded rendering
• Steamer Shader for refractions and reflections of the volumetric effect
• Support for OpenGL, Direct 3D (Win 95 only), QuickTime 3.0 (Intel and PowerMac only), and Render GL 3.0
• LightWave 3D image filters to process Photoshop filters
• NetRender support plug-in, which allows users to automatically pack up a scene and securely transfer the data to Asset Factory (a division of NewTek), where the scene will be rendered and returned to the user for a reasonable fee.
• SDK enhancements
  

Pricing

$2,495

Platforms

Windows95, NT, Unix, Mac 

Product Strengths

LightWave 3D's major strength is that it provides a solid set of animation tools at one of the lowest price points of the high-end professional animation package. The latest character animation tools and game development features were incorporated to enhance workflow methods, but introduce new techniques for content creation in film/video and game development productions.

Company Positioning

NewTek continues to be viewed as a solid price/performance tool vendor for the broadcast community. With a two pronged strategy, NewTek will provide product convergence to integrate its products, but also advanced software that concentrates on it's individual market. NewTek remains one of the last independent animation tool vendors left in this space. It has had to fight a few battles to maintain its position, but as a result the company has remained very dedicated to its efforts.
In recent months the company has focused its efforts on stronger positioning, globalization, branding and messaging.

Product Positioning

LightWave is strongly positioned within the broadcast space and the company continues to focus on bringing the technology to more game developers. Thanks to a strong distribution partner, they have had ample success penetrating the Japanese market.

Key Partnerships

Dell, Intergraph, IBM, Apple, , Intel, Kaydara, Ascension

Competitive Position

The price/performance model that NewTek has always paid attention to has enabled more many artists to create professional quality animation. As a result, NewTek has a dedicated user base which it prides itself on.
They are sometimes viewed as the underdog of the animation market by their competitors, but that only seems to help perpetuate the company's appeal in attracting customers.

• NewTek is a privately held company and detailed financials are not available
• Estimated revenue for 1999: $15 to $25 million
  

Digital Video

Video Toaster for NT

Paint/Effects/Compositing

Aura

Web 2d/3d Graphics, Print, multimedia

Inspire 3D