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Soft Silicon

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Commodore (retd.) Anand Khandekar, chairman of PACE Soft Silicon, who

formerly headed Motorola's Software Services in Bangalore, looks like a modern

day Robinson Crusoe. No wonder he has his extremely capable (Wo)man Friday,

Professor Jaya Panvalkar, the CTO who oversees the state-of-the-art

software-based multimedia applications the company develops for different mobile

devices. Besides the development center in Pune, the company also has offices in

Dublin and Cambridge and came into existence in 2000 with senior people from

CirrusLogic, Motorola, Symbian, Cambridge Silicon Radio and Accenture. The

pecuniary impetus was provided by the lead investor IIUL (International

Investment & Underwriting Limited), the investment arm of Dermot Desmond,

who closed three rounds of funding in June 2000, November 2001 and January 2004

respectively.

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The company's flagship product is SoftCorder, a new class of application

that turns PDAs and Smartphones into camcorders and allows users to share video

clips with other mobile devices and PCs via e-mail or MMS. Its other products

range from a video-conferencing platform, a media processing to optimized codecs

for different protocols like ARM, OMAP and Xscale. PACE Soft has already filed

for ten US patents for its various multi-media products that may be used in

camcorders, media players, video conferencing, PDAs, pocket PCs, digital

cameras, smartphones.

Khandekar says that the company sells its products on the Handango website.

Pace is already a platinum partner of Symbian, a consortium of the world's top

mobile companies, Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. And it rides piggyback on Intel

and Texas Instruments to go to OEMs.

Panvalkar stresses on the USP of the PACE solution. "Since the code size

a mobile phone can carry is limited, the challenge is greater. We have devised

an algorithm which can give 95% quality with 2% computing. Thus, the images and

high-motion sequences on your mobile phone will not be jerky since the errors

are concealed and, most important, you do not lose out on battery power."

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