Ad eXpress, a supplier of digital advertising transmission services, continues to operate.

"This action permits the assets of the company to be sold to new investors," Warren "Bud" Hornsby, the company's director of technology, said in a prepared statement.

The company expected to complete its restructuring "shortly," Hornsby said. A new investor group has secured a court-approved management agreement, he said, and the new group "has met all short-term financial needs."

Company co-founder Hornsby said that William Rilling, the president and the other co-founder, left Ad eXpress in July. The new investor group will choose a new president during the restructuring.

"Our business future has never been so positive," said Hornsby. "The July 14 filing settled several months of uncertainty. It is strictly business as normal and we have a terrific future ahead of us. The court process is now fundamentally routine."

Rilling, the owner of a Cincinnati-based advertising agency, worked with Hornsby, a computer consultant, to develop the Ad eXpress ad delivery system, which uses the CompuServe network to distribute advertising electronically.

All the intellectual property rights of the Hyphen PostScript Level 2 raster image processor have been assigned by the British receiver and Hyphen's Italian founder, Gianni Smaniotto, to a start-up called HyWay Ltd. of Egham, Surrey, England.

The downfall of Hyphen, which created the first PostScript "clone" RIP fast enough to image a newspaper page on deadline, probably started in 1992 when Smaniotto forced out the founders of the British and U.S. companies, Richard Patterson and Malcolm McGrory.

Patterson and his research and development staff in England wrote the PostScript interpreting software, while McGrory sold the product in North America. HyWay executives say there are now more than 3000 North American sites using Hyphen software.

Patterson and McGrory each started consulting and integration firms on either side of the Atlantic in 1993 and last year merged the two companies to make Cascade Systems of Norwich, England and Andover, Mass.

Cascade, which has developed element-tracking software and a newspaper archive, has had major investments from a variety of sources, including Adobe Ventures, a subsidiary of Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

Smaniotto's group in Bologna, Italy, developed a PC-based editorial front-end that has met with little success outside of Italy. Observers said Smaniotto's desire to succeed in the editorial front-end business caused him to lose focus on Hyphen's core competency of PostScript RIPs.

HyWay Ltd. is run by David Trumpess, a former managing director of PageSet and Berthold UK who also held senior management positions with Intergraph and Monotype.

HyWay's new operations director is Paul Foster, who had been managing director of Hyphen Ltd. The research and development team will be led by Mike Scrutton, who had held a similar role at Hyphen Ltd.

The new company will be represented in the United States by Mark Brown, who is vice president of OEM sales, with an office in Acton, Mass.

-- dmc

Ad Express,
(513) 528-1119;
HyWay Ltd.,
(508) 263-9368.

Bit bucket ...
Executives, chief and otherwise: A raft of new executives adorns the new offices of System Integrators Inc. of Sacramento. Erika Williams has joined SII as chief operating officer; Williams spent 17 years with Amdahl Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif., where she was senior vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Storage Systems division (a $350 million business). ... New SII chief financial officer is James Williams; he'd been vice president, finance and administration, at Visx Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. ... And Septimus Kwong is the new executive director of SII's publishing solutions division, a new group that will handle the more complex issues of integrating SII products into metropolitan newspaper environments. Kwong was with Electronic Data Systems for the last four years, where he was an implementation manager overseeing a team of 45 systems engineers; he'd been with McDonnell Douglas Systems Integration Co. previously. ... Let us not forget the new CEO at Integrierte Systeme Grafische Industrie (ISGI, which seems to be pronounced "isgee") of Eschborn, Germany: Danny Chapchal. Following his successful NEXPO '95 turn (see Page 3), Chapchal converted his agreement with Siemens-Nixdorf (the parent company of ISGI) from a consultancy to a chairmanship.

New media mavens: At InfiNet of Norfolk, Va. (a joint venture of Knight-Ridder and Landmark Communciations that provides both Internet access services along with Web development), Bob Gilbert has been named executive vice president. Gilbert, a 19-year veteran of Knight-Ridder, had most recently been director of strategic initiatives for the company, helping set up the Destination Florida electronic travel magazine and laying some of the foundation for Mercury Center in San Jose, Calif. In previous lives, Gilbert was a real newspaper editor, having served as assistant managing editor of the Miami Herald as well as manager of publishing systems at corporate. ... At Access Atlanta, the on-line effort by the Journal and Constitution, David Scott has been named vice president, Internet, for Cox Enterprises Inc.; Scott had been the publisher of Access Atlanta. Taking Scott's publisher's job (with the added responsibility of developing other on-line products for the paper) is Michael Gordon, who had been the service's managing editor (he'd been the print paper's AME for the Sunday editions). ... At TV Guide, the executive editor of TV Guide Online will be Scott Donaton, who had been executive editor of interactive and new media for Advertising Age magazine. ... At CompuServe's JForum (all about things journalistic), Teresa Mears will serve as moderator of print journalism discussion areas; she has been in the newspaper business for 18 years, most recently with the Los Angeles Times. Also at the JForum, George Garrigues will become moderator of a new discussion area called "The Editor's Desk," which will serve as a forum for copy editors worldwide. Garrigues has worked as an editor and reporter for 38 years, including stints at the New Haven Register in Connecticut, the Bergen County Record in New Jersey and Vancouver Sun in Canada, as well as at the Los Angeles Times. ...

Back to Florida: Having worked in Florida in the '60s and '70s, Clark Lambert must have known what he was getting into last month when he elected to accept the job of data services director at the St. Petersburg Times. As an IBM sales representative to Nasa at Cape Canaveral and later as an executive at the Miami Herald and Knight-Ridder corporate, Lambert must have gotten used to the heat and bugs. Most recently, Lambert has been with the Kansas City Star, where he had been director of information management, VP of information management, VP of new technology and staff adviser to the Star's Electronic Media Division. ...

Confabs: The System Integrators Systems Users Group will hold its annual fall session in corn country Sept. 10-13 at the Des Moines Marriott. To SIIgn up, check with Barry Abisch at (914) 694-5094. ... The Information Superhighway Summit will be held Sept. 11-14 in Santa Clara, Calif. Case studies, discussion of policy and infrastructure, and tutorials will supplement the exhibition; check out their "no hype" claim by calling (508) 879-6700 (or the Web page at http://www.idgwec.com). ... Multimedia Expo West and Internet San Francisco -- titled "On-line and On the Web" -- will be Sept. 12-14 in San Francisco. Speakers include Philip Monego Sr., (president and CEO of Yahoo! Corp.), David Pool (executive vice president of CompuServe) and Michael Rogers (managing editor of Newsweek Interactive). Didn't seem to be a Web page, but you can call at (212) 226-4141 for more information. ... The New York Press Association convention and trade show is Sept. 15-16 in Lake George, N.Y.; call (518) 464-6483 for details. ... The Online Developers Conference II ("Blueprints for the Post-Web World") will be Sept. 19-21 in San Francisco. Speakers in the opening session include Ed Bennett (chief of Prodigy), Michael Kolowich (prexy of AT&T Interchange), Ted Leonsis (prexy of America Online), Robert Massey (chief of CompuServe) and Russell Siegelman (GM of Microsoft Network), and that panel would almost be worth the price of admission alone. For the developing information, call (212) 780-6060. ... The National Newspaper Association's annual meeting and trade show is Sept. 20-23 in St. Paul, Minn. Conference sessions include seminars on "Low Cost Editorial Color," "Electronic Pre-Press," "New Media: Facts, Fallacies and Finding the Cash Flow," and "How Your Newsroom Staff Can Make Use of the Internet." For more information, call the NNA at (703) 907-7900. ... The Quark XPress Conference is Sept. 21-22 in Orlando; call (206) 285-0305 for the quirks. ... NetWorld and Interop -- the place where many heard the word "Internet" for the first time -- is Sept. 25-29 in Atlanta; call (415) 478-6900 to network with the organizers. ... Seybold San Francisco -- with thousands of attendees and hundreds of exhibitors -- washes up on the shores of the Bay Sept. 26-29. A special track on newspaper and new media is scheduled; call the Softbank folks at (415) 478-6900. ...

Errors & Omissions: Because of the hurly-burly of NEXPO, our man George Powell misunderstood a couple of issues about the Associated Press' ComicSEND, which he covered in the last issue ("Hiring outside companies to handle weather, stocks, comics"). He came to the erroneous conclusion that AP ComicSEND required extensive user intervention before pages could be printed. Executives at the AP say their service can be completely automated but also offers a manual option. The news cooperative says that AP ComicSEND delivers paginated comics pages, customized for each newspaper. AP says it maintains a template for each paper, gathers the appropriate comics from the various syndicates, places them in the templates and delivers one week's worth of files, via AP's satellite network or posted on a bulletin board, depending upon the receiving equipment at each newspaper site. Executives at the wire service say that if newspapers wish to edit, they can access the pages in EPS format, apply folio, then merge them with the rest of the newspaper. Many papers asked the AP to offer this flexibility so they could retain editorial control, the executives say. AP ComicSEND staff claim that, even with these optional manual steps, their service is "the easiest to use of them all." We regret these misunderstandings. ... #

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.