Montreal Tech Watch

Warren from Techvibes met a team from Toon Boom this week at MacWorld, as they launched a new product called Flip Boom:

The company was demoing one of its latest products, Flip Boom, an animation program targeted at children, at Macworld Expo in San Francisco this week.

“There’s only a finite number of studios making animation features, even though that number has grown substantially over the years, but we’ve seen 40 percent growth in the consumer market,” Danick said.

That market includes not only children’s software but educational programs or individuals and schools. Danick also said that Toon Boom tries to cover the spectrum, with programs such as Storyboard and Studio 4 for intermediate users, and Toon Boom Digital Pro for high-end productions.

“We’re 100 percent certified and tested on Macs. And if you to Apple’s website, you’ll see we’re available for download right off their site,” he said.

As I see it, Toon Boom is now trying to reach mass market, with a product that is priced very aggressively. They have also released recently a version of Toon Boom for the “average joe”, called Toon Boom studio, and I think it’s the product that accounts for 40% of their growth, as Danick says.

Another software which was launched at MacWorld this week was a new version of LightSpeed, a Point-Of-Sale system for mac computers, which has now an iPhone interface and works also better with Leopard. The key new feature was however a new desktop touchscreen interface, said to work with touchscreen-enabled iMacs and displays by TrollTouch. I was not aware that Apple had iMacs that had touchscreens, nevertheless, this is a great addition for LightSpeed.