Vantrix

Vantrix was founded in 2004 by Allan Benchetrit and Jean Mayrand . It is the result of the evolution of two successive spin-off companies: Sipro-Lab and Voice Age Networks.
History
In 1994, Sipro Lab Telecom together with University of Sherbrooke, created a research center that started to do fundamental research around speech processing in Voice over IP, the company’s original focus. Sipro Lab created a number of codecs and patents in speech processing that led it to become one of the most successful patent companies in North America in telecommunications. Sipro Lab patents found their way into 15 worldwide standards for Voice over IP. The company, which still exists today, received most of its revenue from royalties. Anyone who uses their technology is indirectly paying royalties to Sipro Lab. This collaboration has made University of Sherbrooke the second richest University from patents in NA, behind UCLA. http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/13955/
VoiceAge: Sipro Lab was successful in the IP Telephony world, and just before 2000 they saw a growing opportunity in the wireless world. They created a company called VoiceAge to accomplish in the wireless world what they had done in the voice world: VoiceAge did exactly the same things as Sipro Lab, turning out codecs, patents and fundamental research around media processing in the wireless telephony market. They created over 500 patents, and their technology is deployed in over 1 billion phones and 500 million PCs worldwide. They generated large amounts of revenue from these patent activities.
Early network operators: In 2001 a new opportunity presented itself. The wireless value-added services market was predominately led by 2 regions in the world. Nordic European countries were leading in advanced technology. Japan was leading in introducing new services. Japan was the first to sell products like ringtones, wallpapers and applications for mobile devices and created a whole ecosystem to sell good and services wirelessly. Most network operators at that point were only selling voice telephony services and just starting to commercialize SMS. NTT DoCoMo was arguably the most advanced of the telecom operators, the worldwide leader in the introduction of new value-added services.
The Challenge That Led To The Solution: NTT DoCoMo asked VoiceAge to develop an application that would allow media to be created for compatibility across all handsets. NTT’s apparent need stemmed from working with a large number of content providers, a large number of handsets and content that was not compatible with all the handsets. NTT required content providers to submit a specific type of content in a specific format in order for NTT to offer the services and content to their customer base. So NTT asked VoiceAge to create software to enable content providers to format content in a way that would be most effective for distribution to DIFFERENT wireless handsets.
The MMS Solution: A new division was created within VoiceAge to build a software product that would take any type of media content in any format and adapt that content for optimized mobile delivery, in a way that was appropriate for each and every handset. This platform has evolved over time. It first launched for the purpose of optimizing multimedia messaging content; MMS, the transport of MMS, optimizing and adapting MMS specifically for each and every content piece. The basic problem is that every handset has different capabilities and variables in screen size, color, pitch, resolution, etc. and what is needed is the ability to adapt any content either coming from the Internet or captured in one handset and deliver it to another handset. After VoiceAge produced the software, they continued pursuing the research and patent activity.
Creation of Vantrix: In 2004, the need for more attention on the software side became apparent, and they created Vantrix. Vantrix is basically the product of that technology and its implementation in the wireless world. Vantrix specializes in multimedia content adaptation and optimization for converged multimedia services.
Vantrix and VoiceAge have been influenced standards in wireless media processing. For example, Vantrix chaired the OMA-STI transcoding working group at OMA, Open Mobile Alliance, and was responsible for creating the standards now being used to adapt content for transport through multimedia messaging. As well, Vantrix is part of the dotMobi executive advisory group, chairing the dotMobi multimedia working group where, once again, Vantrix is responsible for defining how multimedia content should be processed and exchanged over wireless networks.

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