Interactive CD ROMs for Travel and Corporate Promotions

What better and more cost effective way is there to show your resort, live-aboard dive vessel or destination to prospective travellers? The CD ROM has proven to be the multimedia distribution medium of choice. Travel agents ask for them, travelers love them. The cost to produce and ship a CD ROM is much less than even videotapes and they can contain so much more information.

Electronic Catalogs, Books and Brochures

Publishers have been printing books, magazines and catalogs for many years. Chances are the need for the 4-color process is not going to go away in the near future. The wave of new media options has made a significant contribution to what is available as marketing collateral. The cost to print a 300 page full color reference manual can be from $100,000 - $200,000 depending upon quantity and where it is printed. That same reference manual can cost under $10,000 to publish on a CD ROM. Publishers should all be considering this new media as an alternative to and an addition to publishing books, manuals, catalogs and brochures.

The CD ROM offers so much more to the end user. You can add interactivity, video clips, audio and animation. The impact that this will add to your brochure is in the emotion it instills into the presentation and into the buyers decision.

Now the printing process takes place on the desktop. The user prints only the information they want hard copies of. The quality and speed of desktop laser and color printers has improved dramatically over the past several years, while the costs have come down to a fraction of what they cost even two year ago.

The Business Card CD ROM

The CD ROM Business Card holds up to 50 Mb of information on a disc the size and shape of a business card. They work just like any other CD on both Mac and PC. The contents can be a multi-media presentation, slide show, web site, catalog, or even video!

Stock Photography Catalogs and Images

Stock photography is always in demand and CD ROM is the best way to present and distribute your images to potential buyers. Today's technology allows us to provide a catalog of "thumbnail" images that can be viewed on a computer monitor, while technical information and keywords which can be searched and sorted. Once an image is located, the requester may simply open it, or if a fee or licensing is required, be prompted to contact the photographer to obtain a password to access the high resolution scans that can be included on the same disc.

Artists Portfolios

The Paintings of Wyland is a good example of how an artist would use a CD ROM to distribute and market images. On this particular CD it was important to Wyland to include scans of the paintings so the media could use the images for gallery publications. However, it was even more important that the general public could view the images on a computer monitor, but not be able to access the images for reproduction. We accomplished this by using encryption to lock the images until Wyland provided the proper pass key. Pass kays could only be obtained only by calling or writing to the artist.

The "Enhanced CD ROM" Combination of CD ROM & Audio Tracks

This format allows you to combine the computer presentation on CD ROM and audio tracks onto the same CD. Now your audience can not only view the interactive tour of your property, but they can take the same CD to their audio CD player to hear the music.

Copyright Protection and Information Security

It is possible to set-up special passwords to create a "for members only" section on the disk. For example, if you plan to distribute the CD to both the public and to your travel agents or magazines, you might possibly have some information you want to go to the agents, but not be accessed by the general public. This can be done with what is called encryption. Certain files can be "locked" out of the reach of the general public. These encrypted files will require a unique password, provided only by you, in order to be decrypted and used. Of course this is optional, but it does allow you to target several different types of viewers with one CD disk.

Fingerprinting is another technology that allows you to embed a digital code, undetectable by the human eye and without degradation to the image. This code is carried with the image even through the scanning and reproduction process. In the event you suspect your image has been copied without authorization, you can retrace the source of that particular image.