Cache money: L.A. firm taps Russian roots for next-generation online archives.

SNAPSE Inc., a Los Angeles-based media and editing exchange system with Russian roots, is attempting to carve a niche for itself in the booming Internet archiving sector. What Snapse executives hope will separate it from the pack is the range of services that its Web site provides researchers. The firm owns patent-pending software that allows remote users to edit material directly on sites around the globe rather than being required to download media first. Clients can create, add, edit, and produce content access across a range of remote platforms including hand-held computers and phones.

"What we're allowing is the chance to go directly to the user, whether it's a kid, a teacher or a doctor," said Chief Executive J. Mitchell Johnson. At this point, however, the clients are more likely to be major corporations and media content producers. That's because the cost of the service--as high as $1,500 per online minute--is expensive.

"Our focus is business users," said Johnson. "For example, Intel has a program called World Ahead. Their objective is to train teachers and students how to use technology. Their access is to 35 countries."

The software from Snapse--an acronym for Significant Number of Applications, Pictures, and Sounds for Everybody--also facilitates media object licensing, e-commerce arrangements and allows media object owners to receive royalties in a manner similar to the ASCAP/BMI system developed for conventional radio stations.

Several major media firms are among the archives with which Snapse is working to provide content for researchers.

"The big content owners, like Getty Images, Corbis Photos and the British Broadcasting System are able to service these customers," said Johnson. Many of the customers using Snapse!s service are also media firms or independent producers, including documentary filmmakers or commercials creators. Snapse's leadership is trying to capitalize on that realm.

The Santa Monica office, run by Program Manager Dennis Bishop, is working to provide links for Snapse through contacts he developed while he was a vice president at HBO Pictures. He's working with the Directors Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America and the California Film Commission, as well as all of the Hollywood studios and TV production entities.

"Los Angeles is an important source of content and my being here can facilitate that," said Bishop. His goal is to provide film and TV companies with access to Snapse clients' archives, and by making the deal two-way, expand the companies archive base.

"We plan to increase it by signing up studios to allow us to use their content, just as we've doing deals with various other archives," Bishop said.

Movement in Moscow

In addition to Santa Monica, Snapse has offices in Austin, Texas; Berlin and Moscow, where the company came into being.

Johnson, who spoke for this article by phone from Moscow, recently sealed a deal to provide access to the State Film and Photo Archives' 42,000 films and million-plus photos, Snapse's largest single archive.

It was following his graduation from the film school at USC that Johnson began traveling to Russia in 1994 in a media co-venture with ABC News in New York. He was the architect and executive producer of a news magazine series based on "20-20" that aired all over the former Soviet Union. In 1996 he founded Abamedia LP, which eventually became the Russian government's trade representative for film and images.

While working with the Russian archive, Johnson said he developed an awareness of the potential of a media system that could go beyond data retrieval to editing capabilities. Armed with about $5 million in investment funding and several research grants, he founded Snapse in 2005.

Though Snapse's business model is built upon linking researchers with archives on a global basis, one of its early successes was built on local connections.

Earlier this year, Intel Technologies Inc., enlisted Snapse, with its access to the state archives, to help with its Teach to the Future Program for students in Russia.

"It is hard to think of a more meaningful use of technology in the classroom than an application that encourages students to connect with their families and community as part of the learning process," said Intel's head of the project, Yaroslav Bikhovsky.

Snapse's roster includes several executives with impressive credentials. Chief Operating and Marketing Officer Dave Evans co-founded Digital Voodoo in 1994. Chief Designer Charles Morpheus was a designer and digital artist for Icumedia Inc.; and Yuri Bukhshtab, Snapse's chief scientist, is head of the laboratory at Keldysh Institute of Advanced Mathematics at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

BY DAN COX

Staff Reporter