Pound Hill Software Announces MetaGrove for K4.

New Software Product Adds XMP Capabilities to K4 Publishing System, Facilitating the Writing and Reading of High-Fidelity Metadata

LOS ANGELES -- Pound Hill Software, a leading developer of metadata software tools, today announced MetaGrove for K4, a new software product that provides XMP metadata capabilities to users of SoftCare's popular K4 publishing system.

MetaGrove is the world's first software XMP toolset for Adobe Creative Suite. The toolset optimizes the capture and display of descriptive metadata to fuel digital workflows. Plug-ins are available for Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and InCopy - and now also to integrate with K4. Building on Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) open-source labeling technology, MetaGrove improves digital media workflows and allows repurposing of digital assets by making digital media files easier to describe and faster to find.

The K4 publishing system is integrated with Adobe InCopy, allowing newspaper, magazine and book publishers to manage the entire production process, including design and editorial workflow. Pound Hill Software also plans to expand their K4 Plug-in to support Adobe InDesign in their future releases. K4 is a product of SoftCare based in Hamburg, Germany, and is distributed exclusively in the U.S. by Managing Editor Inc. (MEI).

"K4 is a robust publishing system that can be deployed in conjunction with a number of Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions," said Chris Griffin, Pound Hill's Chief Technology Officer. "However, the product does not support XMP. As a SoftCare partner, we've been working closely with SoftCare, utilizing their powerful API to access K4 switch points and queues in order to integrate our metadata toolset with their publishing solution."

MetaGrove not only adds XMP functionality to K4, it also takes XMP to the next level by making it easier to define, capture and display the descriptive metadata that make digital media files more intelligent. "This enables more efficient digital asset management, including job processing, workflow automation and rights description," continued Griffin.

Pound Hill developed MetaGrove for K4 as a direct result of customer requests. "For example, a major New York multimedia company and a K4 user needed to inject their complete taxonomy directly into their digital assets, a task that could not be accomplished using K4's proprietary metadata implementation," said Jury Balta, Product Marketing Manager at Pound Hill. "By using our MetaGrove for InCopy plug-in, in conjunction with our new MetaGrove for K4 plug-in, the multimedia company can now easily repurpose digital access by searching on any of the thousands of keywords in their taxonomy."

About Pound Hill Software

Established in 2001, Pound Hill Software Inc. develops, markets and supports software tools that enhance the ability of digital media professionals to tag, identify and access today's growing diversity of rich media files, regardless of file format. The company's MetaGrove toolset enriches the ability to define, capture and display XMP metadata beyond the basic tools in the native authoring environment. Pound Hill is headquartered at 4085 E. La Palma Avenue, Suite L, Anaheim, California 92807. For more information, call 1-86-METADATA (1-866-382-3282) or visit www.poundhill.com.

Pound Hill and MetaGrove are trademarks of Pound Hill Software. All other trademarks belong to their owners.