Actimagine/Mobiclip
Actimagine was established in March 2003[3] by engineers Eric Bécourt, Alexandre Delattre, Laurent Hiriart, Jérôme Larrieu, and Sylvain Quendez, and CEO André Pagnac.[4] Despite being headquartered in Paris, Actimagine operated as a US company, with offices in Tokyo and Singapore.[5]
The company's patented product was the Mobiclip codec, which provided high video quality with low battery consumption. Actimagine entered the market as an alternative to Java programming for mobile. Developers could save time by developing in Flash, then converting to mobile with Mobiclip.[6]
It first licensed video compression technologies to Nintendo in 2004 in order to deliver up to 90 minutes of TV-like video on 32MB cartridges for the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS.[7] In 2005, Nintendo further integrated the technology into the company's development kits to support in-game video sequences. The first games to include this technology were 2005's Jump Super Stars and 2006's Metroid Prime Hunters.[8][9] Fisher-Price also licensed Actimagine's video codec and software vector graphics renderer for its Pixter electronic device.[10]
In April 2006, Actimagine raised €3 million in equity financing from US venture capital firm GRP Partners. This first round of institutional fund raising enabled Actimagine to accelerate its business development in the US and Japan.[11][5] In October, Adobe acquired Actimagine's vector graphics technology and incorporated it into Flash Lite.[12][13]
At the end of 2006, the company officially launched its patented video codec, named Mobiclip.[14][15] In 2007, Actimagine opened an office in California.[16][17][18]
In 2008, the company launched Mobiclip.com as a web-to-mobile video platform[19][20] and released the first application delivering live TV on the iPhone, a year before Apple.[21][22] In October 2009, Al Jazeera launched a mobile app powered by Mobiclip that provided high quality live viewing of the news channel in English and Arabic.[23] For the Nintendo 3DS, the company created a 3D video codec and developed software to help calibrate its camera.[1]
Sale to Nintendo
In October 2011, Mobiclip was acquired by Nintendo.[24][25] The team was later renamed Nintendo European Research & Development, or "NERD."[1]
NERD developed a new emulator for 2016's NES Classic Edition.[26] It also worked on the 2017 Super NES Classic Edition and was instrumental in emulating the original console's Super-FX chip for games like Star Fox, Yoshi’s Island, and the previously unreleased Star Fox 2.[27] In 2017, the United States branch was merged with Nintendo Technology Development.[28]
