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Wednesday, 09 March 2005 |
MP3
developer yields royalty riches
International Herald Tribune - France
The sales literature is slick; the financial controllers tenacious;
the individual projects live and die by their profitability. As a result, income
has risen faster than at Siemens, DaimlerChryler, Lufthansa or SAP in the past
five years.
All of the essential ingredients one might expect of a successful German
enterprise that set a global standard: MP3, the digital audio compression format
on 150 million music players and almost every computer in the world.
But the organization that created the MP3 and is awarded about 500 patents per
year is not a company but a state-financed, nonprofit group: the
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a network of 58 institutes in Germany, one of more than
6,000 exhibitors at Cebit, the technology trade shownin Hannover, this year.
"At Fraunhofer, most of our research has to find an immediate application in
industry or it doesn't work," said Hans-Jörg Bullinger, president of the
institutes since 2002. "What's unusual is that we run things like a business,
and businesses, as you know, have to make a profit."
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