| [26/07/2000] |
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| Commercial use of satellite data |
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| caatoosee, Astrium and LBBW establish Stratobyte, a strategic joint venture |
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Stuttgart-based Stratobyte AG has now opened its doors for business. The strategic joint venture between caatoosee, the specialist for net business solutions, and Europe's new space corporation Astrium as well as the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg is aimed at linking satellite data with information systems to create new media products.
By establishing Stratobyte AG the joint venture partners have put their money on the growing importance of the link between geo-referenced data and information retrieval on mobile platforms, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), mobile communications, navigation systems and car PCs. Astrium supplies visual and navigation data from global observation satellites which is then fed into network solutions. In future, the new route information services provided by Stratobyte AG should be able to supply highly realistic 3D graphics that enable corporate and private customers from all over Europe to work out online where they are at any given moment.
caatoosee and Astrium each has a 40% share in Stratobyte AG, with the remaining 20% being held by the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. Guido Alt, founder and managing director of caatoosee GmbH, says that the commercial potential of Stratobyte products was not the only reason for his company's investment: "In future, satellite data will also be incorporated into caatoosee networks, so that we'll be seeing a whole lot of new features on our products." Stratobyte is a perfect addition to caatoosee's investment portfolio, which is primarily based on platform-independent information and transaction systems for electronic commerce. |
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For Dr Klaus Enßlin, managing director of Astrium GmbH, Stratobyte represents "a further achievement in the process of commercializing satellite-based global observation systems and opening them up to a wide range of customers". At LBBW executive officer Reinhold Schreiner sees the re-focused investment banking policy of his organization as one of the strategic reasons for buying into Stratobyte: "We now direct most of our efforts towards medium-sized businesses. The new industries in Baden-Württemberg and the surrounding area are just the kind of objects we want to invest in. So our involvement with Stratobyte is completely in line with this strategy."
For the past four years the Stuttgart-based caatoosee has been providing tailor-made net business solutions that link companies, people and markets with one other. The company employs around 240 staff at 11 sites in Europe and the USA. Today 'caa-tou-see', originally the name of an Indian chief, stands for a rapidly expanding corporation with many years' experience in its core business of networking, software development and content management.
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