One chapter in the saga of Kodak's escape from bankruptcy has come to an end. The company announced today that it has completed the sale of its valuable imaging patents for $525 million to a group of Silicon Valley companies. The deal involves more than 1,100 patents related to the capturing, manipulating, and sharing of digital photographs.
Yesterday we shared some news courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that Kodak had received a generous bid for its patent patent portfolio of over $500M. This was good news for Kodak, seeing as $500M was the mark the company had to hit in order to receive $830M in exit financing that would play a crucial role in helping Kodak dig its way out of bankruptcy.
However, all we knew at the time was that the bid was being put forth by a "consortium of bidders" out of Silicon Valley. Well, as it turns out, that consortium is being led by none other than the unlikely team of Apple and Google.
EXIF data embedded in an image file can shed quite a bit of information about a photo, including how it was created and the owner of the copyright. It's useful, but can be easily stripped away. A new consortium led by three organizations (IPTC, 4A's, and ANA) is pushing to make metadata permanent.