Another major area that Future Group used its foresight to invest in, as an augmentation to its IT services, was New Media. This uses digital media and computer technology to create innovative and interactive instructional and presentation materials for delivery through all forms of computer-enhanced communication, such as CD, DVD, computer animation, interactive multimedia presentations, and the internet.
i. Multimedia Production Future Group has an excellent team of illustrators, cartoonists, and graphic artists with expertise in designing and creating multimedia. For over a decade they have make full use of all the very latest technology to develop animations, cartoons, interactive games for mobile phones, and multimedia web designs and software. The success of their skills is evidenced by the fact that the group now includes one of the leading multimedia software companies producing educational software for children.
The Future Group portfolio is now increasing to cover other development and media services, such as programming, animating, and artistic styling IT outsourcing services; pre-production and production services; e-learning applications; interactive sales tools; and software demos. Other fields that Future Group has recently moved its multimedia production efforts into are television, magazines, and advertising, where it has been able to utilize its skills and expertise to a greater advantage.
ii. Broadcasting As broadcasting becomes more technical and is now involving IT to a greater extent than ever before, it was obviously an area that a farsighted holding company like Future Group needed to be involved in. Internet broadcasting, digital radio and television, podcasting, and satellite programming were the prime areas of focus for its expertise and innovative design and engineering skills.
iii. Publishing Hard-copy publications still carry a superior cachet over e-publications, not only in the academic world, but also in many other sectors of the publishing world; Future Group therefore decided to maintain their investments in this area. The majority of the group’s hard-copy publications are heavily designed, technical textbooks and scientific journals for the following publishing segments: STM (Scientific, Technical, and Medical), children books, magazines, legal, and reference manuals and encyclopedias. Other segments will be added to these in the near future.
Having said that however, Future Group has not neglected e-publishing, on the contrary, it has specialized in large-scale conversion of documents from their original medium, e.g. books, journals, newspapers, conference proceedings, and large-scale corporate conversions, to virtually any digital format, including writing or modifying a DTD (Document Type Definition), and content preparation for electronic distribution and the web by conversion to structured formats, such as XML, SGML, and HTML.
iv. Designing Designing for media, and particularly for new media where stable practices have yet to be established, is an area that Future Group excels in. Its designers create original media products combining aspects of media technology, cognitive science, and aesthetics that are relevant to each individual object of design.
Its media designers are highly qualified and skilled art and design professionals, who make innovative and creative decisions about the format and content of communications media, based upon the target community and the genre of the media. The range of products that they work on can be anything from scientific research papers to romance novels, publicity posters, video games, web pages, action-adventure movies, and encyclopedias.
