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Iacta came together in 1994 as a multimedia project team to produce the interactive version of Discovery Channel's Carrier: Fortress at Sea. As the project was completed in late 1995, we recognized that a form of interactive television was about to develop from the popularization of the Internet, and we shifted our focus to address it.
Today, Iacta LLC consists of a core team who works with all aspects of ITV service development. We are joined by a number of regular contractors, colleagues and very good friends who help us understand what users want from the Internet and interactive TV experience.
Laura Buddine
Brian Bock
Laura Buddine has been involved in the development of interactive products, services and programming for television delivery since 1985.
As founder and CEO of Tiger Media, Inc., from 1986 - 1992, she produced the first multimedia CD-ROM for many television settop platforms including CD-I, Commodore CDTV, Tandy VIS, and also for a number of multimedia computer systems including the Fujitsu FM Towns (first US multimedia CD-ROM on Japanese market, 1989 Best Hit Software winner for Japan), Tandy 2500XL, Sun SPARC, and one of the first products for the Microsoft MPC. Tiger Media also pioneered in platform-independent development and produced the CATS cross-platform development system and the award-winning (Sun World Product of the Year) CatsMeow, a high-level "drag and drop" interactive authoring system for Sun SPARC. Tiger Media was purchased by Aimtech in 1993.
Laura also has worked as a consultant on several ITV trials, designed the Thomson "ThomCat" multimedia settop box (1985) that became Thomson's CD-I player, and also designed the Commodore CDTV (designed 1987, launched 1991). She is the author of Building Applications with Cornerstone (Infocom, 1986), co-author of The Brady Guide to CD-ROM (Prentice-Hall, 1987), and scriptwriter for the video training series Knowledge Engineering: The Key to Expert Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1987). She has served as Director of Marketing for Micro D. Inc. (now Ingram Micro), Group Product Manager for Letterflex Systems Group of WR Grace, and Veterinary Product Manager for Beecham Laboratories (now SmithKline-Beecham). Her prior experience includes twelve years in local affiliate television and advertising agencies as creative director, producer, copywriter, account executive, on-air talent, and broadcast engineer. She serves on the Organizing Committee for the Aspen Technology Summit.
Brian Bock is Net4TV's user manager and editor of Net4TV Voice. He is responsible for WebTV user relations as well as the WebTV user writers and editors for the magazine. A WebTV user since 1996, Brian's prior experience is in GIS, print publication design and editing for advertising and corporate communications.
Iacta has several additional team members involved in producing, programming and engineering, art, user management and research, a number of programming and content creation contractors and more than thirty WebTV user volunteers creating content and assisting in outreach and user management.
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