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The Huntsville Times Page B7 and 10 June 20, 2000 Phoenix rides ‘Wave of the Future" ’Multimedia firm adds 45 jobs to do online training courses for government and schools By James McWilliams Cole Smith, CEO of Phoenix Multimedia, looks over a Web design of Kidsconnect.com. In the background, Nuo-nuo Xu works on another online project. 
Phoenix Multimedia is hiring 45 graphics-production workers to deal with a rush of new business that could give the company $15 million in revenue this year, according to company founder Cole Smith. The Huntsville Company produces educational, interactive videos for online distribution. Smith calls Phoenix a “digital assembly line” in which information from education experts is turned into video, audio and text, made interactive, and sold online to schools, businesses and government agencies that need to teach or train people. The U.S. Labor Department has agreed to buy 60 online-training courses developed by Phoenix, said Smith. Phoenix has developed a 15-hour, interactive course on Alabama history that is scheduled to be taught at Calhoun Community College, and Phoenix is developing a similar course on anatomy for the school, said Amy Seaton, production manager at Phoenix. Calhoun history instructor Crawford King said he has been impressed by the part of the history course he has seen. Teaching online is “the wave of the future…the rage,” said King, adding that schools that don’t offer online courses will be left behind by schools that do. “One company has committed to deliver us 500,000 students in three states,” said Smith. Phoenix gets revenue for each student who uses an online course. Phoenix’s products allow people to learn at their own pace from home said Seaton. The products free businesses from the expense and lost productivity time that come from having workers lead training and the products can even free those workers from having to discuss topics they would rather avoid, said Seaton. “Many people don’t want to lecture on sexual harassment, so we created a course to deal with it,” said Seaton. Since Smith started Phoenix in 1997, the company has developed 230 educational courses for various clients, and Smith said he expects to have 500 courses available by the end of the year. “I enjoy the challenge of doing something new, doing something creative,” said Smith. “I’m excited to come to work each day.” Smith graduated from East Tennessee State University with a degree I business finance, and he spent his first years in the business world as an analyst. At MCI, he got a job in marketing and found he enjoyed creative work. So, Smith spent eight years as co-owner of a video-production company in Memphis, he said. At that company, City Productions, Smith produced 50 videocassette titles for libraries and schools across the country, he said. City productions reached $ millions in annual revenue before Smith decided he wanted to start his own business in digital and interactive video, he said. He moved to Huntsville because of the local technology base that could support his ideas. His first two years in North Alabama Smith continued developing traditional video titles, including cassettes abut U.S. Presidents and First Ladies. He used to profit from those years to fund research and development related to a new, patent-pending technology for putting interactive video on the Internet. The R&D spending left Phoenix without a profit in 1999, but the company is set-to be profitable again this year, thanks to many pending contracts with clients planning to use Phoenix’s technology and online content, Smith said. Three Hollywood movie studios are considering using Phoenix’s online video-streaming technology, said Phoenix spokeswoman Stephanie Ferree. Phoenix is “a front-runner in streaming technology on the Internet,” said engineer Brad Vick of Huntsville’s Davidson enterprise LLC. He said interactive features in Phoenix’s technology set it apart from competing products. Davidson is working with Phoenix to put the technology in a training course for the Defense Department. Phoenix is finishing production of the first 30 half-hour courses the U.S. Labor Department wants, after six intense weeks of writing, recording and editing, said Smith. The next 30 courses will be developed the same way, under the same type of tight deadline. The Labor Department courses are on topics as diverse as business writing, customer-service skills and the federal budgeting process, said Seaton. After the Labor Department buys all 60 courses, Phoenix will be free to see them to other clients, said Smith. Phoenix lets anyone who connects to an Internet site buy a course with a credit card and immediately take courses online, Smith said. Phoenix has 82 employees and plans to hire 45 production workers. Phoenix employees portray their company as a fun place to work, where the creative staff dresses casually and doesn’t mind putting in unpaid overtime to finish projects quickly. Skills are more important than credentials for people seeking production jobs, said Seaton. “Some of our people are self-taught,” said Seaton. “I’ve picked up employees from the computer-graphics aisle at Books-A-Million after conversations. I don’t care where they get (skills), so long as they can do the work.”
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