24 Hours of Le Mans Drives Millions of Worldwide Fans to the Web with the Help of Canto Cumulus
LE MANS, France & SAN FRANCISCO--June 14, 2002--Canto, the global leader in digital asset management solutions, today announced that ACO (Automobile Club de L'Ouest), organizer of the world-famous 24 Hours of Le Mans and other motorsport events, has selected Canto Cumulus 5.5 Workgroup Edition to organize and publish digital photographs of the 24 Hours of Le Mans race to its millions of worldwide fans via the official Le Mans web site, www.lemans.org. Canto also announced that ACO has chosen Cumulus to manage its extensive collection of tens of thousands of motorsports photographs and related documents that the organization uses year round to promote its global events and resell for merchandising purposes.
Before, during and after the event, ACO staff photographers will capture thousands of digital images of the race, cars and drivers. Images will be downloaded directly into Cumulus, which will automatically extract metadata that the cameras associate with each image. To increase the ease of searching for and identifying images, additional keyword information will also be added, using the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) Subject Reference System, which Cumulus fully supports.
ACO's web development team will then use Cumulus to quickly and easily find the images they want to publish to the Photos section of the 24 Hours of Le Mans web site. Once the images have been selected, a custom Visual Basic script that Canto developed to integrate with ACO's web application will be used to automatically place the images in the site's page templates, ready to go live. ACO expects 7-10 million hits to its site per day over the duration of the race weekend.
"Over the course of the event we will amass nearly 20,000 photographs which we need to have quick, reliable access to for a wide variety of reasons," said Nicolas Cousseau, photography manager of Automobile Club de L'Ouest. "Cumulus provides the scalable, enterprise-class performance that we need in order to manage a rapidly growing catalog of that size that we will use not only for this event but in our promotional efforts in the years to come. Furthermore, by customizing the application in order to rapidly publish images to our web site, Canto has given us the ability to reach out in a very meaningful way to our worldwide audience, giving them a reason to come and return again and again to our site."
After the race, Canto will continue to work with ACO to maximize the value of their digital assets by creating and hosting two custom web access sites that will be completely integrated with the 24 Hours of Le Mans site. The first site, geared to general public, will use Canto's optional Web Publisher module to allow fans to search for and place orders for physical copies of their favorite racing images via an integrated e-commerce engine and shopping cart. The second site, which will be accessible only to members of the media, will also utilize Web Publisher and allow authorized professional to search for and download free digital images to be used for promotional purposes. Both sites are expected to be live within two weeks after the event.
"24 Hours of Le Mans is one of the marquee racing events in the world," said Pierre Saint Michel, managing director, Canto France. "We are pleased to be `kicking off' our relationship with ACO in such a visible and meaningful way, and look forward to helping them capitalize on the full value of their enormous asset collection in order to further grow the appeal of their motorsport events around the world."
For more information on the 24 Hours of Le Mans race visit www.lemans.org and be sure to view the Cumulus-enabled Photo gallery.
About Cumulus 5.5
Cumulus 5.5 is the market-leading application for managing and publishing all types of digital assets such as images, layouts, presentations, video, audio and text. The program offers a friendly visual interface, powerful search capabilities, comprehensive customizing options, instant HTML export, slideshow capabilities, e-mailing and more. The Cumulus 5.5 platform also offers a flexible base for asset workflow solutions in a virtually limitless number of production environments. The Cumulus product line consists of three cross-platform editions: Enterprise and Workgroup (Windows, Mac, Unix, Linux) as well as Single User (Windows, Mac). All editions have additional options that are offered by Canto and its numerous partner companies.
About Canto
Founded in 1990, Canto is the leading supplier of Digital Asset Management products and services. Committed to deliver world-class solutions at a reasonable price, Canto's award-winning product line "Cumulus" is designed to manage and archive all types of digital assets. With over 1 million Cumulus licenses sold, and more than 9,000 client/server systems installed worldwide, Canto is the clear market leader.
Canto, the Canto logo and Cumulus are registered trademarks of Canto Software AG. Other company product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others, and are hereby acknowledged.