Pachyderm Services now offers hosted Pachyderm authoring accounts and dedicated servers for schools, museums, colleges, universities, and anyone who is interested in easy, web-based multimedia authoring. For more information on pricing and how to get a Pachyderm account, please see the Pachyderm Services Signup

Press Release, February 6, 2008

NMC Announces Launch of Pachyderm Services
New Service Brings Low-Cost Web Multimedia to Schools and Museums

Today the New Media Consortium (NMC) announced the launch of Pachyderm Services, a new suite of services providing inexpensive access to web multimedia authoring for museums and schools. Teachers, students, museum professionals and others can now enjoy hosted Pachyderm authoring accounts on a yearly subscription basis designed to match any budget.

“Pachyderm combines interactive multimedia, digital storytelling, and clean, simple design in a way that lets authors focus on the content they want to share,” notes Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services and Pachyderm Project Director. “Photos and video can be recorded with a basic digital camera, edited with free or low-cost tools, and placed into Pachyderm quickly and easily. This really is a tool for people who don’t have access to expensive equipment and software.”

Designed for people with little multimedia experience, Pachyderm is accessed through a web browser and is as easy to use as filling out a web form. Authors upload their own media (images, audio clips, and short video segments) and place them into pre-designed templates, which can play video and audio, link to other templates, zoom in on images, and more. Once the templates have been completed and linked together, the presentation is published and can then be downloaded and placed on the author's website or on a CD or DVD ROM. Authors may also leave their presentations on the Pachyderm server and link directly to them there. The result is an attractive, interactive Flash-based multimedia presentation.

“Pachyderm is perfect for students, from grade school through college,” according to Kris Wetterlund of Sandbox Studios. “We have seen museums create kid-friendly pieces that blend art from their collections with classroom concepts in history, literature, mathematics, and science. Putting Pachyderm in the hands of the kids themselves is going to be a powerful way to let them express themselves and really work with the content they are learning,” she adds. “I can’t wait to see what they do with it.”

Edutopia, the online magazine of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, described Pachyderm as “multimedia authoring for peanuts” (“The Elephant in the (Class)room: Pachyderm’s Multimedia Tool,” Edutopia, August 29, 2007). Basic subscription accounts are available for $99 per year; premium accounts, which include unlimited Help Desk access, are $149 per year. No special software is required to author in Pachyderm—the service runs entirely in a web browser.

Dr. Larry Johnson, NMC’s CEO, notes, “The aim of Pachyderm Services is to provide options to schools and museums, especially the smaller locations that simply don’t have the technical staff to support an installation of their own. With Pachyderm Services, museums and schools don’t need to install a thing to be able to support multimedia authoring for the web—no servers to maintain, no need to train technical support staff—it’s all done for you.” Johnson also notes that organizations requiring large numbers of accounts can save money by leasing a dedicated Pachyderm server for as little as $5 per account per year.

Hosted Pachyderm accounts and server solutions are available immediately. For further information or to request an account, please visit www.pachyderm.org.

About the New Media Consortium
The New Media Consortium (NMC) is an international 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium of more than 250 learning-focused organizations dedicated to the exploration and use of new media and new technologies. Through its many projects, its comprehensive website, and its series of international conferences, the NMC stimulates dialogue and understanding through the exploration of promising ideas, technologies, and applications. For more information on the NMC, see www.nmc.org.

For additional information, contact:
Rachel Smith, Vice President, NMC Services    This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it       512.445.4200