Picsel

» see picsel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The company was named after its engine before it was named after itself. The registration at Companies House on 28 May 1998 reads E. PAGE LIMITED, and ePAGE is what the thing they were building was called: a content engine that could take a file it had never seen, written by an application that was not installed, and draw it on a screen anyway. The name Picsel arrived in August 1999, and the engine underneath went on being called ePAGE for years after the company had stopped being called that.

What ePAGE was for was the problem of the attachment. Somebody sends you a Word document in 2003 and you are holding a phone with a few inches of screen, no Office on it and a processor slower than the machine that made the file. Picsel's answer was to render the thing rather than open it, which meant the handset needed none of the software the document had been written in. Out of that came two products, Picsel Browser and Picsel File Viewer. A consumer app called SmartOffice arrived later.

It was a licensing business. The customers were handset manufacturers, and the people actually holding the phones never bought anything from Picsel at all. Samsung and Motorola shipped it. So did Nokia and Sharp, and so did both of the big Japanese carriers. At the point the company fell over, the engine had gone out on more than two hundred and fifty million devices. The Glasgow office peaked somewhere around two hundred and twenty developers, and in 2008 the company took two Queen's Awards for Enterprise in the same year, one for international trade and one for innovation, handed over at its own offices.

This is the kind of software nobody chooses and a great many people used. Samsung was a licensee and Samsung sold phones everywhere, so a handset bought in Turkey in that era could well have had Picsel's work sitting in its menus, under a label naming the file type rather than the firm that wrote the renderer. Two hundred and fifty million is a number you only reach by being invisible inside somebody else's product.

~ the case file ~

~ PICSEL, backwards ~

The ending was not sudden to anybody inside it. The staff had stopped being paid around February 2009, five months before the administrators came. In that same February, one of the Picsel companies sued Apple in Delaware over the smooth-zoom behavior in the iPhone and the iPod Touch. A firm that could not make payroll was suing the most valuable technology company in the world, and the case never reached court; the administrators later listed it among the assets to be valued and sold.

PricewaterhouseCoopers was appointed over the trading company on 14 July 2009 by notice in the Court of Session. Then comes the detail that explains why this company is hard to find in the public record. On 27 October 2009 the whole group was renamed by spelling it backwards. Picsel Technologies became LESCIP T, Picsel Research became LESCIP R, and so on through the group. It is a routine insolvency maneuver, done to release the trading names for whoever buys them, and the effect is that the original companies are now filed at Companies House under their own name spelled backwards.

The company then died twice more. The founders bought the business back and traded on as Picsel UK, which petitioned to wind itself up in July 2012. The work moved to Smartoffice Technologies, which went into administration in September 2013, this time at the hand of a Malaysian state-backed lender that had followed the company home from its Kuala Lumpur office. The 1998 holding company, meanwhile, was never dissolved at all, and is still listed as being in insolvency proceedings today.

~ com.picsel ~

In March 2014 Artifex Software of San Rafael bought the Smart Office apps, which by then had been downloaded more than seven million times, and rebranded them. In April 2022 Artifex was itself bought by ePapyrus of Seoul. The office products on Artifex's site today handle Korean Hangul document formats, which is the new owner showing through the product line, and neither the word SmartOffice nor the word Picsel appears on that page any more. picsel.com still redirects there, pointing at a page that no longer mentions the thing you were redirected for.

One thing did survive the renaming, the three insolvencies and both acquisitions. There is an app on the App Store called Smart Office for BlackBerry, sold by Artifex Software, updated in July 2025. Its bundle identifier is com.picsel.smartoffice2gd. Sixteen years after the Court of Session appointed administrators over a company in Glasgow, and after that company's name was reversed into nonsense to get it out of the way, the name is still in the string that identifies the software to the phone.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »