Digitaltveurope.com

Consultancy and research and development group Mediasmiths has opened Mediasmiths Forge, a Belfast based software research and development facility.

Terry Harmer will head up the operation as general manager, tasked with setting up a high-quality development, testing and support organisation, and building the company’s research capability. Invest Northern Ireland has offered £75,000 (€87,500) of support towards the investment project.

Niall Duffy, managing director of Mediasmiths (pictured), said that Mediasmiths Forge would focus on three business lines. One was automation of testing for video and other media products (targeted primarily at other vendors). The second was development work on extensible technologies including open source tools and middleware, and the third was pure research, based on a research programme in part set by the staff of the facility (with a core of employees drawn from Queen’s University, Belfast and the technology centre growing up around that) and in part based on requests from potential customers and partners.