Elena Shirokova

Elecard company, founded in 1988, is a leading provider of software products for encoding, decoding, processing, receiving and transmission of video and audio data in different formats (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, MJPEG 2000 and others).

Elecard is one of the first companies, which has developed the video codecs for the newest H.264/AVC compression standard and whose MPEG-2 Decoder is considered to be one of the world's best.

Since 2001, the company has been developing solutions for digital TV broadcasting and video streaming, which are widely used by the world's leaders of this sector. In 2006, Elecard announced a new product line of hardware/software IPTV solutions, which aroused great interest.

Elecard offers a wide range of reference designs for professional digital TV broadcasting market, which includes streaming, transcoding, video-on-demand servers, professional software products and software development kits (SDKs). The company develops digital TV set-top boxes and user's software applications for the average consumer. What makes Elecard different is that it lets an integrator company buy everything it needs - reference design, software, components and technical support in one place.

The application area of the company's technologies is very wide and includes solutions for satellite surveillance systems, terrestrial, cable and satellite broadcasting, security systems, video for cellular phones, and home multimedia centers.

The Elecard Group incorporates several private IT companies: Elecard Ltd, Elecard Devices, Elecard-Med, CompActive, Eletom, Solveig MM, Advansib, Elecard-Display, Russian Innovative Center Management Company and two educational research laboratories in the universities of Tomsk and at the laboratory of the Research Institute of Radio in Moscow (NIIR).

The company's headquarters is located in Tomsk, Russia. In 2007, Elecard opened its first office in San Mateo, California.

As of October 1, 2007 the company employs over 160 people. Among them are high-level experts, holding postgraduate and Ph.D. degrees. The company offers internship placements for students, while some of the current employees teach at the universities of Tomsk. Elecard's research officers wrote several books on computer graphics that were published in both Russia and the U.S.