Changing the way the world does text!

International Characters is an SFU spin-off company founded to commercialize the high-speed XML/Unicode/text processing technology resulting from the research of Prof. Rob Cameron using a patentleft business model. Our motto is "free for open source, everyone else pays."

Our technology delivers dramatic performance improvements based on the representation of character data using parallel bit streams and the processing of these bit streams using the SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) capabilities of current and developing commodity processors.

For example, our open source u8u16 software achieves 3X to 25X speed-ups for conversion of UTF-8 character data to UTF-16, depending on platform and input data characteristics. Download u8u16 from Prof. Cameron's development website at u8u16.costar.sfu.ca. Note that the performance improvements cited even include the cost of conversion to and from parallel bit stream form.

Our Parabix (TM) software is the core high-speed XML processing engine based on parallel bit stream technology and available from its development website at parabix.costar.sfu.ca.

In order to pursue our patentleft business model, we have filed patent applications to protect our techniques and technology. See application 20060284745 at the USPTO and the corresponding international filing. However, we encourage the identification and submission of any prior art that may read upon our claims. We are an active participant in the development of the Community Patent Review pilot program.