I don’t think I’m all that smart. I mean, I’m smart, but I’m under no illusions about how smart. I’m always the first to say that there are about a zillion people out there smarter than me; I can learn more stuff that way, and learning is always more interesting than just Being Smart. So I don’t have any special insight, I’m not somehow prescient, and I’m not visited in my dreams by spirits that show me The Way. I’m just reasonably good at looking at problems and seeing what seem like obvious ways to solve them. And while you might think that if I have that ability, and sometimes exert it on a given problem before anyone else, it would give me a winning edge, you would be wrong. I have somewhat of a track record of being onto the right idea years before everyone else, and it’s gotten me bupkis. Fuck being ahead of the curve. People who talk about “first mover advantage” don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.
Virtual Reality
Early in 1991 I got a call from a guy who saw my ad in the Yellow Pages (kids, ask your parents) under “Electronic Design”. He asked if I knew anything about virtual reality. VR was still a pretty new, obscure, and fringe thing in ’91, but as it happened I knew some people. I’d been in Survival Research Laboratories for a few years by then, and SRL was kind of a nexus for new, obscure, and fringe tech in the Bay Area. People doing interesting stuff tended to drop by the shop; one was Eric Gullichsen, who was running an early VR program at AutoDesk and later started Sense8, we knew some folks at NASA Ames, Jaron Lanier’s VPL may have been running at that point too, but I’d have to check. So I had about as much awareness as anyone. Anyway, I met the guy – Jim Durward – who had an idea for a system that would create a shared virtual environment. To rather abbreviate the story, we started a company (Parallel Universe, later renamed Virtual Universe), I brought in a couple of guys (now ex-friends) to help with the design, and we got to work building a UNIX-based system that would allow up to 96 users to connect over dialup phone lines (remember, this was when about the best you could do was 28.8kb/sec via modem, and DSL/cable Internet connectivity was still about half a dozen years away) and interact in the shared 3-D space. But our real innovation was to couple a second phone line to the first and use it to carry audio, with a central mixer under control of the UNIX system managing the user’s soundscape. With our proprietary board and a Sound Blaster installed in the user’s PC, we could steer their stereo audio field around to conform to their visual field. Basically, we learned that in terms of bang-for-the-buck, we could generate a much more convincing immersive environment by adding realistic audio than by using fancy, expensive, and really-not-all-that-great head-mounted 3D displays. So we did an embarrassingly-small IPO (though what’s really embarrassing is that in Calgary nearly 30 years later you’re still lucky if you can raise a few hundred thousand to do real technology), filed our patent, and got to work. And then, in early 1994, the whole thing started its slow slide into the shitter when I was driven out by my emotionally-disturbed now-ex-friends and control of the company was handed over to what surely must be the most clueless bag of protoplasm I’ve ever had to sit across a table from, Lorn Becker.
Long after the company had ceased actual operation, that moron sat on the patent and refused to cooperate with any effort to license it, right up until it expired – a clear violation of his fiduciary responsibility to the then-still-public company and its shareholders. You can look it up and judge for yourself (Durward, Levine, et.al.), but I remain convinced – as I was then – that there was an awful lot of royalty revenue that should have come from companies like Second Life. As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, this stupid sonofabitch’s plan never saw beyond using VUC‘s losses and R+D tax credits to offset the profits of his other companies. For my part, getting the bum’s rush when I did worked out okay; I had enough free-trading stock to get my next company started, though if I’d been really smart and unloaded that stock the instant I was out the door (rather than sitting on it because I had no model for how the company – and its stock – could spiral down) I’d have been hundreds of thousands further ahead. About five years later the settlement I got as a result of suing them for wrongful dismissal and defrauding me of my patent rights helped buy our place in the country – and brought a memorable quote from my lawyer, Peter Linder: “It’s one thing to deal with people who are broke. It’s another to deal with people who are broke and stupid.” So that was that. Jim and I have worked together on other stuff since, and we remain tight. The rest of them should die of cancer, very slowly.
Not that we were the only casualty; I don’t think any of the early VR companies survived. I don’t recall actually hearing of VPL’s demise, but Jaron writes and makes music these days. Last I was in touch with Eric he was hooked up with the crown prince of Tonga and running their domain registry. I think Ono Sendai was involved with Sega‘s VR game system, but I heard stories about their HMD giving people simulator sickness and it went away. Scott Fisher (from NASA Ames) ran Telepresence Research for a while but appears to have moved on. I don’t know what became of those guys in Montreal who were doing that rather slick Amiga-based thing. And, of course, Silicon Graphics rotted out and the pieces flew everywhere. We used the Virtual Research HMD in-house but I’m sure they didn’t last, nor did the Logitech ultrasonic 3D positioning system it used. I’m sure that digging around in some old stacks of business cards would refresh my memory as to others, but you get the idea.
Then in March of 2014, Oculus was purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars.
Internet of Things
In 2005, with the two companies I’d been running since 1994 winding down, I brought in a couple of new partners and we started GreenServer. The idea was simple: Low power computing targeting media delivery. That is, a little server with a fraction of a PC’s physical and power footprints with a Bittorrent client for acquiring content, the usual local Windoze/Mac filesharing, and a streaming server; a place for all of your music, video, etc., to reside and the means by which to manage it and stream it out to media adapters – simple. And since the product’s spin was power savings (vs. keeping a fat and power-hungry PC running 24×7 for media collection and delivery), we added functions for managing household power consumption, such as shutting down PCs that were deemed idle and monitoring the actual power consumption of devices around the house via small, embedded, networked meters. For this I was derided as “evil” by no less a shit-for-brains as Kevin O’Leary during two visits to CBC’s Dragons’ Den (a pair of fiascos worthy of their own blog post – one of these days). After a few years of banging our heads against the wall trying to raise investment capital (including a trip to San Francisco during which fraudsters tried to scam us), we simply gave up.
Marijuana
(sorry, I got distracted here, but I’ll be back to finish this up asap.)
Nitpicking Bastard 
do tell..
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