← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 4974 | Posts: 11 | Started: 2003-02-13
2003-02-13 03:09 | User Profile
Nearly as useful and innovative as peanut butter underwear, this product gets to market via some helpful discussion facilitated by Brother Jessee...
Getting Game Boy to Play Their Tune [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/technology/circuits/06song.html?pagewanted=2]http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/technolo...ml?pagewanted=2[/url]
By MICHEL MARRIOTT
WHEN Ronald L. Jones, an engineer and inventor, traveled from his home in Los Angeles to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas three years ago to seek backers for his product ideas, he was down to his last $800, and determined to make the trip fruitful.
A mutual acquaintance set up a meeting with a business developer, Mark A. Bush, that turned into an all-night conversation about technology and opportunity. "I saw this brilliant guy with this big heart," Mr. Bush said. But while Mr. Jones was a whiz with printed circuits, he had made less time for business plans or legal documents. "A lot of people took advantage of Ron's ideas," Mr. Bush said. "I said, man, we've got to get your paperwork so no one can steal your stuff."
And they talked specifically about one idea of Mr. Jones's: a way to turn a juggernaut of the electronics marketplace, Nintendo's Game Boy, into something more, not just a game machine but a portable music player as well. "When Ron first showed it to me," Mr. Bush said, "I said, wow, it's a great idea." He wrote an $11,000 check to help Mr. Jones with his personal finances, and the two became partners.
No one had broached Mr. Jones's idea to Nintendo, the Japanese game giant, which had largely resisted licensing other companies to produce Game Boy cartridges for anything other than games. But last month, Mr. Jones was back in Las Vegas - and his product was on the market.
"Listen - just listen to that," he implored as a listener donned headphones tethered to a $69 Game Boy Advance. "Sounds nice, right?"
The headphones boomed richly with a sampling of music as the Game Boy's three-inch color screen displayed digital images of the CD covers corresponding to each song. What made all this possible was Mr. Jones's creation, SongPro, a $99 two-inch-long cartridge that can be used to download music to be played on a Game Boy.
SongPro's journey to market involved a legal tangle with Nintendo, which had to be convinced that the idea was anything more than an infringement on its multimillion-dollar portable-gaming franchise. It also vaulted Mr. Jones and Mr. Bush, who are black, into the relatively insular world of high-tech entrepreneurs - a world in which few black technologists have become prominent.
"They had a lot of things working against them," said Vaughn Halyard, a former Disney senior executive involved in film, music and game development and production in Los Angeles who is a consultant for the Jones-Bush team. "People and institutions are always willing and ready to help black people and minorities consume. But it is out of character to consider truly empowering black people to invent. That's a whole different ball game." That Mr. Jones and Mr. Bush got their product to market, said Mr. Halyard, who is also black, "is testament to their determination."
Being an outsider is a role that Mr. Jones, 47, says he has had to play much of his life since growing up as a maid's son in the shadow of white wealth in Pacific Grove, Calif., on Monterey Bay. He said he was one of six black students in a high school of 1,400 students. He ironed clothes to earn money, and by the time he had saved enough to buy a bicycle, many classmates were already getting cars. "I cruised up to the school on a 10-speed," he said, "and these kids had Camaros."
Nonetheless, he enjoyed school, especially mathematics, in which he excelled. "I fell back on my family's principles," Mr. Jones recalled, which "told me that there is no monopoly on brains. Learn something."
He studied engineering at Monterey Peninsula College and San Jose State University before dropping out, he says, to learn engineering on the job.
Over the years he worked for I.B.M., Hewlett-Packard and Data General. In 1990 he founded Colossal Graphics in Palo Alto, working in large-format printing and desktop publishing. In 1999, Micro-Publishing News, a trade publication, named him Innovator of the Decade for his advances in large-format printing.
Even with that background, and a working prototype of his Game Boy idea, many potential investors were skeptical. And although Mr. Bush, who is 42, had had success as a business developer in Silicon Valley, he said that as an African-American representing a black-owned technology company to potential investors, he felt a double disadvantage.
"I would say that in 90 percent of the early parts of my presentations, the questions asked would always be, 'Who does this technology really belong to? Is this yours?' " he said. "Even my white colleagues understand that for me, it's difficult to get money."
Mr. Jones's background in printing, however, had helped him cement a relationship that proved crucial: a friendship with the Rev. Jesse Jackson. He had printed placards for Mr. Jackson's organization, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, when it led rallies in California, he said. "When we were in trouble," he said of the period in which Nintendo was pressing his company to cease and desist with its product, "it was a natural to reach out to Reverend Jackson."
Butch Wing, director of the Silicon Valley Project for Rainbow/PUSH, intervened on Mr. Jones's behalf in 2000 to work out a crucial technology agreement with Nintendo. "We sought a dialogue and discussion with Nintendo representatives to seek a positive solution to the dispute," Mr. Wing said. "Nintendo was receptive to the dialogue."
Neither side will say much about how the discussion was framed or unfolded. But Perrin Kaplan, who is vice president for corporate affairs for Nintendo of Japan and is based in Redmond, Wash., said, "There is no conflict, and they are working with us."
Part of the agreement required the fledgling company to drop the name it proposed for the product, Song Boy. It did, and both the company and its product are officially known as SongPro.
By 2001, money had become so tight that Mr. Jones was shuttling between the homes of family members and friends, living, he said, on no more than $5 a day. "I had it all worked out," Mr. Jones recalled. "I'd know where all the best happy hour spots were and drive to them, buy a beer and eat for nothing."
Mr. Jones persevered, and by the 2002 Christmas season, the SongPro was ready for market. The system includes a 32-megabyte Flash memory card, headphones, music management software and a U.S.B. line to link it to any Internet-connected computer for music downloads. The cartridges read MP3 music files as well as those in Microsoft's popular WMA format. Song lyrics, CD covers and artist liner notes can be downloaded along with music from the SongPro site at www.songpro.com. Its technology prevents unauthorized copying. SongPro is sold online and at some electronic specialty stores, including Electronics Boutique. The first 7,000 produced went on sale shortly before Christmas, with a potential target market of 130 million Game Boys sold to date worldwide. The company has enlisted Nelly, the hip-hop artist, as its national spokesman.
Even now, as the company seeks additional financing for marketing, manufacturing and operations, Mr. Jones helps keep his costs low by shuttling between his sister's home in Los Angeles, near SongPro's office, and the maid's quarters at the home of a friend, Marc Hannah, a founder of Silicon Graphics and one of the richest black scientists in Silicon Valley.
Mr. Jones said his living space sometimes looked more like a factory floor than a bedroom, scattered with circuit boards and soldering guns.
Later this year, he said, the company plans to introduce a more expensive SongPro model capable of playing full video on Game Boy color screens, opening the way for downloading and viewing multimedia files like music videos or movie trailers on the go. The company, which has five employees, is also preparing enhancements to the technology that will allow files to be transferred from PC to Game Boy wirelessly.
What helped sustain him during the worst of times, Mr. Jones said, was a conviction that he had invented and engineered a great technology, and his faith in something he learned as a teen-ager. "Life is an open-book test," he said. "People can help you if you ask the questions. On these two premises, no one can stop you."
2003-02-13 13:43 | User Profile
I saw a film called "Solaris" - based on the SF classic by Stanislaw Lem.
The film had a genius black woman physicist who really kept her cool thoughout and was brilliant and moral as the day is long.
I can't believe this crap sometimes. I mean, maybe, just maybe, a high-yellow black male might conceivably play the role (but even then it's a stretch, although I have known some very smart high-yellows), but here you have a thoroughly African looking female spouting off physics babble and making the white boys look dumb by comparison.
It's really getting old.
Walter
2003-02-13 20:51 | User Profile
When the black guy couldn't get his infringing "invention" off the ground, he played the race card. Nintendo, wanting to avoid charges of racism, caved. And, for this, in 20 years our public schools will be teaching that a black guy invented the portable MP3 player.
Any halfway competent electronics student could easily make an MP3 cartidge for the gameboy. If no one had done it yet, it's only because no one wanted to use the low quality audio component of the gameboy to make a portable MP3 player. Besides, as the black guy learned, these companies own the rights to using their proprietary sockets -- and only a black guy yelling racism has a chance of getting the rights owner to back down.
The idea of Song Boy (Songpro) is lame. Stick in a $2 DAC and a battery into the cartidge and you eleminate the need for the gameboy. This would not only lower the price of the product (no longer would it need to support the gameboy), it would also allow people to listen to music while playing games on their gameboys. But, then you'd have just a better quality portable MP3 player (sans a small video display that shows you a picture of the CD cover, so what).
BTW, I looked for the Songpro. It's 99 bucks. It'll hold just half-an-hour of medium-quality music (not only does it skimp on storage, I'm sure it skimps all around). For less money, you can get a MP3 player with twice the storage. But, unless you like hearing the same few songs over and over, I suggest you spend more money and get something with a bunch of storage. 300 bucks will get you something that holds all your music (thousands of hours of high quality music). If you want to be cheap, for well under 100 bucks you can get a portable CD player (with skip protection) that will play MP3s (about 12 hours of music per disk at medium quality) -- the CD player will also play your CDs thus saving you the hassle of transfering your music to something else.
There are many lamer "inventions" in the stores but unless their creators are black, no one is getting praised.
2003-02-13 21:49 | User Profile
Yes, this invention does seem rather unimpressive, considering it came from a descendant of the black Ancient Egyptians who flew hangliders to their jobs in Bronze Age nuclear power plants.
2003-02-13 22:11 | User Profile
I shake my head at you racist swine who insist that the final tally of the Civil Rights era is trillions of dollars wasted on welfare & inner-city programs and the abolishment of the right of free association and race mongrelization and the irreversible dismantling of Western Civilization.
We got the Song Boy out of it! A cheapjack piece of high-tech sht that gives your kid two *ways to dick off in school!
Oh frabjous day! Calloo! Callay! Diversity works, after all.
2003-02-14 07:49 | User Profile
Originally posted by Happy Hacker@Feb 13 2003, 20:51 ** Nintendo, wanting to avoid charges of racism, caved. And, for this, in 20 years our public schools will be teaching that a black guy invented the portable MP3 player.
**
The current regime, the current mess, isn't going to last another 20 years. No way.
2003-02-14 10:08 | User Profile
*An amusing sidebar to all this. Most amusing of all is that '35 percent' figure. I'm starting to think a black would place third on a written test,behind an otter and a roll of Scotch tape. *
[url=http://www.praxagora.com/sierra/flum/9603.htm]http://www.praxagora.com/sierra/flum/9603.htm[/url]
After California implemented the California Basic Education Skills Test, or CBEST, to make sure that new teachers have attained at least a 10th-grade level in reading, writing, and math skills, the Oakland Alliance of Educators, the Association of Mexican-American Educators, and the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education filed a class-action suit against the test, alleging racism. As proof, plaintiffs pointed to statistical disparities of pass rates by ethnic group: only 35 percent of African Americans, 51 percent of Latin Americans, and 59 percent of Asians passed the test the first time, compared with 80 percent of white test-takers. (For testers who take the test two or more times, the numbers are higher: 63 percent of blacks, 86 percent of Latinos, 84 percent of Asians, and 96 percent of whites.)
One of the suit's star plaintiffs was Sara Boyd, an African-American former teacher and guidance counselor retired from her job as vice principal of Menlo-Atherton High School. The suit cited Boyd's many awards and accolades as proof that she was a solid educator as well as ``an extra-sensitive conduit and role model for the school's large minority student population,'' even though she flunked the test four times.
In a videotaped deposition with Lawrence Ashe, who defended the test, Boyd mentioned that 6 out of 80 teachers at her school were black---1 or 2 percent by her estimation. Then she realized that, in fact, 8 teachers were black.
So, in fact, 10 percent of the faculty is African American?'' Ashe responded.No,'' Boyd countered.
What percent of 80 is 8?'' Ashe asked Boyd.
For some time Boyd was silent, then:Can you rephrase that? I'm drawing a blank here.''
The question was rephrased and Boyd answered ``That's about 1 percent.''
2003-02-14 12:19 | User Profile
Originally posted by il ragno@Feb 14 2003, 10:08 ** After California implemented the California Basic Education Skills Test, or CBEST, to make sure that new teachers have attained at least a 10th-grade level in reading, writing, and math skills, the Oakland Alliance of Educators, the Association of Mexican-American Educators, and the California Association for Asian-Pacific Bilingual Education filed a class-action suit against the test, alleging racism. **
I took and passed the CBEST first try, ZERO preparation, and not having slept after a long commute and a headache. The math part was just common sense and application of a couple of rules. I totally blanked out on the written part. The task was to write an essay about a person I admired, and I just couldn't think of anyone! Anyway, even with all of that I passed. The CBEST is not a serious obstacle for anyone even minimally qualified to be in the classroom.
I wonder if the suit were filed now whether the court would even hear "Bell Curve"arguments. Have such arguments ever been made in court as defense to a charge of institutional racism?
Walter
2003-02-14 16:07 | User Profile
**The current regime, the current mess, isn't going to last another 20 years. No way. **
I set the over/under on collapse at 11.5 years -- if the Jewish community does not change reverse course.
2003-02-14 16:10 | User Profile
I wonder if the suit were filed now whether the court would even hear "Bell Curve"arguments. Have such arguments ever been made in court as defense to a charge of institutional racism?
Not that I know of. I eagerly await the day that I am presented with a case that allows me to make such arguments.
2003-02-20 03:57 | User Profile
"People and institutions are always willing and ready to help black people and minorities consume. But it is out of character to consider truly empowering black people to invent. That's a whole different ball game."
Empowering black people to invent? They aren't still slaves. They have the power to do whatever they want. And we can see from what they do just what it is they want to do: listen to disgusting music, drink malt liquor, collect a government check, attribute every failure to white racism, smoke crack, and bed a white girl.
** He said he was one of six black students in a high school of 1,400 students. **
The guy is probably pretty smart for a black fellow. And he had better thank God that he went to a white school. If he had gone to school with other blacks they would have ruined him.