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MIACOMET - 1995-2005
MIACOMET SOFTWARE COMPANY - REAL FEEL HARDWARE
THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN COMPUTER SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE COMPANY
In 1979, David Krebs, gave me one of the first Texas Instrument TI-99/4 Home computers made. It had been given to him as a gift but he had no interest in it and knew I'd be intrigued by it. I brought it back to my apartment and instantly fell in love with the challenge of making it do something. I remember making a little stick figure dance on the screen with my wife for hours. That computer was responsible for getting me hooked on electronics and computing.
I started to buy synthesizers and Atari's and Commodores and Apples and anything I could get my hands on to learn more about these amazing machines and technology. Eventually I started the Mindworks computer store on Nantucket with my good friend Bob Lamb. We were the first computer store on the island and we sold the first color & sound commodore 128 home computers. The store was actually more about selling software games which drove the purchase of the computer to play them. But after a couple of years I realized I had no desire to be in the retail business, I was much more interested in creating something for the computer.
Right after we sold the Mindworks computer store I met a gentleman named Bruce McCowan through his wife who had called me for problems with their computer. I went to their home here on the island to help them out and after fixing everything we sat and talked at great length about computers and the industry that was coming. Bruce seemed to think I would make a great computer stock analyst for his firm in NYC called McCowan Associates, an investment firm that handled over a billion dollars for pension funds and private investors. I knew nothing at the time about stock investment but he assured me he would help me learn. So I became the firms first Computer Stock Analyst and I researched computer companies for investment for the next 4 years. During that time I also became a Novell certified Administrator and installed their first computer network in the main office in NYC.
Bruce McCowen
After 4 years in NYC I was ready for yet another change.
I had wanted to start a new company but I was still searching for that special idea for a product when one day while fishing with my bud Bob on his boat called the shmee for striped bass, the idea to create high end virtual motion controllers for the PC came to me. I loved playing games on computers but they always felt disconnected with a mouse. So I invented a series of controllers that would give you the real feel of interacting with the game or a sport sim.
The first one I focused on was a Fishing Rod and Reel that not only allowed you to control a fisherman on the screen but also let you cast and set a hook and reel a fish all with the real motions of fishing. I also created a gear system that would torque up inside and a gyroscope weight that would pull in different directions and this replicated the weight and fight of a fish.
So I quit my job in NYC and started to build my Company which Linda, my wife, named Miacomet.
I applied for my first patent and after about a year and a half and a huge amount of our personal money I was awarded my first US Patent.
While I was waiting for my patent to issue, I started to work on the Fishing software simulator that would be sold with the Fishing Controller. There was no 3D mesh modeling software at the time it hadn't been invented yet so I made the fishing sim this beautiful piece of art by having a good friend of mine and great local artist, David Lazarus, hand draw every plate in the software program and I would than animate everything over the top of his beautiful hand drawn pictures.
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To create the fishing environments, I created a bait that the fish followed at different times and weather changes and created a strike zone around the bait that the lure had to cross to attract the fish. Once attracted the fish would bite at the lure depending on lure color, time of day, weather and how the lure was reeled across the strike zone. Once the fish was hooked it would turn everything on inside the reel and replicate the weight and the fight of the fish. I used real video oceans layered on top of animated sky weather changes with a video of my fishing consultant Bob Decosta as the fisherman controlled by the rod and reel controller. When the user pulled the rod back in a casting motion the video fisherman would move with him, the direction of cast and distance was controlled by the speed of the cast and the angle. Once the lure was in the water the reeling motion of the controller controlled the speed of the lure retrieval. All of this coding was placed under real video of oceans with weather sky changes and a controllable fisherman video that moved with all the motions of the Fishing Rod. Below were some testing videos and an opening Intro of the software program I created.
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Having worked at Mcowen Associates for 4 years i had learned about startup companies so I put my first investor package together and went out to raise capital to fund my new company, Miacomet Software. Bob F. was my first investor and his capital allowed us the time to find someone to run the company and get a CFO to handle the capital I had been raising. We found this guy Randy H. who had been a CEO with another software company and Bob brought in Matt P. to be the CFO. They helped in the initial stages of bringing the product to other software and hardware companies and to grow the company while I continued to bring in investors.
This is not an easy task when you have very little credentials and a new unproven product. I can't tell you how many times I had to explain how many fisherman owned computers but it was a question that was asked time and time again. How big could the market be? Many of my friends invested in the company as well as large investors like Brace Y. from Goldman Sachs. Remember I was just a musician with a good idea trying to raise money for a young unproven company in a huge market that had yet to be proven so the risks and rewards were great. And to get large investors was foreign to me as I had never done this before.
Over the next two years I created and designed and applied for patents on several other controllers I created below.
We took many trips out to California to meet with Sony, Electronic Arts, Sierra Online and most of the game software development companies looking to make a partnership with Miacomet. We also went to Europe looking for investors but continued to run into many roadblocks along the way. But I was able to raise about a quarter million dollars from friends and family on the island who all took a great risk investing in an unknown and unproven company! With that capital we brought on our CEO and CFO and continued to try and make partnerships in the Industry. At one point I got a call from CNN and flew to NYC to do this interview for financial news with two very well known broadcast anchors, I think you'll recognize them in the video below.
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I hired Bob Decosta a local Charter Boat Captain and owner of Albacore Charter Fishing, here on the island to be my fishing consultant for the fishing sim. Together we spent hundreds of hours researching everything to do with fishing. But it was Bob that called me up one afternoon and said that he had a friend here that I should meet and that they may be interested in making an investment in Miacomet. So I took my proposal book and my demo software and fishing rod and drove out to meet them at their house out at the beach.
Once again I was just a musician not really familiar with any people in the corporate business world, so I was not impressed until I found out who I was going to meet. The person I met had just been featured on the front page of Barrons Investment Newspaper. It was Dennis Kozlowski The CEO of Tyco International. Calling him the next Jack Welch of the business world, he had become the most successful CEO in corporate America!
So I arrived at his house and was met by Dennis and his two fully cut white poodles at the front door of his beach home. Dennis's wife, Karen and his business partner at Tyco, Mark Shwartz, were both there and we all sat down in the kitchen. I did my little dog and pony show and demoed everything I had brought with me and explained the entire concept and what the company had accomplished to date. They were all very nice people and very excited about what I had created. After a couple of hours I collected all my stuff and walked out the shell driveway to my car to leave. Right as I was getting in, Dennis came out to the car and asked me how many shares were available in Miacomet. I told him we had about 3 million dollars worth left. At that point Dennis said to me. "We'll take all of those shares! We'll need to serve on your board of directors but I can get a check to you by tomorrow." We shook hands and I drove off ... jaw in hand!! I had just made a deal with one of the worlds most powerful and successful CEO's and not only would I have all the capital to run the company I had Both Dennis and Mark Shwartz from Tyco International running my board of directors.
During this time I invented the Pool Controller. Sitting at my desk trying to play a pool game with a regular mouse was extremely awkward. Thinking about the mechanics of playing a real pool game one slides the pool cue forward which I had to do rolling the mouse forward. I flipped the mouse over and while I was rolling my finger over the ball of the mouse I thought...what if I turned the ball into a cylinder and mounted it on top of the mouse controller so you could slide a real pool cue over it and rotate it just like the ball. So I got my clay out and started to mold the controller to fit my hand.
Then I broke apart an old mouse, kept the ball underneath but added a cylinder rubber roller on the front and rewired everything to see if it would actually work.
And it did! We applied for my second patent. Then Linda and I flew to Hong Kong and then on to China to meet with a company called STD that did product prototyping. They would create the plastic mold injections to manufacture the pool controller while our first product, the fishing sim was being completed. . Randy had put together a deal with Act Labs another hardware manufacturing company that would allow us to market and manufacture our products in conjunction with their brand.
After the designs and ergonomics and electronics were approved we started to manufacture the Pool Controller and partnered with Several pool software companies and packaged the controller with a two piece Pool Cue and the Pool Controller & Software Pool Game.
The pool game started to sell with no marketing and was doing very well. We had made a deal with the Black Widow, the woman's 8 ball champion to use her picture on the packaging and she endorsed the product.
I started to get letters from all over the country from disabled people who could no longer stand at a real pool table. Incredible letters of thanks from so many people who for the first time in many years could play pool with a real pool stick on the computer. I always felt that there should have been an instructional CD inside the box as there was a learning curve to using the controller. And there should have been more info on using a real pool cue rather than the cheap 3 piece plastic pool stick Interact created but once you got use to it, it actually worked really well and did give you control of the game with cue stick.
While all this was going Randy H. our CEO had rented the 10th floor of the Bank of Boston Building in Springfield Massachusetts and began hiring programmers, graphic artists, modelers, accountants etc. to build the infrastructure of Miacomet and to get the company ready to market the pool controller , build and finish the fishing sim and work on the other controllers that I had been designing.
We went to Lucas Arts in California and presented my design for a laser light sabre controller to work with Luke Skywaker and Star Wars games. They wrote me a small controller program that allowed me to do all my testing and in 2001 I was awarded my third patent.
During this time the buzz about the first products was beginning to show up in Major Magazines and News articles. Popular Mechanics did a piece on the pool controller as well as Time Magazine and Digital Time. The article I loved the most was The top 100 Innovators in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Magazine of Innovation Technology Review! Not bad for a high school dropout!
By this time many new things had been invented and software development was racing forward. 3D modeling and wire frame mesh and other technologies we're starting to take shape. While everything was being built and our products we're supposed to be being promoted by our team, one of my programmers, a guy named Rusty D. developed EWorld. It was another 3D Internet Website concept, a virtual world where people could create avatars of themselves and meet up online where you could not only talk to one another but also buy products, trade stock , play games and also buy Miacomet Products and have them shipped directly to your door. Below is a small demo that was built to prove the look, feel and concept before we approved development. There we're many players in this area, strangely enough the place I ended up spending so much time in later on, called Secondlife, was the exact same thing, but this was still an unproven technology and had a long way to go and was outside the fray of products that fit with Miacomet.
,I continued to work on the fishing sim at home as well as several other of my designs for golf, baseball and snowboarding. And one day I get a package from my company from Springfield from one of my programmers, and inside this package was a cd with what was supposed to be the latest development of the fishing sim I had spent 4 years developing. And it had all been changed! They had removed everything I had done and had this god awful 3D badly designed character holding a god awful looking stick in his hands in front of a god awful 3d image of some badly rendered body of water. It was completely horrible! It looked like crap...worked like crap ..it was crap!! All of the beauty and class and magnificent artwork and design I had created had disappeared overnight and had been changed by my management team convinced that they had a better idea. I was beside myself. Angered, disappointed, frustrated and absolutely bullshit that these guys were now trying to change everything my investors had invested in.
But this was just the tip of the iceberg forming up in Springfield by the Randy and Matt show. Ever since I had brought Dennis Kozlowski into the company these guys thought they had a cornucopia of cash at their disposal now that Dennis was an investor, and that they could do anything they wanted on their own. They started to spend all our working capital developing a side company called Katerra that none of us on the board of directors had approved or even knew about. They arrived on Nantucket one day for our long overdue board meeting at Dennis's office with their little presentation and proceeded to tell us that they had spent all our working capital for Miacomet and that they now needed more cash for not only Miacomet but also wanted an extra 6 million dollars to fund their own new company Katerra, which of course, I was not a part of! Seriously! I was so furious! We were all flabbergasted at the audacity that these guys had to tell us that not only all the money for Miacomet Software company had been spent developing this new company, 3 Million Dollars gone, but that they also wanted money to start a totally different company on their own with nothing going to Miacomet Shareholders! Dennis pulled me out in the hallway and asked me what I wanted to do. I told him, "Fire them All!!!". He asked me if I wanted him to put up more money and I told him, "Absolutely not! I want both of these clowns gone and it's not fair to dilute all of our investors!" So we walked back into the board room and fired both Randy and Matt for complete negligence and shut down everything.
Unfortunately for me I was still in Nantucket when they went back to the Springfield office and everything in that office disappeared overnight...Computers, furniture, software, records, pictures, accounting records and people ... EVERYTHING & EVERYONE WAS GONE! They never said anything to our investors, they never filed any paperwork on the closing of Miacomet, they never explained their actions to any of us and they never apologized or were held responsible for what they did to my company and my investors company. IT WAS ALL GONE!
Weeks later, Dennis and I had another meeting to discuss what to do next. As opposed to diluting the company further by raising more capital I decided that I would use all my patents as leverage and a bargaining chip to make a deal with Thomson Electronics a division of RCA electronics for manufacturing marketing and distribution of the remaining products as we had no infrastructure or management left to work with. So RCA invested 850K in Miacomet and I gave them a hold on all my patents and trademarks in the company as collateral against future sales. I worked with Thomson on the Baseball Bat, Golf Club , Snowboard and the Fishing Rod to get it ready for act labs to distribute as a partner.
And then ... September 11th came. And everything came crashing down. Two weeks after the World Trade Center Collapsed, RCA ended their relationship agreement with Thomson Electronics and all the people involved with our products at Thomson disappeared in the change over. The money disappeared, the products disappeared, our partners disappeared, most of the board of directors disappeared and my patents and trademarks disappeared.
And then 2002 came and I turn on the TV and I see this!
And This!!!
And This!!!
And This!!!
And Finally This!!!
Hey! That's my Chairman of my Board of Directors and his Partner OMFG!!! Arrested for embezzling 60 Million dollars from Tyco Corporation! Holy Shit! Boy when it rains it pours!
Well the rest was a slow painful death of Miacomet Inc. The only people left were Me , Bob F. and Keith A. the head of sales. Everyone else had scattered like the black plague had arrived. People on the island disowned Dennis in the blink of an eye trying to distance themselves from him. I don't know exactly what the truth is about what happened but Dennis had always been a straight shooter with me and It all smelled a bit fishy anyway. A part of me really believes he got singled out of all the corporate CEO's who were doing great things for their companies and had all been over spending. They made an example of him but no matter, I wrote Dennis a letter after he was incarcerated in the NY State Prison and told him how I felt and that it really didn't matter to me one way or the other but asked if there was anything I could do for him as it seemed everyone else in his life had abandoned him. Dennis and Karen used to hire Ecliff and the Swingdogs which I was the keyboard player for and he told me that he always loved music and guitar specifically. So I called the prison the next day and asked them what one had to do to send something like that to a prisoner. I found out what I needed to do and I sent Dennis a guitar, chord book, strap and a tuner so he would at least have something to do while he served his time. We wrote back and forth a couple more times but then I lost touch with him. If you see this Dennis my best to you and your family.
Once everyone left I spent the next couple of years alone, programming and designing a software game program to sell for the company to try and keep things running for Miacomet and rebuild. At the time my best friend Bob Lamb had quit his construction job to become the Balloon Wizard. haha He decided that tying balloon animals for kids was much more fun and rewarding than moving dirt around and so he started this great business here. I loved what he was doing and it gave me the idea to build a Balloon tying software program that came with an air pump and sculpting balloons for kids. I wrote this program where Bob was the wizard in a castle and he would teach you magic potions that were the fundamentals of making about 20 different animals with balloons.
This was the first test video I shot of Bob, the Balloon Wizard in my house on green screen. I than overlaid the graphics animations with an effects program and imported the video as a transparency over the main screen inside a wizards castle that I had Josie, a friend draw for the program.
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I had this whole idea of a Magic Theme for the program, wizards and spells etc. as Harry Potter was just coming out and I thought it might do well as a Magic Balloon Program. But...I made my final mistake and gave the program to Keith and Bob and they changed the packaging to YOUR BALLOON MAKER without my approval once again! It was so sad to see another great idea of mine destroyed by stupid people with no creativity and vision whatsoever. Anyway, Bob and Keith made some sort of shady deal with a company called Enteractive Entertainment and I never heard a word from either one of them again nor did I or Miacomet Company ever receive a penny from the program I built to try and save Miacomet! ... and that was the final nail in the coffin. Everyone who had been involved with the company disappeared with no explanations to any of my investors and left me alone to deal with the aftermath. SMH!
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