Transmedia Infrastructure
Having worked as a cross-media artist since the mid-80s, in the early 90s I turned my attention to transmedia and the idea of technology infrastructure as art. I understood that the basic components of transmedia were themselves transmedial. In the artist’s book Red Moon, first self-published in 1992, I focused on ideas related to binary transmedia, information entropy and digital communications as art. Binary transmedia is the literal translation of digital information from one form to another (for example, from text to sound to image) in order to recursively discover, disclose and incorporate new meanings.
While attending the MFA program in Visual Art at Vermont University, I was exposed to the idea of interventionist art by Steve Kurtz. Steve believed it was possible to use situational and information art to effect large-scale social change.
I put all these ideas together and they led to a form of process-oriented, interventionist art that had as its artifacts patents, research papers, presentations, software and, ultimately, companies. From 1996 to 2002, my artistic practice centered on the creation of Internet infrastructure software companies.
Transfinity/HAI-D-KO, Transmedia Research, 1996
The first company, Transfinity/HAI-D-KO, was incorporated in 1996 as a Subchapter S corporation. Corporate charter, articles of incorporation, t-shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers were submitted to Steve Kurtz and Miwon Kwon as a conceptual art project while attending the MFA program at Vermont College.
The MFA program at Vermont College was a low-residency program. While attending the program I also worked as a Senior Technical Advisor for FedEx. At FedEx, I had the rare opportunity to express some of my ideas in a real-world, global supply chain environment. The principal goal was to use the Internet to lower the barriers to entry for global trade to companies, large and small, in every nation in the world. This would be accomplished by outsourcing everything – manufacturing, distribution, financing, sales and service – literally everything except the product concept and the transaction.
Federal Express, Virtual Enterprise Architecture (VEA), 1996.
Senior Technical Advisor in the Logistics, Electronic Commerce and Catalog division of FedEx. Served as Chief Architect on several ground-breaking electronic commerce and supply chain initiatives. One initiative, the Virtual Enterprise Architecture project, outlined the strategy for, set the technical direction of, and led the development efforts to create information systems supporting FedEx’s vision of a real-time global inter-enterprise trading network. Pioneer in the development of the first enterprise application integration (EAI) architectures. During 1996 and 1997, worked closely with the founders and chief scientists of Vitria (Dale Skeen and Jo Mei Chang), Active Software (Jim Green, Raphael Bracho) and Neuron Data (now Blaze Software) as well as first-tier integration firms such as Ernst and Young and KPMG. Co-developed, with Ramesh Venkataramaiah, the FedEx/SAP integration architecture. This architecture provides seamless integration of SAP R/3 order management with FedEx shipping and tracking solutions over the Internet. Both systems are now an integral part of the FedEx and SAP global logistics solution set. Following my tenure at FedEx, I co-founded my next company, GlobalESP.
GlobalESP, Fully Distributed Transactional Computing, 1998.
The VE Group, a holding company, was incorporated in 1998. Transfinity’s name and intellectual property assets are transferred to The VE Group and the holding company is capitalized. Patent applications are filed and the subsidiaries formed. The original Transfinity is renamed HAI-D-KO.
GlobalESP is incorporated in 1998 as a wholly owned subsidiary of The VE Group. As CTO of GlobalESP, I invented and co-developed, with Dr. Ramesh Venkataramaiah, the industry’s first fully distributed transactional peer-to-peer computing environment. I also co-invented with Dr. Venkataramaiah and Atul Elhence, the industry’s first fully distributed, directory-based object persistence. GlobalESP’s technology is acquired in 2001 by First Dallas, a private investment fund. The ideas underlying these technologies (database sharding, interlingual data representation, distributed workflows, universal versioning and identification, real-time object routing and object persistence) have all become core components of what is now commonly referred to as cloud computing.
Transfinity, Broadband Content over Dialup and Wireless, 1999.
The next company was called Transfinity (not to be confused with the original Transfinity aka HAI-D-KO) and was based on N-Bit technology. Transfinity was the first company to offer dial-up Web acceleration using a combination of n-tiered caching and compression. The whole idea behind Transfinity was to make Web content available to as many people as possible as cheaply as possible - Internet, wireless, whatever. As an idea, it has worked out pretty well.
Transfinity is incorporated in 1999. Transfinity was the first software company in the market with “last-mile” Web acceleration. Co-invented, with Dennis Tucker and Dr. Shin-Ping Liu, the Internet’s first n-tier caching and compression product for dial-up Web acceleration. Was also the co-inventor, with Joseph Morgan, of related patents in the fields of encryption, compression and arbitrary precision mathematics. Transfinity’s technology was acquired in 2000 by First Dallas and its Web acceleration product was sold in 2002 to Houston based ISP, EV1 (i.e., Everyone’s Internet) where it was marketed as WebJet. In 2006, EV1 sold its dial-up business to PeoplePC.
Zamboola, Single Point-of-Access Smartphone-based Wireless Internet, 2010.
The following is taken from the company’s initial press release:
Zamboola has introduced a new 3G cell phone technology that the company claims effectively reinvents the PC.
Officials with Zamboola said this technology connects a monitor, keyboard, mouse and other terminal devices as well as HDTV/IPTV monitors and speaker systems to the Internet using a 3G cell phone.
According to company officials, the patent-pending technology treats any combination of a monitor, keyboard, mouse and speaker system as a simple terminal device that can be used to access browser-based software, services and media over the Internet.
Zamboola's solution supports both wireline and wireless connections.
Company officials said that Zamboola removes any requirement for traditional PC hardware including the CPU, memory, disk drives and cooling fans from both desktop and portable computing environments.
The result, company officials said, is a reduction of up to 70 percent in hardware manufacturing costs and 50 percent or more in energy consumption for each computer that uses the technology.
“Zamboola has reinvented the PC,” said Michael Harold, co-founder and CEO, Zamboola, in a statement.
Harold said that the only computer Zamboola needs is the one inside the computer. Everything else is reduced to a terminal device.
“By providing a single point of mobile access for all of a person’s computing and media, and that includes what we now call desktop and portable PCs, netbooks, digital tablets and even HDTV set top boxes, Zamboola is the first company in the world to deliver on the promise of quadplay wireless access. The solution is simple. It’s the cell phone,” he said.