0.18 The return of little shat

Squish and Joey learned from their F5 experience that starting a company was a practically effortless exercise in getting rich quick. Not for them the slow building from scratch of a Microsoft or Aldus. The New American Way was to come up with an idea, sketch out a big-picture view of its product line, get started, raise money, and go public. A, B, C, D…rich.

If two years of blood, sweat and insanity at F5 could make them millionaires, they reasoned, they could be billionaires if they started not one company, but three simultaneously. The three would complement one another, providing a seamless, synergistic suite of services and technologies that would transform the world of digital telecommunications.

Accordingly, they launched Zama Networks, Indaba Communications and Ahaza Systems in 1999. Zama would be a Pacific Rim company connecting the western United States, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, and other nations with a high-bandwidth, fiber-optic network. Ahaza was to produce a line of products that boosted the network’s performance, passing data packets at dizzying speeds, thereby enabling immersive three-dimensional communication. And Indaba would make the communications interface: the software for the boxes and peripherals people would use to inhabit virtual environments and communicate “face to face.”

For Squish, the core endeavor was building the best imaginable high-speed digital communications network. In his mind, the guy who moves data packets fastest wins. For Joey, the core endeavor was human-computer symbiosis—making people better and happier through fusion with digital machinery. His theories of communication and interface were informed largely by research he’d done in Japan, where he had worked in laboratories on virtual communications environments that people “inhabited” by donning a virtual-reality headset connected to a box connected in turn to a network of these devices. The devices tracked the details of facial expression—pupil size, mouth and eye movement, etc.—and used that data to animate a three-dimensional model of the user. Similar motion-tracking and animating technology is used in such video games and, increasingly, in motion pictures. Instead of emailing or talking blindly on a telephone, Joey believed, an Indaba user would see these expressive models of his or her interlocutors and have as rich a communications experience as if they all were physically face to face.

I could never figure out whether this was the most ingenious or the most insane thing I’d ever heard of. But Joey had a videotape of these communications sessions from the Advanced Telecommunications Research lab in Japan, and it was fascinating. There was very little difference in look between a person using one of these devices and the model representing him or her. “And remember,” Joey would say excitedly, “that was 1990s technology! It’s just going to get better and better!”

The Indaba/Ahaza/Zama product line was a fusion of the Internet, computer, video-game machine, television, telephone, and VR devices—the ultimate example of digital convergence. Squish and Joey’s Empire would change the world, make them and all of their friends—including me, of all people—rich, and make everyone forget Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Andrew Grove, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Edward Gibbon…. Squish and Joey were winners—until now, a rare commodity in Seattle—and all I had to do was go along with them for a couple of years, win with them, cash out, and retire to concentrate on my life’s work, free at last of financial anxiety.