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Technology Stocks : Innovacom (MPEG), [announced single chip MPEG-2 encoder] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: roy whitt who wrote (5869)	8/29/1998 11:25:00 PM
From: Dennis Castleman	Respond to of 6297

A Innovacom MPEG2 Encoder ASIC, I think I have a good idea of what it take to get it done, but first I have a few thing that need to be said. I'm not going to write my stories about the Koz. But I will give you a little of my history with the company and it's people. As hard as it is for me to say this I owe my career path of the last 7 years or so to Koz. In 1992 I was living in Orlando Florida and had been laid off from a job writing SCSI Device drivers. Looking through the help wanted ads I found an small 3 line Ad with a phone number advertising for programmers with C/C++ DOS, Windows and Unix experience. So I call the number and talk to a Mr. John Anderson who tells me that he's right down the street from me, and to come on over for an interview. I get there all suited up and John's wearing shorts, sandals and a Harley Davison tee shirt. He starts telling me about this guy named Mark Koz and his Japanese buddy Max who have this company called Intelligent Instruments Corp in Sunnyvale CA. John tells me that they've got a contract to build this Video Server and a Set-top Boxes for ISDN. This all sounds cool and John hires me on the spot. I' spent the next 6 months working on some cool stuff, like a JAVA like multimedia scripting language for a set top box. We developed a GUI, runtime library, settop box, video server and ISDN network switch and eventually had it all working. But the money ran out and the product was late and nobody knew how to produtize it. Mark & Max then convinced Japan Tobacco to invest some money and FutureTel was born. This was about the same time as the PrimeView mpeg 1 encoder board came alive. So now it's late Jan. 1994 and Koz calls me at home and tells me that we're going to build an MPEG 2 encoder ASIC. In one Koz's many travels he met Jeff who owned a design house in the Chicago area. Koz asked me if I would go to and help port there UNIX biased ASIC design tool to NT. At the same time Fredricson Labs would be starting our encoder design. It was a cold Jan. in 94 I remember getting on the plain in Orlando and it was sunny and around 70 degrees when I landed at O'Hare the wind chill was 60 below zero. What the hell I'll battle the cold for a 30K raise and a chance to work on an encoder ASIC design. More to follow - I got to go.