The Spirit of Innovation!

Of the tens of thousands of students who pass through a university, only a few take the risk of creating their own degree — one nobody has heard of, with no guaranteed job at the end. The idea frightens most students. I am grateful to the University of Utah, the Bachelor of University Studies program, and Dr. Shaw for letting me be one of the few.

I was a computer science major teaching programming labs in both Merrill Engineering and the Business School, and I noticed something: business students and engineering students thought about software completely differently — different reasoning, different language, different ways of attacking a problem. I didn’t fit neatly into either group, but I could translate between them. I saw my role: interview the business side, understand what they actually needed, and hand the engineers a design they could build from.

Dr. Shaw sponsored the idea, and I titled my degree “Analysis of Computer-Based Systems.” A few years later he told me my program had become a template for what the University developed into one of its most popular and highest-paying degrees: Management of Information Systems.

In the summer of 1992 I visited my programmer friend Clark Whitehead, who ran the University’s administrative computer operations. His staff showed me a tiny, pixelated digital video clip about the size of a postage stamp. I remember exactly what I said: “This is the future.”

I shut down Digital Performance, my government information-systems consulting firm, and restructured my life around that moment — studying the Windows operating system and Advanced BASIC until I found the algorithm that could play those small video files full screen, in smooth natural motion, on an ordinary off-the-shelf Windows 95/NT PC. No accelerator board, no extra hardware. 

I believe it was the first full-screen video player for the Windows 95/NT environment with features like real-time resizing.

I founded ImageMind Software in 1994. When my graphic designer said I needed a logo, I did a short meditation, and the image of a VHS record viewport came to mind. It became ImageMind’s mark.

I consulted Microsoft’s technical programming support about writing Windows screen savers. They were helpful — right up until they heard my plan for a full-screen video screen saver. Their programmers told me playing full-screen video in Windows was impossible. I replied, “Not on my PC.”

My Full Screen Video Screen Saver gave many customers their first full-screen digital video experience on a Windows PC — with no added hardware. Users chose from short clips I digitized from footage donated by KUED at the University of Utah: parasailing, galloping horses, nature scenes, tropical fish. The retail box held eleven 3.5″ diskettes; each clip ran just seven seconds, the price of file sizes and disk storage in 1993.

Why screen savers mattered: on early PCs, a static image would burn into the monitor within minutes, so Windows displayed moving graphics to protect the screen. Playing real video was the most sophisticated screen saver of its time. The product sold first in Egghead stores across the USA, then expanded into other electronics retailers.

 With the screen saver on Egghead shelves and magazines writing it up, I wanted to rebuild it around the most impressive video in the world — and that belonged to the Discovery Channel.

I approached them at trade show after trade show without landing a meeting, until they finally asked what I wanted. I explained the product and the brand-new CD-ROM format, which replaced diskettes with the speed and storage for longer clips at better resolution. 

Discovery agreed, and in 1994 I began programming Great Moments of Discovery Full Screen Video Screen Saver from my Salt Lake City condo. The product went on to earn PC Magazine’s recognition as a best product of 1995.

 My screen saver products caught the attention of investors Mr. Stevens and Mr. Creer, whose backing let me push the video player algorithm into new territory. I designed and programmed Video Express Viewer, a full-featured digital video player for Windows 95/NT, styled after a TV remote control, with features the market hadn’t seen — video password protection, real-time resizing, and animated control effects. The enhanced version was built with the talented programming of Craig Johnson and Stan Williams, with Jeremy Gehring running the website, online distribution, support, and testing.

Video Express Viewer sold in retail stores beside my screen saver — and when the Internet took off, we released a free limited version online. After CNET covered it, the download sites crashed under demand; FOX Tech Report followed. Even the retail box has a story: I sketched video pouring out of a computer monitor on a lunch napkin, and a graphic artist photographed the monitor on my own desk to create the box art. The CD-ROM shipped with Discovery Channel clips from Great Moments of Discovery.

 Today, streaming video sharing is simply how the Internet works. But in 1996, home connections ran at 14.4, 28.8, or 56 kilobits per second — so a YouTube was impossible. Or was it?

That year ImageMind built Video Express Album: a hosting portal where people created an account, uploaded personal voice or video files, and let friends and family stream them over the Internet with nothing to download. Sounds like YouTube, doesn’t it?

The vision was right; the pipes weren’t. User-created content was still too heavy for the home connections of the day, and Video Express Album taught me a lesson I’ve carried since: you must innovate to the market conditions.

 “Dot com” was the phrase of the moment. Email was the Internet’s most popular application, and pictures traveled as slow file attachments. I believed I could take email to the next level: a system that sent full-screen video email as easily as text. I knew streaming inside and out, so I conceived a service where anyone could record a private video message and send it anywhere in the world — nothing to download, the video simply played. It could have changed what email meant. The market ultimately turned its attention to video conferencing instead — but the idea of talking to a camera instead of typing was on its way.

 By 1997, ImageMind products had given people nationwide their first experience of watching — and then recording and sharing — digital video on a personal computer. As the industry raced to define how media would move online, several companies competed to own streaming. I chose Microsoft’s Windows Media (code-named COUGAR before release, later NetShow): they offered real developer support, and I already had a working relationship with Microsoft HQ that gave me early access.

Microsoft interviewed me about where streaming was headed. I told them about the postage-stamp video in Clark Whitehead’s office and repeated the same words: “It’s the future.” Microsoft went on to lead streaming technology, and streaming became as commonplace as the Internet itself.

 As connections grew faster and cheaper, I redesigned Video Express Email from a boxed retail product into an online service — its own web portal. Customers logged in, an ImageMind app written by Stan Williams and Craig Johnson downloaded automatically, and they could record audio or video emails as scalable streaming files. Jeremy Gehring built the portal’s presentation and our new online payment system: buy online, use immediately — a distribution model much of the software industry soon adopted.

Eventually the system ran fully automated, no human hands required, and it kept running until the dot-com crash took down the hosting companies beneath it. My one regret from that era: I never got to build Video Express Conferencing.

When I started ImageMind in 1994, software lived on retail shelves — Egghead, Computer City, CompUSA — and ImageMind had three products among them: Video Express Viewer, Video Express Email, and the Video Screen Saver. But people were going online, and I saw the shelf’s days were numbered.

The Video Express Portal put our products a click away: record and send media emails, voice messages, media text message with no downloading large attachments. Send audio messages up to ten minutes, embed your own videos on your website. We added media instant messaging — the first of its kind — and a Campaign Manager that let marketers send streaming video email campaigns to a mailing list and report back on exactly who watched.

Seattle was preparing to implode the famous Kingdome, and Microsoft’s streaming division saw a showcase moment for NetShow. They came to me as a leading developer on their streaming technology, and I built them “Implode a Friend”: a website of world-famous implosion videos you could email to anyone. The recipient opened a message reading “You’ve Just Been Imploded” — and the video streamed.

One person sent it to four or five friends; each of them sent it to four or five more. The traffic grew so explosively that the streaming files had to be moved to one of Microsoft’s largest hosting partners. Nobody called it “going viral” yet — there wasn’t a word for it — but that’s exactly what it was. Stan Williams, Craig Johnson, and Jeremy Gehring built it with me, it met every one of Microsoft’s objectives, and it sent the Kingdome off in style.