[Slate] "So I gave my Furby a Game Boy enema..."

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From: Adam Rifkin -4K (adam@XeNT.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Tue May 02 2000 - 19:32:40 PDT


I didn't want to do it, but I gotta give Slate a hat trick on FoRK
today. This just cracks me up too much not to add it to the FoRK
scrapbook...

   http://Slate.msn.com/Furboy/entries/00-05-02_81644.asp

> Furboy: A $100 Billion Adventure
> Inside the greatest Silicon Valley startup.J
> By Jonas Grumby
>
> Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2000, at 4:00 p.m. PT
>
> Sit back, I have a tale to tell of a fateful and frightening trip into
> the dark forests of opportunity, success, and failure in Silicon Valley.
> Sure, you can make $100 billion in a year, but can you leave with it? In
> the Valley, programmers are kings, lawyers are pawns, and the geek has
> already inherited the earth.
>
> I'm writing this as fast as I can. I think it will take some time, so
> stay tuned as I roll this out. My guess is it will take me about four
> weeks to finish. You won't want to miss it.
>
> Chapter 1
> It's Alive! (0-3 months)J
>
> It all started when a Furby showed up as a present for my son last
> Christmas. Cool things, those Furbys, pretty entertaining, somewhat
> lifelike, and no manual required. Kids 2 to 82 interact with them right
> away. So, like any good techno-geek, and much to the annoyance of my
> son, I took the Furby apart. It is quite fascinating, a bunch of audio
> and mechanical sensors, a speech processor, mini-motor drivers, and just
> a little bit of programmable intelligence. A quick scan of the code, and
> it was clear that I could play around with this thing.
>
> So I gave it a Game Boy enema. It took about five minutes. I made a
> simple four-wire connector from an ordinary phone jack and hooked up a
> very simple interface between the guts of the Furby and a $49 Game Boy
> (to the even greater annoyance of my son). This way, I could program the
> Game Boy and access all the inputs of the Furby -- noises, words said to
> it, etc. -- and then control its moves and moods. In another five minutes,
> I connected the Game Boy to my PC, via the game link cable, which just
> happens to be the predecessor to the USB connectors on all new PCs, and
> voil I could futz around all I want on my PC and keep the Furby under my
> control. To make things easier, I ported a lite version of Linux onto
> it. Then my son and I christened it Furboy -- shipbuilder style -- with a
> bottle of Gatorade. Accidentally -- well, maybe not so accidentally -- he
> spilled the whole 32 ounces onto our hack, which was when we discovered
> that Furboy doesn't need batteries -- it can run on Gatorade electrolytes.
> Stupid me, I thought Gatorade was just sugar.
>
> I talked to this creation, and it actually listened. Its responses not
> only made sense, but so did its body language -- sad eyes, perked up ears,
> jumping up and down with excitement. This little Furboy was becoming
> almost human. Before you call me Gepetto, relax, it's just a bunch of
> dumb electronics, but Brenda Laurel and all that Apple and Interval
> money be damned, I came up with the first intelligent computer-human
> interface. Billions have been made with really disgusting computer-human
> interfaces like Windows, the PalmPilot, and even Netscape browsers (you
> say "double u, double u, double u" three times fast and then argue with
> me). But for under $100, I solved the last foot problem, the part
> between the computer and the human brain, and it really worked.
>
> I figured I could sell this invention to some company that was desperate
> for something new, make a few bucks, buy a really fast car, and drive 10
> miles per hour down Highway 101 in first gear, like every other poor
> schmuck who had to work. Or I could do what Michael Jordan in those cool
> Nike ads always told me: Just Do It.
>
> I had always been a salaryman, slaving away for some guy who wore white
> short-sleeved shirts, at boring places like IBM and Xerox. I had a
> pension plan but not much else. All my savings went into buying a dumpy
> home in Palo Alto for more than the cost of a palace in Kansas City.
>
> My wife was watching all of her friends' dopey husbands hit it big and
> bugged me to take some risk, join a startup, be a Silicon Valley dude,
> not a big company hump. She had a point. I had turned down iVillage,
> Autoweb, and 14 different pet food Web companies. I just didn't get what
> they were about. I then started turning down companies if I didn't
> understand their names, Inktomi, Akamai, what the hell does that stuff
> even mean? If I was going to do something, it had to be really obvious
> and really, really big. This was it. I was going to be able to trade in
> my Camry and be "in the chips." Nothing could stop me.
>
> So I did it. I quit my job and started to work on commercializing
> Furboy. Not one day into it, I made my first mistake. A neighbor came
> over to complain about me cutting down trees in my yard and happened to
> see a Furboy in action. He was an associate in marketing at "Have you
> read our latest Polese release?" Marimba and was hoping to become the VP
> of marketing at google.com, another stupid-named company, and was
> meeting VCs, so to impress them he mentioned what he saw at my house
> (can you believe VCs actually have spies?). John Doerr from Kleiner
> Perkins started calling every single day, leaving his pager number, no
> less.
>
> I didn't return Doerr's call, but he inadvertently opened up a floodgate
> of nonstop proposals. It seems that other VCs long ago hacked Doerr's
> cell phone. They simply redial all his ingoing and outgoing calls a day
> later.
>
> Since it ran Linux and an IP stack, I assigned the Furboy an IP address,
> and it became a node on the Web -- a personal portal if you will -- off the
> Furboy.com domain, which I scored from Network Solutions. I could now
> fetch info from any Web site as well as control Furboy remotely. Furby
> to Game Boy, Game Boy to PC, PC to Furby.com, Furby.com to the Internet.
> This puppy networked. I added a little elliptic curve security from
> Certicom to make sure that my Furboy would only work for me. Furboy took
> on a life of its own: It had enough intelligence to communicate with me,
> as well as to filter the stuff I say on the phone, mutter to myself,
> type into my PC, and read off the Web, and then offer coherent advice on
> what I should do next.

----
Adam@4K-Associates.com

.sig triple play!

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