Aprototypical

It's been a banner week.

I pronounced our prototype "good enough" and performed a demo in public. 3D Radio co-founder and my better half, Mike, along with our CEO for Hire Jim Gutman brought it down to Boulder Open Coffee at The Cup last Tuesday.

It took much deliberation to decide to build a prototype at all. After all, our business model doesn't have a place in it for us build anything. We are an intellectual property development company. We think of great things that people can use to enhance their lives, and we then look for business partners that have the experience to commercialize our ideas.

3D Radio is, after all, pretty easy to understand. It allows you to manage radio like Tivo helps you manage TV -- pause and rewind live radio, record content for later, skip stuff you don't like. But it's always nice to have props, so build a prototype we did.

We took an ordinary Dell laptop, hooked up a few Griffin Radio SHARKS, and built a GUI front end powered by RadioTime's program guide. What took the most effort was finding the programmer who put the whole thing together.

So after months of hearing me say our prototype was under development, my coffee companions were able to see the darn thing in action.

Still a few kinks to work out, but overall it went well. And no one spilled coffee on it.