Hey wow, neat company and I’m glad you posted about it here!
Unfortunately, I get the sense that your product is up in the Coelux range of pricing, because you don’t list the price. I think a lot of people here are going to immediately dismiss it as an option given that we can’t easily figure out how much it costs.
Your marketing is also aimed at businesses instead of homes. Especially given that my post was about home lighting, do you have anything you can share about home applications of your product?
(BTW, I remember reading an article in the 90s from a tech mag—like Wired or something—about crack.com, although I had no idea what you did, but the notable thing that stuck in my brain from that article was “why on earth would anyone name a company after a horrifically addictive drug?” I’d be curious if you know what article I’m talking about and whether you have a link to it!)
regarding crack.com, funny you connected the dots! I was a co-founder of that company which made the video game “Abuse” back in the 90s. The story behind the name… originally we called the company Chameleon Software but found someone else was using that name and had to change it. At the time the internet was just starting out and we thought it would be cool to use a domain name to name the company. We went through the dictionary and decided to call it “Crack Dot Com”, in those days we spelled out the whole thing. This is in part because at the time, there was a popular model for selling games called “Crack ware” because the first one is free, you get addicted and want to buy more :) We aspired to make addictive games and it was a bit edgy so I think it served us well. We didn’t realize it then, but crack was one of the top 100 search terms on the internet because people were looking for software cracks so we got some free traffic (though ended up getting a lot of piracy!!) haha. My second company, which turned into Thinstall (now Vmware ThinApp) started out looking at how to stop software piracy by making desktop software have a small SAS component that was required.
Anyway, I wanted to get back to my computer graphics roots so I started Innerscene to research how to make 3D displays that look like windows (VR without a headset). Turned out to be a much harder problem that I expected but we have something really amazing now.
yes! We published Abuse on DOS, Mac, and Linux (Redhat). When the company shutdown we released the code to the public domain so you can find it on many other platforms today including Windows or directly inside a browser ( https://playclassic.games/games/run-and-gun-dos-games-online/play-abuse-online/ ), and on iPhone/Android—though I find it hard to play on a mobile phone :)
Hey wow, neat company and I’m glad you posted about it here!
Unfortunately, I get the sense that your product is up in the Coelux range of pricing, because you don’t list the price. I think a lot of people here are going to immediately dismiss it as an option given that we can’t easily figure out how much it costs.
Your marketing is also aimed at businesses instead of homes. Especially given that my post was about home lighting, do you have anything you can share about home applications of your product?
(BTW, I remember reading an article in the 90s from a tech mag—like Wired or something—about crack.com, although I had no idea what you did, but the notable thing that stuck in my brain from that article was “why on earth would anyone name a company after a horrifically addictive drug?” I’d be curious if you know what article I’m talking about and whether you have a link to it!)
regarding crack.com, funny you connected the dots! I was a co-founder of that company which made the video game “Abuse” back in the 90s. The story behind the name… originally we called the company Chameleon Software but found someone else was using that name and had to change it. At the time the internet was just starting out and we thought it would be cool to use a domain name to name the company. We went through the dictionary and decided to call it “Crack Dot Com”, in those days we spelled out the whole thing. This is in part because at the time, there was a popular model for selling games called “Crack ware” because the first one is free, you get addicted and want to buy more :) We aspired to make addictive games and it was a bit edgy so I think it served us well. We didn’t realize it then, but crack was one of the top 100 search terms on the internet because people were looking for software cracks so we got some free traffic (though ended up getting a lot of piracy!!) haha. My second company, which turned into Thinstall (now Vmware ThinApp) started out looking at how to stop software piracy by making desktop software have a small SAS component that was required.
Anyway, I wanted to get back to my computer graphics roots so I started Innerscene to research how to make 3D displays that look like windows (VR without a headset). Turned out to be a much harder problem that I expected but we have something really amazing now.
Was this an “Abuse” game that was distributed somehow by Bungie? If so I played that and have some fond memories. Hi!
yes! We published Abuse on DOS, Mac, and Linux (Redhat). When the company shutdown we released the code to the public domain so you can find it on many other platforms today including Windows or directly inside a browser ( https://playclassic.games/games/run-and-gun-dos-games-online/play-abuse-online/ ), and on iPhone/Android—though I find it hard to play on a mobile phone :)