Tao Group

» see tao-group.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Francis Charig and Chris Hinsley started Tao Group in 1992 and shipped the first version of their virtual machine the same year. They called it Virtual Processor, VP for short, and the pitch never really changed in fifteen years: write your code once and ship it in VP form, then let the device translate it into its own machine language at the moment it arrives. The platform around it went by TAOS at first and ended up as Intent, with a spell as Elate in between.

It worked, and it worked on the hardest possible target. In the early 2000s a mobile phone was not one platform but several dozen, each with a different processor and a different idea of what an operating system was. Tao licensed more than twenty million copies of Intent to handset and electronics makers, among them Sony, Kyocera, Sharp and Panasonic. Several of the same firms were also investors, alongside Motorola and Freescale. From 2001 to 2004 Charig sat alongside the Kyocera president Yasuo Nishiguchi at the head of the Open Contents Platform Association, which had more than fifty member companies and was mostly Japanese.

The recognition came in late and all at once. Red Herring listed Tao among the top hundred privately held companies in Europe in 2005 and again in 2006, and in that second year the World Economic Forum named it a Technology Pioneer while the Tech Track 100 placed it 26th. Early in 2007 it was still shipping, adding GSM support to its Intent GamePlayer line so games could do something with your location.

On 31 May 2007 it went into administration. The Register reported it on 13 June, by which point David Rubin and Partners had confirmed it was handling the case and Companies House was listing Tao Group Ltd, of Suttons Business Park in Reading, as "in administration." The same report said the IP portfolio had been sold the previous week in a private auction to the venture capital firm Cross Atlantic Capital Partners. Neither the administrators nor the buyers would discuss it.

~ the case file ~

~ what Intent actually did ~

Intent could run as the native operating system of a device or sit on top of one as an application, which is an unusual amount of flexibility to offer a manufacturer. Underneath it was a portfolio of pieces a phone company would otherwise have to buy separately: C and C++ games using OpenGL ES, a Java virtual machine that translated to native code rather than interpreting it, a web browser optimized for small screens, and a ringtone engine with the very 2003 name of Advanced Polyphone Ringtone Engine.

There was also a music mixer called miniMIXA, which came from SSEYO, a British audio house Tao bought in 2002 for its Koan generative music engine. SSEYO had won a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in 2001. Tao won one in 2005 for miniMIXA. A company whose whole business was invisible middleware for Japanese electronics firms had two BAFTAs on the shelf.

~ the invisible layer ~

Tao never sold anything to a person. It sold to the people who made the thing you bought, and the terms of that business are that your name does not appear. If you owned a mid-decade Japanese handset there is a reasonable chance some of this ran on it and no chance at all you knew. In Turkey the phones that mattered were Nokia and Siemens, and the thing you noticed about a phone's software was whether it had Symbian or just Java, which is to say the two layers above the one Tao was selling.

That invisibility is also what made the company fragile. A middleware licensor lives on the gap between what the hardware offers and what developers need, and the gap was closing from both ends. Java ME got good enough and was free with the handset. Then Apple and Google turned the phone into a single target with a store attached, and the problem Intent had been built to solve stopped being a problem anyone was paying to fix.

~ what outlived it ~

Charig started Antix Labs in Reading in mid-2007, weeks after the administration, and took a lot of the old staff with him. Antix built a games player for televisions that were starting to get network connections, which was the same bet on a fragmented device market, moved one screen over.

The music side did better. In 2008 Intermorphic, run by the two people who had founded SSEYO in the first place, bought the Intent Sound System intellectual property back from Cross Atlantic Licensing. Koan became Noatikl and miniMIXA became Mixtikl, and both are now components of an app called Wotja. The generative music engine a phone platform acquired in 2002 outlived the phone platform by nearly twenty years and is still releasing versions.

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