I’m actually interested in barter and coop.
About Licensing
It’s too soon for a 3D animation company to License the tech behind the Moose. (It’s not ready, as I’ll explain below). But it’s never too soon to acquire, collaborate, make partnerships, or simply barter.
3D graphical characters are usually created in programs like 3Ds Max or Maya, and the Moose was too. It is possible, to give any character the behaviour and lip sync that the Moose has. It is possible to change the Moose head into anything else.
There are a few special things to put into the rig. After that, it’s all just code and settings.
Before this can be licensed, the documentation needs to be written up, and some work done to reshape our graphics engine code to work within Unity, Unreal engine, and so on. I don’t foresee a problem.
Do you know a 3D coder who used Granny by RadGameTools in the past, and now codes in Unity?
Bartering and partnering could be possible to create licensable code, by working together.
About Marketing
The Talking Moose will once again spread around the world and into multiple languages.
I can get that done, but not as fast as I would like. How, you ask?
It really helps that I have other high traffic websites with good pagerank. Unlike most indie game developers, I have money for advertising properly.
What I lack right now, is marketing experience and skilled people to focus full time on it. An inventor needs a hustling evangelist to succeed. I know this. I need to find a well-matched marketing partner.
About Acquiring
I’m talking to you, Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Nuance.
Your products: Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Watson, and Nina, have amazing abilities to understand speech input questions and provide spoken answers. You are in competition with each other, in an ongoing war with multiple battles ahead. I’m just one guy saying, Nobody falls in love by talking to a colored logo.
Of course it is doubtful that Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc, would replace their static logo with a smiling animated face. The ‘not invented here’, ‘self-reliance’, and ‘copy instead of invent’ safety, are factors.
Nevertheless, one day computers WILL have visible speaking faces, and the first-to-market with a truly lovable one, will rule. The First-Mover advantage.
I don’t mean, ‘be the first with an animated character’. Many have tried and failed. I mean, ‘be the first that succeeds’. What is the formula for success?
Until now, no technology existed to give satisfactory movement and behaviour. Eye contact matters a lot. Smiling is vital. Expressive eyelids and eyebrows, and so much more, are needed. The Moose has it all (and fun ears, which are a bonus).
Most important: Don’t be annoying. These are the key points: Speech must be interrupt-able. The character must never block your view of real work, so it must move instantly out of the way. It should only show up to talk, then disappear. It should notice when you are typing or actively using your mouse, and wait until you seem less busy, before talking.
One day, someone in an M&A (Mergers and Acquisitions) department is going to say, the Moose has X million users now, and still growing. We could use that reach, AND use that technology, so lets try to buy it. But what if someone super-smart realized the price is lower when the product is still an unheardof startup.
About the market for Marketing!
Can you think of a company that sells something? Of course! Is advertising a big business? Yup.
Keep this in mind: The moose is free and has nice reasons to be on someone’s computer, for happy purposes: Jokes, social benefit, and providing useful abilities. Adding commercial messages WILL be acceptable to users, in limited amounts (to be determined by research). Whoever controls that, has the keys to an entirely new stream. It’s like the invention of Banner ads.
People don’t like “Push” advertising. Ads that intrude while they’re focussed on something else, are bothersome. We have to be careful to set closely-monitored, research-determined, intervals to speak. A short funny ad, once-a-day, 10 seconds, is probably OK. Lets find out, in beta testing.
About Collaborating, cooperating, helping each other
The Moose comes with a reasonable set of things it can do. Nice things like weather reports, reminders, news, tweets, social updates, and so on.
The moose platform is open and designed for Plugins. Does your company offer BETTER stuff? Make those plugins, under your own brand, sell them yourself. Maybe we can co-market together too.
Can you make better voices?, better news, better social feeds, better dating matchups… Heck, just about everything we do on the internet, has polished companies filling all the niches.
Definition of heck. It’s where people go, who don’t believe in Gosh.
You can- and other companies can-, make Plugins for the Moose, and sell them.
Bring your good ideas and lets discuss them. You’ll keep doing your business, and I’ll stick to mine, and lets arrange mutually beneficial cooperation.
Here’s what I don’t have. Are you a potential partner?
- Backend services, cloud, worldwide eCommerce
- Conversion onto Mobile devices
- Speech input voice recognition
- Natural Language Processing, conversational ability
- Learning, self-improvement of voice input and conversational
- Marketing experience, marketing infrastructure, evangelist
- On webpage HTML5 animation tech
- Widget tech for WordPress, for moose-quality characters
I don’t want to, and can’t, do everything myself. I could use some partners bring missing pieces of technology with them. Give it some thought.