Tao Group

Tao Group

Type	Limited company
Founded	1992
Headquarters	Reading, Berkshire, England

Tao Group was a software company headquartered in Reading, Berkshire, UK. It developed intent, a software platform. intent enabled content portability by delivering services in a platform independent format called Virtual Processor (VP). Its business was sold in May 2007.

History

• Tao Group was set up by Francis Charig and Chris Hinsley in 1992.
• In 1992, Tao Group released the first generation of its virtual machine called Virtual Processor (VP).
• In 1998, Tao Group released the second generation of its virtual machine called VP2.
• In 2002, Tao acquired SSEYO, a British audio company specializing in generative music technologies, and creators of the Koan generative music engine.
• SSEYO won a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in 2001.^{[citation needed]}
• Tao won a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award in 2005 for the miniMIXA product.
• Tao licensed more than 20 million copies of intent to clients, working with companies over the years such as Sony, NEC, JVC, Kyocera, HTC, Philips Electronics, Kodak, Sharp and Panasonic.
• The Open Contents Platform Association, headquartered in Tokyo and chaired by Yasuo Nishiguchi, the then President of Kyocera, followed by Francis Charig, the Chief Executive of Tao spent three years from 2001 looking at networked device standardization using intent. More than 50 companies were members, mostly Japanese.
• Red Herring included Tao in its top 100 European privately held companies in both 2005 and 2006.
• In 2006 Francis Charig, Chief Executive of Tao was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer.
• Tao ranked 26th in the Fast Track 2006 Tech Track 100 in association with the Sunday Times.
• Investors in Tao Group included Motorola, Freescale Semiconductor, Sony, NEC, Sharp, Kyocera, and Mitsubishi.
• In June 2007 Cross Atlantic Licensing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cross Atlantic Capital Partners LLC acquired the business.
• Antix Labs Ltd was founded in mid-2007 by Francis Charig and headquartered in Reading, England employing many of the team previously working at Tao. Antix has built a software games player.
• In 2008, Intermorphic Ltd, a generative tools company established by the founders of SSEYO, acquired from Cross Atlantic Licensing the entire intellectual property base of the intent Sound System (iSS) technology (including Koan and miniMIX]). The technology is now rebranded as the Intermorphic Sound System, part of Intermorphic's "tikl tech" platform. Koan has been superseded by Intermorphic's Noatikl music engine, and miniMIXA has been rebranded and further developed into Mixtikl.

Products

The company's main product was:

• intent: An award winning hardware independent software platform

intent

Tao Group's intent was a software platform which was licensed to third party hardware or service providers. It enabled games and multimedia entertainment to be delivered on mobiles and other digital devices. It simplified content management by delivering code in an efficient hardware independent format. Hardware independence is important to suppliers of mobiles, PDAs, set top boxes and other devices that can run multimedia or need software updating as it both reduces the support cost of older equipment and also ensures older content can be used on new equipment.

The intent platform could be run either as the native operating system or as an application under another OS. Service code was delivered in a format called Virtual Processor (VP) which was translated on the device to the particular native machine code.

The intent portfolio included support for:

• C/C++ games with OpenGL ES 3D rendering
• A Java virtual machine which translated to native code.
• An internet browser optimised for small screens
• A music and multimedia mixer called "miniMIXA"
• A MIDI ringtone engine called the APRE (Advanced Polyphone Ringtone Engine)

References

• Announcement of formation of Open Contents Standard Association: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ECZ/is_2001_July_16/ai_76556099
• Interview with Tech Pioneer, Tao Group: http://www.weforum.org/en/fp/TechPioneerTaoGroup/index.htm
• Red Herring Europe 100 Award in 2006: http://www.redherring.com/Home/16775
• Kyocera invests in Tao Group: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2003/01/29/28063/reading-based+tao+wins+japanese+mobile+backing.htm
• Tao acquires SSEYO: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ECZ/is_2002_March_28/ai_84240630
• Tao wins BAFTA for its SSEYO miniMIXA product: http://msmobiles.com/news.php/3645.html
• Tao ranked 26th in the Tech Track 100 and confirmation Charig & Hinsley as the founders: http://www.fasttrack.co.uk/fasttrack2002/migration/dbDetails.asp?siteID=3&compID=1885&yr=2006
• Tao Group 'throws in the towel': http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/13/tao_group_administration/

External links

• Tao Group website (on the Internet Archive) at the Wayback Machine (archived May 28, 2007)
• Tao Intent Os An earlier version of intent described on WikiWikiWIki
• Interview with the developers of intent 2001
• Intermorphic Limited