It's over

Thumtronics is dead.  :-(

For years now, I've been trying to raise money to finish the Thummer's  design and to manufacture its first production run. In that time, I received many promises, but no checks. Now, the global financial crisis has dried up all funding for early-stage companies. Thumtronics is now in bankruptcy.  It's over.

To Thumtronics' investors, I offer my sincerest apologies. I did my best. I put everything I had into it -- every penny, every hour, every effort.  I'm sorry. I hope that you will forgive me, and more importantly, that you won't hold my failure against the next guy who comes to you with a great idea.

I've tried diligently for years to license Thumtronics' patents to other companies, with no success. Most of Thumtronics' (pending) patents will fall into the public domain due to non-payment of fees.

Once Thumtronics' bankruptcy is final, I'll place the design documents for the Thummer prototypes on the web, as the basis of an open-source hardware project. Completing the Thummer's design would be a great team project for an electronics/mechanical engineering class. Once an open-source reference design was completed, anyone who wanted to make Thummers could do so.

For example, a firm like Hong Kong's Medeli to work with HK UST's students to finish the Thummer's design, then to collect partially pre-paid orders online until receiving enough orders to justify making the initial production run. If nothing else, this would be a great way to identify (and hire) the university's best students.

Hopefully, through an open-source approach, Thummers will someday become available.  I hope so, because I want one!  :-)

In the meantime, I've started a new company, iGetIt! Music. It has no website yet (although I've registered the domain). iGetIt! is just me and an Internet-connected computer in my bedroom -- a classic micro-ISV. iGetIt! is focused on developing online music education courseware using the computer keyboard (and possibly iPhone) as its input device. iGetIt! doesn't have the potential to rake in the big bucks that Thumtronics had, but if I'm lucky I ought to be able to make a living out of it. In these troubled economic times that's a whole lot better than nothing.

My biggest challenge now is getting back into the swing of computer programming. It's been 22 years since I got my Computer Science degree, and 17 years since I last programmed for a living. I was on the cutting edge of object-oriented programming back then, and mostly I'm finding that today's tools make it very easy to do things that required lots of hand-coding back then.  I'll start a new blog shortly to document my progress and share what I've learned.

So...Thumtronics is dead. Long live iGetIt! Music!  :-)