Hello, I saw the latest news on your Indrema Informer site regarding the Phantom possibly being an incarnation of the Indrema. I am not aware of John Gildred ever being officially involved in Infinium Labs or the upcoming Phantom. I have never heard mention of his name in any conversation I have had with those at Infinium Labs. And in the research I have done it appears that the Phantom was born more out of need for a secure platform rather than that of gaming hardware. I just thought I would give you a heads up on that issue.

Thanks, Lee.

If you do track him down, please e-mail me, so I can ask him if it's alright to share it with others inquiring about him; or at the very least forward their inqueries along to him. Thanks!

After exhausting all possibilities for keeping the Indrema Developer Network sites active, sometime later this week idn.indrema.com and gamexchange.indrema.com will be turned off.

The contents of these sites will be archived and made publically available. The location of the archives is being determined now and more information about this will be posted soon.

If you have any questions or comments about this, please post them to the discuss@idn.indrema.com list.

I will begin by making the announcemment that as of last Friday, a final decision has been made to terminate Indrema. This is the result of a long and thorough search for subsequent round funding, which has proven unsuccessfull. This is the end of a two year endeavor to realize a vision which I felt would be very positive for the consumer.

Our plan is to move quickly to close shop. No need to hang out and feel sorry for ourselves. Many of us have already moved on to other projects. I have let go of most staff last week. The rest will terminate by end this week.

The intellectual property that exists may still be release to the public, but it has not yet been decided. Some developers of the technology are interested in developing components further by themselves. We are looking at giving them that option.

That's pretty much it. I want to conclude by stating that it was a helluva ride.

The chat then opened into Q&A:

• Q: What happens with the hardware designs? Is that planned to be sold to other companies?

  A: We are looking at opportunities to give the hw design to another developer. Not determined yet.

• Q: You mentioned that IP might or might not be released to the public. Does that include the components that were going to be opensourced when released?

  A: If we release code, it will include popcorn only, not openstream, not xtrema.

• Q: What Japanese electronics company are you going to work for?

  A: Pioneer Research Center USA. The project is for a next generation interactive dtv platform.

• Q: Why not Openstream or xtrema? Why are these technologies excluded?

  A: Openstream and xtrema will be taken by one of the developers to work on independently (and not under open source). Sorry

• Q: John, do you have any interest in a collaborative community oriented post-mortem on Indrema's possible mistakes either as a video game company, or as a general startup? So many startups disappear, with nobody learning from them, in a giant churn of perpetual history.

  A: I think that is a great idea, but I will not have much time between closing Indrema and beginning the new project at Pioneer. I will have no vacation.

• Q: what was the biggest obstacle, besides financing, for the indrema box. a technical one?

  A: There were many technical obstacles. We had a tough time with heat management, latency between processes, and of course, cost to build

• Q: Is there any chance of somebody swooping in, buying the company, and finishing the project?

  A: I'm afraid I was pursuing that one about 3 months ago. Didn't happen.

• Q: Can John disclose how much money Indrema needed?

  A: I can't discuss the money specifics, but we needed upwards of 10mil.

• Q: Were ID and Loki approached for funding, or equity stake, etc?

  A: We never approached ID or Loki for funding.

• Q: Does John feel there was any pressure from bigger competition to kill the funding?

  A: I don't think there was an agenda by the competition to kill interest in funding Indrema.

• Q: John, do venture capitalists have no imagination? :-)

  A: Some do, some not as much.

• Q: Are any future contenders going to have to start with a mainstream project and funnel funding into game consoles? I see Shades of Unix wars, which may even hurt Microsoft.

  A: My suggestion to the next startup, finish product before talking about it.

• Q: Can you disclose ay information about the "next generation interactive dtv platform?" How similar/dissimilar is it to Indrema's original conception?

  A: I will inject much of the Indrema vision into the new project. It will be different. It will not be game focussed. It will be killer.

• Q: is it posible that pioneer might want in on the gaming market?

  A: Not now, but who knows? We have a lot of work even without addressing gaming, but we are looking hard at aggressive 3D.

• Q: No games? then what is in it for us wanna-be-developers?

  A: I'm not sure at the moment if it will have potential as a 3rd party dev platform. We are working out the product definition right now.

• Q: wanna give me your thoughts on OpenStream and xtreme not being released to the community?

  A: I would like to see a standard API set of robust video and thin layer graphics acceleration.

• Q: Have you ever spoken with people from MS, Sony, or Nintento about Indrema? If so, what did they have to say?

  A: We did not Speak with the competition regarding a buy-out or similar.

• Q: so what's going to happen to that chrome prototype? (ebay, or your attic? :) )

  A: That chrome prototype is mine. :) My only consolation prize.

At that point, Keri Carpenter of CollabNet spoke up:

Ok. I'm going to take over for a second. I want to talk a little bit about idn. and gamexchange going forward. This has really been a tough week for me with scrambling around to figure out how to make lemonade out of lemons.

The current status is that gamexchange and idn will continue to operate as long as Indrema (even during bankruptcy proceedings) will operate it. I also have a client in mind who you guys sort of know about that I think would be interested in investing in this *community* of linux-based console games (open source and commercial).

But what I haven't had is time to talk to all interested parties (especially them). So, where it stands right now is that I am trying to find a home for us. I still believe. and I want to see these sites that we have built up continue and to actually successfully create some great open source games.

That said, CollabNet as a business isn't in it for charity. So, what I have to do is come up with a clear business reason for keeping the sites live and for continuing to be involved with the sites. I think that if I can broker a deal with this other company, I think things will be fine. Since I haven't really talked to them, I can't say, but percentage-wise -- I think that all of you guys who are here would be philosophically in line with what they are trying to do (and they're a much larger outfit) and I know that they are interested in foraying into game development in the future, open source and not.

So, on my side, from Collab's standpoint, that's where I am. I want it to continue and will work for it, but I also need to be realistic in terms of my bosses and make sure to make a good case to them.

Then, back to moderated Q&A:

• Q: John, on behalf of the open source and small business communities, we thank you for your inspiration and your efforts. "Here's to the crazy ones", etc. :) Many of us are clamoring over your publicly released code, but a post-mortem business and product development analysis could possibly better mature the open source and small business communities.

  The community is left with inconclusive and unfortunately often cynical or pessimistic speculation.

  A: I can answer that one quickly. Timing. The capital markets are very difficult, and it takes money to build the box. I wish there was some work around to that problem, but not yet. I do see that more and more, it is becoming easier and cheaper to build an embedded prototype in your basement. I foresee much more activity that way. It will be interesting to see the progress over the next year.

• Q: Do you think you'll ever have another shot at releasing an Indrema type console, and if you do, what would/will you do differently?

  A: If I do a game console project in the future, I will make sure that the capital will be there for 3yrs.

• Q: What do you think of Nokia's plans for developing a multimedia entertainment center?

  A: I think they have a great deal of good will in producing an open platform. They seem to want to include outside developers, possibly open source some of their software. But we will see. They do not have a power 3D chip. So gaming will be limited. But they have the right idea.

He ended it with:

I have to leave now. This will be may last official visit to the chat channel. Thank you. Bye.

Well... that's it for now!

• Unfortunately I do not have a final answer [about funding] yet, I expect to have conclusion end of this week.
• Yes, we plan to use [USB] 2.0
• The dev kits should be around $600 [US Dollars]
• The mainboard, the box, the chips, the controler is pretty close [to finalized]
• [The "dev-kit"] is just a box at full price, out before the consumer box
• Indrema is looking at what can be salvaged as far a community tools if the worst case scenario happens
• I would like to hear thoughs on how IDN can survive as a general game development support center. Collabnet has expressed some interest in this idea.
• Regardless of whether Indrema releases code as open source, we would like to guage the potential for IDN and GXC
• [The certification document] has been held up until we have a conclusion on our ability to continue operating

"We are in the process of promoting community leaders to leadership roles within the IDN community. To this end, I have had internal discussions with a few members of the IDN community and asked them to take over more power and responsibility with respect to the Indrema sites.

These people now have full administrative privileges on the IDN site. This means they can change list configurations, subscribe/unsubscribe users from the lists and post web content. In addition, they have full administrative privileges on the GameXchange site as well, with the same level of access. If you have a quesiton about either of these sites, these people are a good first start to find out the answer. If they don't know they will contact me about it.

• Mark "Nurlge" Collins
• Clinton Ebadi (aka unknown_lamer)
• William Kendrick
• John Roberts (aka dorix)
• Ahmaud Templeton
• Oluseyi Sonaiya
• Dominic Wu

We're still working on the particulars and not everyone has received training on how to do everything on the system, but we're getting there. First order of business is to update the news, update the FAQs, create a newbie FAQ. Alot of this will consist of transitioning content off of other peoples' Indrema sites, making sure its accurate and posting it to make IDN a site with more and fresher content.

We are in particular need content creators and people in charge of collating various FAQs that would be of use to the community. And if you have content or other resources to contribute, please contact me."

• If we are unable to sustain funds to complete launch, then we will look at releasing the Popcorn code. [The user interface software]
• [The CPU] is 750MHz at current design.
• We have prototypes, but none are final spec.
• The NextGen console is our prototype which is closest to spec.
• If we release any code, it will be LGPL or the like.
• The NextGen pics are shots of a real box.
• It is completely possible to write drivers for digital cameras and the like for IES. This also includes removable USB storage, etc.
• The console uses the GF3
• [There's] no plan [to include normal telephony features], but others could do it
• If we wanted to profit off the box we'd have to sell it for about $500
• We like the chrome, but other colors could be released
• Any release of dev boxes and futher SDKs are pending the outcome in the next few weeks

Indrema chats are held (typically) each Wednesday at 4:30pm PST (0030 GMT, Thurs) in #indrema on irc.openprojects.net.

Lately my schedule has been filled with damage control action items. That is the cause of my lack of participation in community events lately. The damage control I speak of is in regards to our funding. We have experienced our share of dry spells in this difficult economy lately. The situation has not improved. The reality is that we have one last chance to turn it around. There is a plan in motion to obtain interim funding, but [then] I will not have a conclusion until end of this month or early next month.

So there it is. We have been working on development, however much of the hardcore stuff is waiting on the answer. I have had a rollercoaster ride this past year, but I would not change it for anything. I am proud of trying to do what I feel the market needs.

I will have a final answer on our status within two weeks or perhaps three. At that time a more concrete vision of Indrema's future will be available. For now, cross your fingers.

So there you have it! Let's all wish them luck! For the complete chat logs (when they are made available), check IDN's Chat Logs page.