Tao Group was a software company with headquarters in

Reading, Berkshire Reading ( ) is a town and borough in Berkshire, southeast England. Located in the Thames Valley at the confluence of the rivers Thames and Kennet, the Great Western Main Line railway and the M4 motorway serve the town. Reading is east o ...

, UK. It developed the Intent software platform, which enabled content portability by delivering services in a platform-independent format called Virtual Processor (VP). The business's IP portfolio was sold in May 2007 to Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.

History

Francis Charig and Chris Hinsley founded Tao Group in 1992. In the same year, the company released the first generation of its

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized har ...

, called Virtual Processor (VP). In 1998, Tao Group released the second generation, VP2. In 2002, Tao acquired SSEYO, a British audio company that specialised in generative music technologies and created the

Koan A (; , ; ko, 화두, ; vi, công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the "great doubt" and to practice or test a student's progress in Zen. Etymology The Japanese term is the Sino-J ...

generative music engine. SSEYO won a BAFTAInteractive Entertainment Award in 2001. 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 such as

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

, NEC, JVC,

Kyocera is a Japanese multinational ceramics and electronics manufacturer headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It was founded as in 1959 by Kazuo Inamori and renamed in 1982. It manufactures industrial ceramics, solar power generating systems, telecommunic ...

, HTC, Philips Electronics,

Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

, Sharp and

Panasonic formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb ...

. From 2001 to 2004, the Open Contents Platform Association (chaired by Kyocera President

Yasuo Nishiguchi is a Japanese businessman and former CEO of Kyocera Corporation. Originally from Sakai city, Osaka prefecture, he earned a master's degree from Osaka Kyoiku University in 1972. He began work at Kyocera in 1975. In September 2009, he received ...

) and Tao CEO Francis Charig looked at networked device standardisation using Intent. More than 50 companies were members, mostly Japanese.

Red Herring A red herring is a figurative expression referring to a logical fallacy in which a clue or piece of information is or is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual question. Red herring may also refer to: Animals * Red herring (fi ...

included Tao in its top 100 European privately held companies in 2005 and 2006. In 2006, Tao was named a

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

Technology Pioneer and was ranked 26th in the 2006

Tech Track 100 The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 is an annual league table published in association with The Sunday Times newspaper in the UK. It ranks Britain’s 100 private technology (TMT) companies with the fastest-growing sales over their last three years. ...

in association with the

Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, wh ...

. Investors in Tao Group included

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorola ...

Freescale Semiconductor Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. was an American semiconductor manufacturer. It was created by the divestiture of the Semiconductor Products Sector of Motorola in 2004. Freescale focused their integrated circuit products on the automotive, embe ...

, NEC, Sharp, Kyocera, and

Mitsubishi The is a group of autonomous Japanese multinational companies in a variety of industries. Founded by Yatarō Iwasaki in 1870, the Mitsubishi Group historically descended from the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company which existed from 187 ...

. In June 2007 Cross Atlantic Licensing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cross Atlantic Capital Partners LLC, acquired the business. In mid-2007 Charig founded Antix Labs Ltd, which was headquartered in Reading,

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe ...

, and employed many who previously worked at Tao. Antix built a software games player. In 2008, Intermorphic Ltd, a generative tools company established by the founders of SSEYO, acquired the entire intellectual property base of the Intent Sound System (ISS) technology (including Koan and miniMIX) from Cross Atlantic Licensing, and it is now rebranded as the Intermorphic Sound System, part of Intermorphic's "tikl tech" platform. Koan was superseded by Intermorphic's Noatikl music engine (now a component of Wotja), and miniMIXA has been rebranded and further developed into first Mixtikl, and now Wotja.

Products

The company's main product was "Intent", an award-winning hardware-independent software platform.

Intent

TAOS was the original name for Intent. As the product changed it was renamed to Elate and then finally named Intent. Tao Group's licensed product, "Intent", was a software platform provided to third party hardware and service providers. It enabled games and

multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradi ...

entertainment to run on mobiles and other digital devices. It was also used to simplify content management by delivering code in an efficient hardware-independent format. The Intent platform could be run either as the native

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

or as an application. Service code was delivered in a format called Virtual Processor (VP), which was translated on the device to native

machine code In computer programming, machine code is any low-level programming language, consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). Each instruction causes the CPU to perform a ver ...

. The Intent portfolio included support for: * C/ C++ games with

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-ac ...

3D rendering * A

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

virtual machine which translated to native code * An internet browser optimised for small screens * A music and multimedia mixer called miniMIXA * A

MIDI MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, an ...

ringtone A ringtone, ring tone or ring is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming call. Originally referring to and made by the electromechanical striking of bells, the term now refers to any sound on any device alerting of a new incoming ...

engine called the Advanced Polyphone Ringtone Engine.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Announcement of formation of Open Contents Standard AssociationTao acquires SSEYOTao ranked 26th in the Tech Track 100 and confirmation Charig & Hinsley as the foundersTao Intent Os
An earlier version of Intent described on WikiWikiWIki
Interview with the developers of Intent 2001Intermorphic LimitedAmiga reborn via Tao alliance
Software companies of England Computer companies of the United Kingdom Companies based in Reading, Berkshire Software companies established in 1992 2007 mergers and acquisitions British companies established in 1992 1992 establishments in England