Tao Group was a software company with headquarters in

Reading, Berkshire Reading ( ) is a town and borough in Berkshire, England, and the county town of Berkshire. It is the United Kingdom's largest town, with a combined population of 355,596. Most of Reading built-up area, its built-up area lies within the Borough ...

, 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 or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...

, 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 Generative music is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system. Historical background In 1995 whilst working with SSEYO's Koan_(program), Koan software (built by Tim ...

technologies and created the

Koan A ( ; ; zh, c=公案, p=gōng'àn ; ; ) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement from Chinese Chan Buddhist lore, supplemented with commentaries, that is used in Zen Buddhist practice in different ways. The main goal of practice in Z ...

generative music engine. SSEYO won a

BAFTA The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA, ) is an independent trade association and charity that supports, develops, and promotes the arts of film, television and video games in the United Kingdom. In addition to its annual awa ...

Interactive 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 is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

, JVC,

Kyocera is a Japanese Multinational corporation, 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 genera ...

HTC HTC Corporation ( zh, t=宏達國際電子股份有限公司, p=Hóngdá Guójì Diànzǐ Gǔfèn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī, first=t), or High Tech Computer Corporation (abbreviated and trading as HTC), is a Taiwanese consumer electronics corporatio ...

, 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 film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

, Sharp and

Panasonic is a Japanese multinational electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka, Kadoma, Japan. It was founded in 1918 as in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Fukushima by Kōnosuke Matsushita. The company was incorporated in 1935 and renamed and c ...

. From 2001 to 2004, the Open Contents Platform Association (chaired by Kyocera President Yasuo Nishiguchi) 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 something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion. A red herring may be used intentiona ...

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 organization, international advocacy non-governmental organization and think tank, based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German ...

Technology Pioneer and was ranked 26th in the 2006 Tech Track 100 in association with the

Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British Sunday 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 N ...

. Investors in Tao Group included

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been ...

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, embedde ...

, 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 traces its origins to the Mitsubishi zaibatsu, a unified company that existed from 1870 to 194 ...

. 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 Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

, 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", a 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 (literary theory), writing, Sound, audio, images, animations, or video, into a single presentation. T ...

entertainment to run on mobiles and other digital devices. It was also used to simplify

content management Content management (CM) are a set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. When stored and accessed via computers, this information may be more specifically referre ...

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 and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

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 computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...

. 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-accelerate ...

3D rendering * A

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

virtual machine which translated to native code * A

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

optimised for small screens * A music and multimedia mixer called miniMIXA * A

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

ringtone A ringtone is the sound made by a telephone to indicate an incoming telephone call. Originally referring to the sound of electromechanical striking of bells or gongs, the term refers to any sound by any device alerting of an incoming call. On p ...

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 Defunct software 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