ABOUT

I’ve been doing software development for over 20 years, but that’s just the sunset of my career. Before that I held quite a variety of roles from setting up a large Internet business to working on machine learning 20 years before it became chic.

I’m also a sexagenarian, hence my Twitter/X handle is @sexadegen, although most people seem to think that that means I’m a sexy degen, and let’s face it, who am I to argue?

For the past 7 years I’ve been working on the folio ecosystem as a side-project while I worked full time as a dev. When I started work on the folio project my initial focus was very much on creating personal life stories and the ability to persist them into the future so that we could leave a permanent record for our ancestors, the family historians of the future.

In reality, the roots of the folio project go back 20 years to when I co-founded a company called Clippz. The concept behind Clippz was to deliver short-form video to mobile devices in a cost-effective manner. Remember, these were the days before iPhones so video on mobiles was a real novelty.

One of the ambitions I had for Clippz was to be able to approach content rights holders about the possibility of taking their long-form content (e.g. a movie) and breaking it into smaller chunks so that people could enjoy bite-size pieces, a collection of their favourite scenes from movies perhaps.

The problem that we faced initially was a lack of a unified digital rights management solution across a variety of manufacturers, then the iPhone came along and everything changed. I parked the idea of short-form mobile content (TikTok anyone?) and moved on to app development.

Over time, I started to realise that what I was building has applications outside of personal history and the ghost of Clippz started to stir. I released that a folio could be a wonderful tool for commercially distributing short-form content, and many of my demos: Harry Potter, The Matrix and The Hobbit have showcased that concept. However, the DRM problem remained. It’s one thing to mock up a demo of something, but it’s another to translate it into a solid commercial platform.

Enter the blockchain. Crypto technology allows us to solve that problem, and I’ve built the solution into the folio apps. So in many ways we are at a major milestone. On one hand I’ve reached the culmination of something that I have been working on for a long time, and on the other we are at the beginning of a whole new media format.

I’m really excited to see what people create on top of what I created.

Phil John: August 2024, sexadegen[at]gmail[dot]com