Showing posts with label Consumer experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Consumer experience. Show all posts

22 April 2009

My Consumer Product experience

I've worked on actual physical products, some for shelves for regular consumers. You can't make money on clever software these days ---ever since Netscape, either Microsoft will give it away for free or some open-source coder will do so. So the remaining niches are where Microsoft won't go ---embedded applications, for instance. Where the code supports something physical that you can't just copy with a few keystrokes.




Z produced a consumer distributed Disk over IP box, sold to ordinary consumers via a major retail firm. I supported this device, building UDP / IP tools for technical help folks, evaluating and adding features for marketing folks, internationalizing for the Asian market. I also worked on a management tool for a business product, using Java / Swing / JNI. I was also hired for cryptographic experience. They ran out of VC funds. They had lost consumers because of flaws in their consumer device, in part thanks to the lowest- or fastest- bidder Indian outsourcing. They also had remaining flaws when they tried to deploy the business product in beta business sites.

At C I helped produce a medical device (ECG/defibrillator) for use by nurses and physicians; I helped implement the GUI and various internals, as well as ancillary Windows programs.

The company was bought and several engineers including myself were laid off. A few years later and the product is released, pictures are on the net.

At H, a medically-qualified electronic design firm, I helped refine and then implemented the embedded GUI, from the ground up, for a medical surgical instrument, for which I was lead software engineer. I helped bring up custom PCBs. I also designed and implemented a prototype system used for preliminary FDA evaluation. This involved designing a script engine, choosing I/O modules, writing JNI layers to talk to I/O modules. I implemented cryptographic authentication protocols using Atmel cryptomemories, etc. Worked on both 8-bit PIC processors and 32-bit ARM7 processors. This company grew too quickly and could not make payroll. That was a shame as it was fun to work there, smart and humourous people, relaxed conditions, combined a number of interests of mine.