2010 was a year of change in the Spinning Guy’s life, and 2011 looks like it may be similar. Right now, though, I’d like to talk about some of the things I’m doing and something I’ve actually accomplished.

Since April of 2010, I have been working for Intellitar. The company’s name comes from Intelligent Avatar. What we do is make intelligent software avatars. The work is interesting, fast-paced, and quite a change from my usual database and data analysis work. Right now, we have two products – Virtual Eternity and Intelligram – based on our core intelligent avatar technology.

Virtual Eternity is a legacy building product. The concept is you create an Intellitar, train that Intellitar to talk like you do, and leave that Intellitar as a legacy for your descendants to speak with when you are gone. People seem to have two reactions to the product – “cool!” and “creepy!” In fact, quite a number of people have had both reactions. The technology is quite interesting and we continue to add features. If you are curious about building an Intellitar or serious about leaving a legacy, Virtual Eternity is a great place to start exploring the capability of intelligent avatars.

Intelligram is an e-card product. Upload a picture of yourself to be animated, record the message you want to send, pick a background, and send it out. When the recipient gets the card, your eyes blink, your head turns, and your mouth moves when you speak. It’s just plain cool. It’s a much simpler implementation of our technology and because it delivers a simple recorded greeting, it doesn’t require our ai on the back end. For me, it’s a fun product and I see potential to expand into corporate communications as we continue to add features to this product. If you’re really interested, you can click here to see a sample.

Right now, I’m hard at work on a third implementation. It’s actually very similar – and very different – from Virtual Eternity.

Oh, and since this is a spinning blog, I do have knitting on the needles – or I did until last night when there was this terrible incident of stitches falling off a broken circular needle …