Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006 - 37

tial, but they also needed to create policy and procedures for inventors
who were students, and thus not employees of the university. Considerable care was taken not to pressure any of the students to assign their
rights to the university; the professors did their best to assure them that it
had no bearing on their course grade. In the end, the students decided
that they needed the university's resources if anything was ever to become of the inventions, and that assignment of ownership might just lead
to an exciting adventure and perhaps some pocket money.
CSURF determined from their preliminary keyword search of the
public patent databases that there was no "prior art" (U.S. patents filed)
describing a DMX512 device similar to the PCBox. And they felt that the
invention had commercial potential. They then advised, as a precautionary measure, that the team not share their plans, prototypes, or product
specifications outside the original circle of inventors without a Proprietary Information Disclosure Agreement (PID) in force. Signing the PID
was a requirement for the five new engineers joining the company.

We have a Deal!

RAMBox Inc.'s Second Year
In September 2004, the second year's team needed to be brought up to
speed in order to carry on the technical innovations of RAMBox Inc.
They were given an initial assignment to build from scratch handsome
and rugged prototypes of the PCBox, the FOGBox, and the SLIDEBox.
They also added a number of improvements to RAMBox's, product
line. The first improvement was providing DMX addressability for the
controllers (until this point, all DMX addresses were hard-coded to each
device). The new team also rewrote the software for the PCBox so that its
graphical user interface was easier on the slave computer's system resources. They also developed a fourth product, the WALLBox, which was
a DMX controllable power outlet strip that would allow DMX-control of
any appliance plugged into a wall outlet (e.g., a fan for dispersing fog or
smoke). A new invention disclosure was filed with CSURF for the
WALLBox.

Seeking a Licensee
Cleveland visited the LDI trade show in October 2004 in order to contact
a number of manufactures about RAMBox's products. In particular, he
wanted to meet with Josh Alemany of Rosco Laboratories who had been
told about the idea for the PCBox early in 2003 when the project was still
incubating. Alemany and his colleague, Rosco Software Product Manager
Miles Dudgeon, took some time out from the trade show to hear a description of the product. They were intrigued, and Dudgeon agreed to
meet with Cleveland to see the product in November. Demonstrating the
improved PCBox went off without a hitch, and Rosco was interested in
the product!

Assigning Rights and a Full-Blown Demonstration for Rosco
Once Rosco had expressed an interest in the PCBox technology, the
CSURF Marketing Associate, Tara Marostica, moved to secure the ownership rights from the inventors-from both years. Once the assignments
were all in hand, Dudgeon was invited by CSURF to come to Fort Collins
to open discussions for a licensing agreement. By that time (spring

THEATRE

DESIGN

2005), robust prototypes had been built, and a five-minute stage show was
produced for Dudgeon with the RAMBox products playing starring roles.
The entire presentation was programmed and controlled in a Horizon lighting controller. The guest of honor engaged the first cue and the
RAMBox devices took over from there. The FOGBox first triggered the
F100 Smoke Generator to fill the stage with smoke and subsequently the
WALLBox turned on a box fan to disperse the smoke. The SLIDEBox then
advanced an Ekatgraphic projector and a PowerPoint presentation, controlled by a PCBox, played a video while audio cues, programmed in SFX,
were triggered by a second PCBox. The presentation was flawless, and
after a question and answer session with the engineering and marketing
groups, the company management headed for a preliminary negotiating
meeting with CSURF and Dudgeon.
The semester closed with a demonstration of the second-generation
products at the 2005 Engineering Days the following week.

TECHNOLOGY
SPRING

2006

During May-June, 2005, Tara Marostica of CSURF crafted the agreement
with Rosco. CSURF had made a significant investment in researching
prior art for the project and formulating the assignment documents for
the undergraduate inventors, so they needed to recoup their "start-up"
investment before they could financially reward all of the inventors for
their efforts. Since this was the first technology developed by undergraduate inventors to be licensed by CSURF, they recognized all of the undergraduate inventors with the Technology Transfer Undergraduate
Entrepreneurship Award in June. The agreement between CSURF and
Rosco was finalized on July 6, 2005. The rights to the PCBox now belonged to Rosco and they christened their new product Keystroke.
Jennifer Chan rewrote the final version of the PCBox software
graphical user interface that was used in the April show for Dudgeon.
She was contracted by Rosco to write the final code for the Keystroke application. It had been hoped that more of the team members would be
involved in the actual transfer of technology to Rosco, however, only her
expertise was needed to prepare the software for market. The graphical
user interface was redesigned to be even simpler and more flexible for
the user.

Keystroke Debuts at LDI
Dudgeon shipped Keystroke prototypes at the end of August 2005, for
beta testing, the last stage of testing before commercial release. Chan was
responsible for the final refinements in the code and Cleveland tackled
rewriting the Help files which would eventually go into the Keystroke
User Manual.
Although Keystroke was not to be officially launched until the LDI
2005 trade show in November, Dudgeon sent two of the prototype units
to the PLASA show in London, September 10-13, to at least introduce
Keystroke to the European market. Responses from attendees were extremely positive. Designers and technicians from many different markets-university and small theatre groups, as well as higher end
production designers-immediately grasped how Keystroke could simplify their projection installations. Moreover, several excellent suggestions were made for using Keystroke to control sound programs and

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2006