Business
Seeing Through the Brick Walls
By John Fleming
Sep 7, 2003, 16:25

Seeing Through the Brick Walls

I graduated from the University of Arizona in 1977 with a master's degree in Instructional Media. I had studied photography, video, sound recording, movie-making, and various other media. I was full of enthusiasm and ready to share my knowledge with eager students. Then I hit my first brick wall. The jobs available in school districts were chiefly what I call bulb-screwing. There were no audio-visual programs where I could teach what I knew about making productions. Rather, my job would have been maintaining AV equipment, replacing bulbs in movie projectors, and helping teachers set up tape recorders, slide shows, and filmstrips. This wasn't at all what I had in mind, and so I decided to go into real estate, thinking I could use my skills to make productions for myself that would help sell properties.

When I first worked at C-21 Frontier Realty in 1978, I took photographs of all my listings and made presentation boards to display them in the office. Other agents admired the quality of my pictures and began asking me to photograph their listings as well. I was happy to do so (for a fee), and soon I had a regular clientele. Agents are often short on cash, so I initiated a system wherein I was paid for my productions out of the agents' commissions at closing. It worked very well.

Then I began doing video. My first video camera was a huge, heavy instrument with an equally heavy battery pack. I had to have Marge carry the pack while I wrestled with the camera. Sometimes, to get good angle shots, I had her drive our van while I sat on top of it taking shots of the houses. At about this time we established a corporation and called it Video Listings, Inc. Our idea was to show videos to customers to attract them to the properties. I made some fantastic productions, but then I hit my second brick wall. At that time (25 years ago) almost nobody had VCRs. How could they see my artistic and informative videos? Answer: they couldn't. I decided Video Listings was an idea whose time had not yet come.

I gave up on video and even stopped doing photography, going back to print media, as you read in the last issue of this paper. Flyers and newspapers had the advantages of being familiar, cost-effective to produce, and easy to distribute.

Our first exposure to computers occurred when Marge and I took a course at the University. We had to go to the computer center on campus, sign up for a time, and work with large, intimidating machines after having first worked with small, intimidating punch cards. We also sat through tedious lectures on COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and other computer languages. Another brick wall--this was not a direction we wanted to go.

Then personal computers came on the scene. We could have one in our home. We didn't have to sign up for time on the University's machine, redo wrongly punched cards, or listen to lectures. We were in control.

Our first PC in 1979 was a Radio Shack TRS-80. It had what I called "Chiclet keys." They were square like Chiclets and often jammed in the lower position, having to be pried out with fingernails or a knife. The computer would hold only about 8 pages of double-spaced typed text. Data storage was on a sound cassette tape with an external player. There were no different fonts in our software program, and Marge was frustrated because she couldn't even underline or italicize book titles with it. We used a dot-matrix printer with a ribbon that gradually wore out just like an ordinary typewriter.

But computers improved. It wasn't long till we had upgraded to an XT. It was a box with a 20-megabyte hard drive (that's megabytes, not gigabytes), enough for about 20 frames in today's digital movie, just about enough for a one-second show. After that we had a 286, then a 386, then a 486, all the way up to the Pentium 4's that we're using today. Each one had more speed and memory than the last; the hard drives now surpassed 120 gigabytes. (A byte is the equivalent of 1 character. A kilobyte is 1,000 bytes. A megabyte is a little over a million bytes. A gigabyte is roughly a billion bytes.) A computer with 120 gigabytes can store 120 billion characters. Now I hear they're coming out with a terrabyte optical drive that will hold a trillion bytes, a far cry from the 8 pages of the TRS-80. And laser printers make possible professional-looking text, as well as photos and graphics.

The increasing complexity of software programs demanded computers with greater memory. Meanwhile Internet users were putting pressures on hardware and software manufacturers, demanding more speed and sophistication. Our first modem delivered at a speed of 300 baud per second–then came 1200--then 28,000, then 56,000–now ISDN telephone access at 128 kilobytes per second and climbing.

Computers are getting smaller but also more efficient. The first computers in the 1940's filled entire rooms. Recently I bought a new Kyocera 7135, which is a Web phone that fits into my hand. More than just a computer, it is a voice-activated Palm Pilot and cell phone, which stores names and information on all of my clients, and can call any name on the list automatically. Of course it also has a Web browser, and I can check my e-mail or listings and photos from anywhere.

Everybody now has VCRs. In fact, they're becoming obsolete.  Digital video makes possible the compression of information. As opposed to our ancient analogue video camera, my current digital camera weighs only about 4 pounds and measures 12" x 6" x 3.5". And that includes a playback unit as well as a recorder. In the past I would have needed $50,000 worth of equipment to edit effectively; now I can do it all on the computer. With cable operating at even faster speeds of up 3.5 million bytes per second, it has become possible to make, store, and transmit productions efficiently and economically. Our company, Video Listings, like Lazarus, has risen from the dead and crashed through the brick wall onto the electronic superhighway. We are in the process of developing a new Virtual Office Website at www.videolistings.tv (yes, tv; it's one of the new extensions). It will have video-integrated Flash sites and real estate data base search engines for our clients.

The brick wall is down. Delivery of audio-visual productions has never been easier. I can videotape the exterior of a home, then follow a real estate agent through the interior, showing every room in virtual reality, while recording what she says. Within days I can have her presentation sent off to her clients over the Web, or mailed to them on a DVD.