Thursday, August 4, 2005 9:42 AM CDT
CHS grad frustrated by his slow computer invents radio device
By NATHANIEL WEST, Staff Writer
CHESAPEAKE BEACH, Md. -- Thanks to his computer's painfully slow processing speed and his addiction to soccer, Andrew Leyden faced a difficult choice:
Keep listening to the soccer match over the Internet, or finish writing a memo to his boss.
"I stopped writing the memo and started listening to the game," Leyden confessed.
"I thought I needed a more powerful computer. Then I said, ‘Wait a minute, I just need a ‘black box.' And that was the beginning of a very strange life."
Six years and numerous adventures later, the Charleston High School graduate is close to releasing the invention spawned by his soccer/memo dilemma. And the realization of his black box concept, now called the "PenguinRadio," can play Internet radio broadcasts without the aid of a personal computer.
"It's an Internet appliance," said Leyden, 39, of Chesapeake Beach, Md. "I invented it because I wanted to listen to a soccer game."
His father, Michael Leyden, is a retired Eastern Illinois University professor, and Andrew Leyden grew up in Charleston hanging out with other professors' kids.
After graduating from CHS in 1984, he went on to the University of Illinois and then to the University of Notre Dame Law School.
Five years ago he was working in Washington, D.C. as legal counsel for the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, which "handles all telecommunication and Internet issues," said Leyden.
On that fateful day when his computer couldn't manage both the Internet radio and word processor programs, he dreamed up what would become the PenguinRadio. Leyden soon cannibalized an old personal computer, installed a Linux operating system (a penguin is the Linux mascot), and created his first black box.
He quit his job as an attorney, got funding from a number of venture capitalists, and started his own company.
Then the 9/11 terrorist attacks derailed the operation, as the market for his product evaporated.
Leyden fired his staff and instead worked for more than a year installing telecommunication systems in remote areas of Russia.
That ended when a Russian tabloid accused him of being a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency.
(He actually was employed by the U.S. Department of Energy "and I was not working for the CIA," Leyden noted.)
Following about six months of good old fashioned rest, he found that the market for Internet gizmos had revived."We were back in operation, building these radios," he said.
The PenguinRadio is about the size of a clock radio, or a small VCR, according to its inventor. He found the smaller "embedded" chips necessary for the radio's smaller size at a Netherlands-based company, which actually imports the parts from Asia.
Leyden's gadget connects to your home computer network (such as your ethernet) or it can be plugged directly into a phone line for dial-up Internet access. While there is a speaker on the radio itself, Leyden recommends using the RCA jacks to connect the device to a stereo system.
When it's released in about six weeks or so, the PenguinRadio likely will sell for about $250.
"But we're not totally set on that," Leyden noted. "We want to get it between $200 and $300. That's the ‘one spouse price point,' where one spouse can buy it without the permission of the other."
Michael Leyden, an avid listener to a London radio station that transmits over the Web, plans on using his son's invention once it becomes available.
"It's so creative," he said. "The PenguinRadio is just an incredible idea."
An interesting side note, the whole PenguinRadio project has produced offspring in the closely related "podcasting" world, where portable music players can download audio files from the Internet.
When Andrew Leyden's company developed an online directory of all Internet radio stations (www.penguinradio.com, naturally), it also created a similar directory for podcasting (www.podcastdirectory.com, naturally).
And the latter has proven much more popular than the web radio directory — so much so that Leyden was interviewed by Newsweek magazine about the popularity of certain searches in the podcasting site.
Alas, much to Leyden's chagrin, the most popular searches are for pornography, not soccer.
Contact Nathaniel West at nwest@jg-tc.com or 238-6860.
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