"The Internet is spawning businesses that are radically different from the usual corporate culture."

CHARLES WRIGHT reports

Like your average corporation, the entity known as HiJiNX Pty Ltd, a participant in a curious new industry spawned by the Internet, has its mission statement up on the wall. Not a particularly wordy statement. In fact, no words at all.

It's a picture of a private island off Fiji called Bekana, which happens to be for sale at $990,000. The goal, which the staff believe they may actually accomplish this year, is to buy it.

To keep their focus on this highly desirable objective, they get around in casual tropical attire they dub "Bekana-wear", sharpen their reflexes for software code-writing on the office pinball machine, drift into impromptu cricket matches, and study their management bible, which covers territory unmapped by Drucker, Handy, Waterman or even the latest, somewhat fey, cartography of Peters.

The gospel for geeks is 'Maverick', Ricardo Semler's exposiiton of the bizarre system at Semco, the Brazilian company billed as "the world's most unusual work place", for such practices as allowing workers to nominate their own salaries. In Brisbane, HiJiNX is working hard at becoming at least the world's second most unusual workplace.

On this, a typical morning at HiJiNX's new office, just down the road from the 'Gabba cricket ground, the company's recently upgraded link to the Internet is steadily percolating after a hectic night on the boil.

The pay-off is at this point small, but they have assidously heated the pot every day by "putting our Internet address in people's faces" - a delicate, somewhat hazardous practice given the Internet community's opposition and likely savage retaliation to blatant advertising, or "spamming". They therefore expect a sharp increase in revenue over the next few months, as 18 months of hard work culminates in a small fleet of products coming to market.

They've pulled off a highly prized development agreement with Netscape for WebVision, a 'plug-in' to the world's hottest Web browser. It uses lip-synched animation and a text-to-speech engine to literally give a face and voice to Web home pages.

There's a shareware product called InterFACE, which uses the same technology. Judging by interest in less powerful and somewhat defective "beta" test versions - a mechanism for demand measurement unheard of in most industries - InterFACE could sell as many as 100,000 copies at $US49 each.

Then there's a "virtual world" named, appropriately, HiJiNX World, which users can navigate, just like the top-selling search and destroy game thriller, Doom. It's a more social environment than that lethal island. Rather than gunning down the faces that you meet, you can share a virtual drink with them at a bar, or shop in a department store like David Jones or Myer. Unlike Doom's killer mutations, they may pay royalties for the exposure.

Oh, and they've got a new computer game, a mildly subversive little creation called Gangster, which they expect to retail at $US69. Players start as street punks, in a world in which the Mafia godfather has been assassinated leaving the gangs without leadership. The goal is to rob banks, buy and sell illicit liquor, launder money and, by building assets, move up the ladder and inherit the mantle of leadership.

"There's no blood and guts", says co-owner Don Reid, and perhaps despite, rather than because of that, he says both Electronic Arts and Philips Media are interested in distributing it. A redeeming feature: it at least promotes the value of saving.

In addition, there's HiJiNX's international home page design service, with customers as likely to be in Birmingham, UK, as in Brisbane - it has been generating precious cash flow, as the business has soaked up every dollar of funds - to say nothing of the Internet service provider they recently bought and expanded, which sells consumers connection to the online world.

And there are some other projects that Reid and partner Jason Haks are not prepared to talk about just yet.

You might get the wrong impression, on a morning like this, when the head programmer is riding his mountain bike around the office, seeking inspiration, but this office is a hotbed of productivity, a new type of enterprise created by, and its environment and practices sharply defind by, the Internet culture.

With 10 small teams of Delphi and C++ programmers, working on different projects under arrangements that include a share of 30 per cent of profits, it's a sort of commonwealth of code-cutting.

The programmers are mostly young, ranging from 10-24, somewhat younger than Reid, 42 or even Haks, 31. Both proprietors are what Haks describes as "late bloomers". They have no background in programming having worked in sales and marketing in manufacturing, and in electrical contracting. They had no experience with PC's or online communications. In fact, 18 months ago, neither had even heard of the Internet.

They came across it largely as the result of the failure of their first attempt at a joint business. It was a takeoff of a toy game called Stax, which, Jason had observed during a trip to Disneyland, was highly popular with Amercian kids.

Reid disarmingly describes their version, Pog, as a "really stupid game, like flat marbles", a verdict that roughly paralleled the response from Australian kids.

But it apparently rekindled for the partners the enthusiasm of what New Age therapists might call their inner children. As they explored the business of toy making, Reid and Haks became smitten by computer games.

They also heard the faint tapping of opportunity announcing its presence at their doorway, despite the obvious impediment of having absolutely no programming experience or aptitude.

Another significant shortcoming was the fact that their conspicous lack of success meant they couldn't afford to buy that expertise. The solution was both desperate and ingenious: they roughed out a notice, and pinned it to every university bulletin board they could find.

Basically it announced that HiJiNX was seeking computer programmers to develop games and gave a telephone number. The phone indeed started ringing.

Haks and Reid quickly discovered a symbiotic link: where they had ideas but no programming skills to realise them, even the most ingenious computer programmers lacked commercial ideas, and had serious problems dealing with the market.

According to Haks, it wasn't so difficult putting together their first team, which started work on Gangster. Regrettably, it was successful only in highlighting one of the problems of programmers. As Haks puts it: "a lot of guys are not able to do what they think they can. Some teams just disappear because they underestimate what has to be done, or can't handle it". But as they continued to marry ideas with developers, the partners worked out what to look for. "We ended up", he says, "with a fantastic core of very talented programmers". To keep their ideas coming, Reid and Haks decided they needed to learn as much as they could about computers and money. The first step was to buy a copy of QuickBooks, a small business accounting program.

It came with a free trial subscription to the online service CompuServe. They hadn't heard of that either, but when they attached a modem to the PC and logged on, it produced a potentially lucrative epiphany.

Reid suddenly found himself in the world of online "chat" forums, and was instantly addicted. Chat is like CB radio with added testosterone, or estrogen perhaps, given the passion for gender-swapping that arises wiht the secure comfort of anonymity.

The attraction was marred, however, when the partnership got a CompuServe bill for more than $2,000 for a month of Reid's online conversation. (CompuServe's charges having since been substantially reduced). "I had to explain to Jason how I had developed this addiction", says Reid. "He's a lot bigger than me so we made a mutual agreement we wouldn't be on CompuServe any more". Instead a friend got them an Internet account, and Reid discovered even more people to chat with, using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels.

"I believe the sum total of man's knowledge is on the Internet", Haks muses, "but it isn't owned by anybody. It allows you to develop a business without all the airs and graces. You don't need a glass front office with car parking". And you don't get to dream about the office's tropical island."

The Courier Mail
Tuesday, 14 November 1995

Internet In Your Face With Interface

"A small Brisbane company is about to release software on to the Internet that has the potential to put simple teleconferencing into the hands of every computer owner.

HiJiNX, based at the South Brisbane suburb of MacGregor, has released a beta version of InterFACE to 800 people, including NET surfers around Europe, America, Russia and the Middle East.
Jason Haks, one of the Company's directors, said the Web site: http://www.hijinx.com.au had more than 1000 visits a day in the past week from people wanting to download the software.
Mr Haks said the company had been overwhelmed by the response, including a request for a beta copy of the program by an American telephone company investigating alternative communications systems.
Mr Haks and fellow director, Don Reid, said they came up with the idea for the program when they were new to the Internet and did not know any better.
Instead of instantly thinking of bandwidth problems, they came up with a good idea and then explored how they could develop it.
InterFACE, which will be released on December 1 for $60 is used with chat channels on the Internet where people around the world communicate through real-time typed conversations.
The HiJiNX directors said they would also promote InterFACE as a powerful office communications tool which staff could use over a small network.
The program can be installed on each person's PC (the first version of InterFACE is only suitable for Windows machines). A digitised face (with a wide range of mouth movements which lip-sync a conversation) and voice is assigned for each person in the conversation.
When the program is running, a face moves and it speaks the works as they are typed.
The beauty of the program is that the "teleconferencing" aspect resides on the person's hard disk and doesn't take up everdiminishing bandwidth.
The program comes with more than 20 voices, all of which can be customised with pitch and tone, and 20 standard faces.
HiJiNX developed its own graphics standard and InterFACE comes with a feature called "IDentiKit" which allows people to create the face of their choice."

The Australian
Tuesday, 14 November 1995

Playing Hijinx With Camera-Free Conferencing

"A local company, HiJiNX, has developed a unique video-conferencing alternative for the Internet which doesn't require a camera, a microphone or extra bandwidth.
A free, time-limited version of InterFACE, which simulates video conferencing over Internet Relay Chat channels, was already being downloaded 1000 times a day in its first week of release, a company partner, Don Reid, said.
HiJiNX was formed 10 months ago by a group of Brisbane programmers and business partners who agreed to waive wages for a share in the profit. InterFACE was developed for little more than the cost of feeding the programmers "lots of pizza and Coca-Cola".
The Company, which plans to release a commercial version on December 1, would rely almost exclusively on the Internet for marketing and distribution to further minimise capital outlay.
"One of our business philosophies is no shiny glass buildings", Mr Reid said. "We think the Internet shows great potential for Australia. There are no boundaries, and it doesn't matter geographically where you are."
"You don't need to set up agents and distribution in other countries." "We're going to use basically the same marketing strategy as Netscape did". Envisaged a year ago by two Internet-illiterate business partners, InterFACE was desigend for use by consumers with low bandwidth availability.
The software uses two technologies" a text-to-speech engine and an animation engine which together create an image of a talking person.
The graphic representation is handled by a file format invented by HiJiNX called Personal Information eXchange (PIX), which processes a series of pictures and animates them.
IRC users can choose from ready made identities (actors or cartoons) or create their own with an inbuilt ID kit. Users can even add scanned pictures of themselves. "We were originally interested in the IRC side of things, and we asked why it was that we couldn't have pictures and sound", Mr Reid said.
"We didn't like the answer we got - that it couldn't be done because of bandwidth constraints".

"InterFACE uses no more bandwidth than any other IRC client".

The company plans to release a speach-only version for use with e-mail in January.

The commercial version will retail for $US60 ($79.80)."