The PiranhaCam
You know that old saying, “If only I knew then what I know now!”? If you watch enough YouTube, you realize something strange is going on. Look at the people who are considered” influencers. ” The name implies that other people are watching them and taking their advice or doing what they do. The popularity of these people says a lot about American culture.
If a guy goes on YouTube and describes a software platform that would solve world problems, he’d be lucky to get any views. No one would consider me .. I mean him as an influencer. But if a woman in short shorts walks up to a strange man and says, “Slap it or kiss it,” she gets 1 million views. It seems like the dumber the action, the more people are influenced by it. If only I knew this 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, I was that woman. Well, no, I mean, I did something that was so ridiculously dumb it gained media attention around the world.
Photo of Fish in our 200-gallon tank. The largest privately owned school of Piranha.
I enjoy meeting unusual people. Some people are rejected just because their mannerisms seem “strange”. Maybe “It takes one to know one” but they do fine with me. I met a brilliant guy working at a pet shop. He was working in the fish department. We got to talking, and it turned out he was an engineer who quit his job to work in the fish store. He told me he had a 200-gallon fish tank full of piranha in his basement.
At that same time, I was trying to promote my company, Floater Corporation. As stated above, Americans don’t want to hear about innovations that can solve world problems; they want to see dumb stuff. In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, I’m a guy who likes to do things no one else has ever done. Kind of like the guy that climbed the mountain “because it was there”. Same principle except done by an out-of-shape engineer.
In the early days of the web, connectivity was minimal, and there were no streaming web cameras. I invented a streaming camera and pointed it at the piranha tank. I imagined it would show piranhas being piranhas, eating stuff.
I took my VHS video camera, put it on a tripod, and pointed it at the tank. I had it film short videos and then upload them to a website. I had a viewer that showed one video after another. It wasn’t streaming as we think of today, but it was closer than anything anybody else had done. It was called The Floater PiranhaCam.
Almost overnight, the PiranhaCam became one of the busiest websites in the world. It was even listed in The Web’s top 5%. Granted, the web was a tiny fraction of what it is now, but everyone was trying to get a piece of it. The PiranhaCam was discussed all over the world. I even saw a clip of it on Japanese TV. But the high point of my life was almost being featured on the David Letterman show. He did a segment called Stupid Pet Tricks. I was doing a stupid human trick by filming my hand in the tank with some food. In reality, piranha are very shy, and I didn’t think they would go anywhere near my hand. But they did, and we got a video clip of a piranha, maybe half an inch from my finger. I didn’t make it onto David Letterman, but I did get a lot of publicity from this. Unfortunately, Business people, or those who could’ve helped me with my company, had not yet adopted the web and thought I was just nuts. My board agreed. I was told, “Stop wasting your time; the web is for idiots!”.
If you look at books written then, such as The Web Top 1000 or The Web After Work for Dummies, you will see the PiranhaCam prominently featured. The PiranhaCam was another example of the value my life has added to society. Who doesn’t love a stupid website?
The following image is from the book “The Web After Work for Dummies”
Fun Facts
1:
In captivity, piranha are shy. Even after dropping food in the tank, piranha would ignore it as long as I was in the room. This “shyness” made simulating live video even more difficult because my rig had to work automatically with me outside the room. I was working with a rigged VHS camera And digitizing the video required with additional hardware.
2:
During the time of the PiranhaCam I was running my startup Floater Corporation. I had a surprisingly powerful board of directors. I had not yet been labeled a Super Predictor, and for all they knew I could have just been a dreamer. The app was the first artificial intelligence and should have been known to everyone. It would have been a very important application were it not for the fact that I am unconnected and have no one to interface with me and the people with money.
Members of my board were greatly irritated at the time I spent building the PiranhaCam. They repeatedly told me that investing my time on the web was a waste of time and that the web was unimportant. Further, no one would watch video in a browser, and the technology I was building had no value.