Volume Up

The Client

Digimpro Ltd. (later known as YourSpins), a start-up founded in 2000 by professional musician Sándor Mester MS3 and several recognized IT investors, aimed to develop something called digital improvisation, a brand new concept enabling music composers to create multiple versions of the various instruments and vocals, and the multiple ways they can be mixed so that the result is a great remix of the original song, not just some excruciating music. In the early 2000s era when downloading an mp3 file of 3 MB containing 3 minutes of music took hours via ISDN, diSongs of 3 to 5 MBs were able to entertain you for several hours without repetition.

The concept attracted some recognized Hungarian artists and bands such as Korai Öröm, a world music formation well known throughout Europe, and Moby.

The Role

I was hired as a Development Manager for the company a few weeks before its official registration, and the position was later changed to Chief Technology Officer. In these capacities, I was responsible for developing the company’s IT and development strategies and plans, for hiring developers; for developing the specification of this brand new music and file format; for the development of the music editor and player software capable to play these songs; as well as for website development. I was also involved time to time in source code development, and I was responsible for developing and maintaining the core component of the technology. Tasks furthermore included production of multimedia CD contents, and several diSongs as well. The only time so far I had a contract for producing music.

The Personals

In my first job, I went off the deep end. In my second, I repeated it. Shareholders of Digimpro included some real big names such as Mr. Andreas Kemi, who had managed to make Scala Business Solutions a global player and an SAP competitor by that time, and had been busy founding Fathom Technology, later acquired by EPAM Systems to form one of the largest vendor in the IT outsourcing industry. Or Mr. Attila Reisz, who first transformed Microsoft Hungary from a simple local office to a recognized vendor, then become a top manager and shareholder of Index.hu, Hungary’s leading news and entertainment portal. Imagine what it could mean for a 23 years old boy just about to start his career.

Maybe it’s just the time adorning memories, but it was like something was really happening. I learned and received incredibly lot from these guys and the many others working for or helping Digimpro, in topics like people management, business strategy, digital signal/audio processing (I even wrote an echo effect!), creating non-rectangular windows (in 2001!), about half a dozen programming languages (Java, C++, Visual Basic, Python, HTML, CSS), great music editing and mixing tips, important guidelines on creating visual compositions, and the first experience of working full-time for a company.