Binomial stuff

One MS employee recently said to Stephanie (my partner) that (paraphrasing) "your company isn't stable and can't possibly last". My reply: We've been in business for over a year now, and our business is just a natural extension and continuation of our careers. I've been programming since 1985, and developing commercial data compression and other software since 1993. I've been doing this for a while and I'm not going to stop anytime soon.

Having my own small consulting company vs. just working full-time for a single corporation is just a natural next step to me. One thing I really liked about working at Valve was the ability to wheel my desk to virtually anywhere in the company and start adding value. I can now "wheel my desk" to anywhere in the world, and the freedom this gives us is amazing.

Binomial is a self-funded startup. We work on both development contracts and our current product (Basis). We haven't taken any investment money. Our "runway" is basically infinite.

Basis status

Just a small update. We've put like 99% of our effort into ETC1 and ETC1+DXT1 over the previous 5-6 months. Our ETC1 encoder supports RDO and an intermediate format, and has shipped on OSX/Linux/Windows. I've been modifying the ETC1 encoder to also support DXT1 (for our universal format) over the previous few weeks.

Our ETC1 encoder was written almost from scratch. The next major step is to roll back all the improvements and things I've learned while implementing our ETC1 encoder back into our DXT-specific encoder. crunch's support for DXT has a bunch of deficiencies which hurt ratio. (Roy Eltham and Fabian Giesen have recently pointed this issue out to me. I've actually been aware of inefficiencies in crunch's codebook generator for a few months, since working on the new codebook generator for ETC1.) I'm definitely fixing this problem (and others!) in Basis.