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SpectraCal, LLC is a privately held Washington State corporation which develops and markets CalMAN, the leading home theatre calibration software. The founders of SpectraCal have many years' experience in technology industries. |
Bill Blackwell
Bill got bit with the home theater bug during his college years working in the warehouse of a high-end electronics retailer in Houston. In his off-hours, he would sneak into the store's THX-certified demo room where he would watch demo loops of Indiana Jones and Star Wars on a 10' wide CRT front projection system. |
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This passion was rekindled and redirected more than a decade later with the release of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on DVD when all of the beards of the Rohirrim in that seminal work appeared to have an algae infestation on his new DLP front projection system. After failing to find a suitable option to correct this travesty in the sub-$1,000 price range, Bill decided to create one and began working on the spreadsheet model that would ultimately become CalMAN 1.0.
Professionally, Bill brings to the SpectraCal team an extensive background in statistics, marketing and sales logistics. He has a BA and an MBA from Rice University and is a member of the Houston chapter of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). |
Derek Smith
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Derek has been developing commercial software for over twenty-five years, including a decade when he was Vice-President of Software Development at one of the first Internet software companies. In addition to developing innovative software products, Derek has also built custom solutions for many of America's largest tech companies, including Microsoft, Motorola, Cisco, IBM, and Honeywell. Although he has designed software at all levels, his native habitat is the lowest levels of the software stack, interacting with drivers and hardware. At SpectraCal, he has designed and built the Calibration Optimization and Reporting Environment (CORE) engine that gives CalMAN its unsurpassed accuracy. In addition, he has devoted the incalculable hours required to ensure that CalMAN supports essentially every hardware device associated with generating or measuring color. |
Derek has a long-standing interest in automobile racing, and he has contributed several inventions to the field of automotive electronics. His do-it-yourself approach to home theater extends all the way to building his own speakers, and his desire for accurate color led him to find Bill and CalMAN 1.0. |
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L.A. Heberlein
| L.A. has been working with Derek since their daughters were infants, and both daughters are now grown women who have moved away. L.A.'s years of software development have primarily involved leading small teams who were the first to create software in novel environments: the first team outside IBM to develop an operating system for a new IBM processor, the first services brought to market for Microsoft Windows NT, the first ports of large UNIX applications to Windows, first Internet email server for Windows. |
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| L.A. was happily pursuing a remarkably unsuccessful career as a novelist, poet, screenwriter, songwriter and playwright when Derek recruited him to join SpectraCal. "Just when I thought I was out," he has been heard to mutter, "they pulled me back in." |
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