Welcome
We are restarting Info Express Inc. in memory and celebration of Scott Lafferty, who died a tragic death in his home in Bath, UK, in May of 2018.
Scott joined Info Express Inc as a partner in 1986, when he was working on his first side-scan sonar imaging system. The rest of the company was dedicated to writing and publishing technical books, and Scott was totally focused on writing software and designing hardware. So it was kind of a strange working relationship. Although the rest of us couldn't help with his development work, we were amazed by what he was doing and did support him financially and administratively.
Within two years he was well on the way to success, and didn't really need our support. We split the company, giving him the name, as he had made it kind of famous when his gear found the SS Central America, the largest treasure find in history at that time. It was referred to as The Ship of Gold.
Scott moved into a larger space and hired or contracted with other people to support him, several of whom were actually good at programming or designing sophisticated hardware.
Scott spent most of the next seven years in foreign countries and aboard survey vessels, refining his software during each survey. In 1994 he moved to the UK and incorporated as Info Express Ltd. The US corporation was shut down in 2010.
I've documented much of Scott's life in a blog that you can read at www.scott-lafferty.info. If you knew Scott and can fill in any of the blank spots, please contact me.
About Info Express
When Scott was working through Info Express Inc he didn't have a web site and didn't need to advertise or seek out business opportunities. The survey industry wanted him, and he just needed to decide which company he would choose to affiliate with. His concentration was entirely on his side-scan sonar imaging software and hardware.
After he settled in the UK and started Info Express Ltd he worked with a series of companies that managed the use of his equipment and time. As he had more free time his interest wandered into other areas of programming, such as a software suite that managed all aspects of surveys being done by multiple clients, day-trading software that would theoretically allow his computer to sit in the corner and generate income for him every day the market was open, and software to interface with robotic boats and totally control autonomous ones. Most of that code was never produced commercially and is still lurking someplace on one of his computers.
When Scott died Info Express Ltd died with him, as he was the sole director. Nigel Carey, who ran several of the companies that managed Scott's work, restarted the company in the UK with the help of a few other people who knew and worked with Scott.
A few other people in the US who also knew and/or worked with Scott have re-started Info Express Inc with the intention of working with the UK company to continue and expand on the work that Scott did for so many years.
We won't work actively in the survey industry, but we will provide support for the UK company through documentation, publishing, online training, testing, and anything else that seems fun and useful.
We also have someone coming up to speed on Scott's old code, and are exploring the design and fabrication of remote-controlled and autonomous vessels that can be used in the marine survey industry.
If we can't do it, we can probably help find someone who can.
Sounding Board
To me a sounding board is a little less formal than a Board of Directors. For the most part these are people who knew Scott over the years and / or have worked with me and earned my trust. They are people I enjoy sharing ideas with and receiving ideas and opinions from in return. When our individual interests overlap, we may even work together on a project.
The goal of the company is to explore interesting possibilities, have some fun, and hopefully make enough money to cover our expenses. The exception to the just-in-it-for-the-fun part is our sister company from across the pond: Info Express Ltd.
Joan Lambert
My daughter Joan worked for me for many years before she became one of my partners in Online Training Solutions Inc (OTSI), and she has owned that company for the past 15 or so years. She has been writing and publishing books and creating online training through that company for around 30 years, and can help us do any of that stuff.
Ken Fickett
I met Ken and his wife Becky a couple days before Christmas of 1993 while my wife Grace and I were on a several-year drive around the US in an old Continental Trailways bus that we had converted to a computer workstation on wheels. We had just finished kayaking the 99-mile Wilderness Waterway through the Florida Everglades when I saw an old houseboat pull into the Flamingo marina. We were thinking about trading the bus for a houseboat in order to slowly explore the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW). I walked out to chat with the owner, and a week later we were parked on his acreage outside Gainesville learning about his boat-building company, Mirage Manufacturing (http://www.mirage-mfg.com/). We have been friends ever since. Ken is probably one of the most knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to fiberglass and composite materials. He has built boats, cars, and airplanes out of these materials.
Mark Protus
As we were wrapping up our bus trip and getting ready to head back to the Pacific Northwest a friend sent me an email introducing me to Mark, who was managing a new project at Microsoft. She thought I might be able to help with that project. When we got back to Seattle I dropped by to chat with Mark, and that was the beginning of many years of working together on fascinating projects. Mark is the best manager I have ever had the pleasure of working with.
Ken Lassesen
I met Ken while working on a project for Mark. Ken had an office that was back-to-back with mine, but a long walk via the hallway system. With only four inches separating our desks, I could occasionally overhear his conversations, and eventually walked around to see who he was.
Ken was a Senior Application Developer at that time, known as Dr GUI. Although their programming styles were very different, Ken is the only person I have worked with who I thought was as brilliant as Scott. He also brings statistics, data science and artificial intelligence skills to the table. Ken has lent me a hand on quite a few projects over the years.
Jeffrey Watts
When OTSI outgrew the three or four offices provided by Microsoft we rented about a third of the ground floor and the entire basement of an office building near the Bellevue campus. Jeffrey was a consultant to the insurance company that owned the building and we quickly became friends. As Jeffrey moved on to other projects we stayed in touch and ended up working together on a few interesting projects. We have shared some experiences over the years, both good and bad. He is someone I know will always have my back.
Harlan Moore
I met Harlan while we were setting up two classrooms in the basement of our office building. We had a contract with Microsoft to set these up for them to use for Instructor Led Training. Harlan was a salesman at Hard Drives Northwest at the time and sold me 40 computers. He left HDNW a few months later to start his own business, which he set up in a section of our basement. Harlan has an amazing ability to see interesting business possibilities in the general swirl of life around him, and to follow and develop them. We worked together on several major projects and have been good friends for years.
Nigel Carey
Nigel Carey has worked for a number of marine survey companies in the UK over the past 25 years, and always brought Scott (through Info Express Ltd) in as a primary contractor for hardware, software, and personal services.
With the blessings of Scott's sister, Kelly Jean Lafferty, Nigel, with a little help from me, restarted Info Express Ltd and will run it for the benefit of the estate and, of course, the rewards of managing a growing company.
Info Express Inc will support its sister company in any way we can. and I welcome Nigel as the first member of our sounding board.
David Gardner
I didn’t meet David until after Scott died, but he has known Scott and his family for longer than the rest of us. He knew Kelly in school, and after years of service in the Marine Corps and US Army has settled down as a civilian and become a close personal friend of Kelly’s. He has provided tremendous support during her time of grief, and I have come to like and respect him. He has technical experience and good physical and mental stamina, despite severe injuries that ended his military career.
Goals
Sometimes you start a business with very clear goals. You want to market some incredible device you just invented, or feed the homeless, or impeach a president. This isn’t quite like that. I’ve just put a year and a half of my life into managing what Scott left behind. I miss Scott and I am very sorry he died. But I would be even sorrier if all the big ideas and little projects he left behind were allowed to die with him. Watching Scott's mind work was a true joy. I can’t reproduce that and doubt that I can find someone else who can do it as well…but I do think I can find a few people who can work together to recover some of those projects.
Nigel is doing a great job of getting Info Express Ltd back on its feet. We both have some ideas about where the company can go in the future. But Nigel is going to have his hands full for the next year or two getting the company organized and back up to speed.
In the meantime, I would like to concentrate on R&D…exploring the possibilities and finding people and companies to help implement them.
Scott worked in a lot of areas, but his primary focus was on processing massive amounts of data and producing clear and useful information from it. He happened to focus on the data acquired through marine survey work. That is a growing field, and we can continue to work in it for a while; but as Scott learned, a little company like his can't go far in that field unless it is associated with a much bigger company. I think it is time to explore different markets, where we can provide services to a wider range of customers at a considerably lower rate per customer. Rather than trying to carve a little morsel out of a multimillion-dollar project, I would rather develop products that we can sell for a much lower price to a lot more people.
Nigel and I have ideas about areas in which we would like to move, and I will explore possibilities in those areas. But we have also recovered what I think is all the code Scott wrote over the past 15-20 years. One of my priorities is to organize and catalog this and then start looking for someone to start evaluating it to see how much will be of use going forward, and how much we can modify to take us down new paths.
Areas that Scott was exploring that are of particular interest to us were Drones, Autonomous vessels, and the stock market.
Opportunities
We don't plan to hire people fulltime, but we are interested in finding one or two very good Qt5 programmers. If that sounds like you, send me email or use the contact form.
Contact
For the most part we are a pretty relaxed group. We have put in our years of 16-hour days and gotten past that. But we still like to work on fun, interesting, challenging jobs. So if you have one of those and would like to discuss it with one or more of us, feel free to contact me:
Steve Lambert: [email protected]