Late 961 ARR (39 BBY)
According to my admittedly small focus group, I now had an actual marketable concept that could have genuine mass appeal. Now I had to work out how to go from a concept to a galaxy filled with devices based on my technology.
I could try and sell my code knowledge to one of the big droid manufacturers of the galaxy like Industrial Automaton or to a datapad maker like Microdata Technologies. In theory, I could happily grow fat on royalties for the rest of my life, as these giants churn out products without me having to lift a finger.
On Earth this might well have been the best option, with innovators regularly selling their ideas or small start-ups to the giants to cash in. However, in what little I knew about the hyper-corporations of this galaxy, there would be just as much chance of them stealing the knowledge or burying it to protect the status quo, assuming they agreed to meet with me at all.
The alternative would be to quietly create and grow my own technology company, building from scratch and hope not to be noticed by any big players until I had built up a bit of profile and security.
I was only ever going to choose to go my own way. Thoughts of becoming a self-made tech zillionaire, with my inventions being used across the galaxy, really was too enticing a dream not to pursue.
I decided to name this future industrial giant, by the obscure generic name Theed Tech. The alliteration was catchy in English for my own amusement, but in Basic, it was suitably boring.
Zomir was cautious, and was planning for his retirement in the near future, but he really had taken a liking to me and couldn't deny the potential. He helped me with registering Theed Tech as a company with the Naboo Commerce Authority.
The flimsy forms were tedious and involved dealing with lazy officials who really had little interest in a young man's small business. I didn't have big investors or any real starting capital, so they just assumed I was applying to be a small trader like Zomir, not worth anyone's attention.
One worry I did have was intellectual property. On Earth, I'd be technically seen as having stolen the code from various other products, but as far as we could make out, this wasn't really a concept in Republic law.
You could patent physical designs, and there were all sorts of laws around creative stuff, but code was seemingly open source. This was evident by the fact the same code was being used by thousands of different companies across the galaxy. Besides, I really doubted anyone would have the faintest idea what I had done anyway.
---
I had been experimenting at making Ari like devices with different droid-brains. Ari's Intellex III was overkill for the functions I had built in so far, so not really a sensible option for a production model.
The most practical option was from the MSE mouse droid. These were pretty much the cheapest droids you could buy and were made by a company called Rebaxan Columni, who marketed them as pets with questionable success. They used Reba-5C droid-brains, which while being among the cheapest on the market, were far more powerful than the processors of holocomms and datapads, so more than adequate for my quasi-smartphone. Another selling point was that Rebaxan Columni was based on the Outer-Rim world of Chad and wasn't a member of any of the core-centric hyper-corporations.
I did a deal with Zomir, he'd help me pay up front for the parts for one hundred devices, and we'd split the profits 50:50. If I managed to sell them, he'd introduce me to some parts wholesalers. He didn't ask for anything more than that, but I resolved to give him a small piece of the business if I made a success of it. I really felt I owed him that.
With the droid-brains sourced, the other parts weren't that difficult. Given my device was still going to be a bit larger than a personal holocom, I could use a reconditioned droid holoprojectors and transmitters, which were cheap and easy to get hold of. It appeared the expensive part of a holocomm was its small processor, with the comm programming. Having easily copied that code into my budget droid-brains, there was no real barrier to producing a very affordable device.
Datapads and music players were inexpensive by comparison, and I could get their parts cheap too. I had to compromise on the datacores, they would be far smaller than Ari's but for still able to store hundreds of songs and books so it hardly mattered.
The casing cost almost nothing, using a fabricator for a plastic object cost about 2 credits and took mere seconds. Materials science and fabrication appeared to be one area of technology where this galaxy was unambiguously beyond Earth. That and spaceships I suppose.
I had carefully redesigned the device, getting the resulting weight down to a little under 2kg for something that looked like a 7" tablet computer. It had a thick bezel with the holoprojector buttons for some of the datapad functions, with a datachip reader on the bottom. The lack of touchscreens and the still hefty weight made it far less ergonomic than anything that would be acceptable to an Earth customer. On the other hand, the voice control was far more consistent than the likes of Siri, and something the people of the galaxy were used to using.
A unique characteristic was something I taught each droid-brain as part of its initial configuration. In essence, it would be possible to install additional programmes through the datachip reader. In a galaxy where any upgrades or additional features required new hardware, this would be paradigm breaking in the long term.
It's a big ask for people to shell out for a new device every generation for just a few new features. On Earth many people keep their smartphone for multiple generations, and in this galaxy, people are used to keeping things like droids for decades. By contrast, a small fee for a credit chip to install additional functions, much more reasonable and meant I would aide in building a dedicated user base, rather than always looking for new customers.
Making a hundred of these myself by hand was a truly tedious process and made me yearn for future days where I would have employees, or likely droids, working my assembly line. I toiled away and very soon I had my first handful of devices, though I wasn't going to be making money on these immediately.
---
It was the morning of the 828th Festival of Light, and I was in the living room of Kyla and Gavin's parents, who had invited me to stay with them for a couple of days. Lars and Sunde Pannian, both worked for a plasma mining company and were frequently out of the city on business, so I hadn't gotten to know them well despite my closeness to their children. They were delighted to have me over now, with Asherré also joining us so I didn't feel I was imposing too much. The older Pannians were not fans of King Veruna apparently, so felt no need to go to the main festival in the square, preferring a family evening.
The food was simply divine. Despite being a lush planet, Naboo is not a big food producer. Not counting the aristocratic wine makers, there were only a handful of orchards for fruit and shaak herders, to supplement the grains, vegetables and nutrient bars imported from agriworlds in the sector. Regardless, the success of the plasma industry meant Lars and Sunde could afford to put on an excellent spread.
Shaak pot-roast with five-blossom bread, fresh muja fruit all complimented by our favourite Tarul wine. They even had a small bottle of the rarer Blossom wine, which smelled wonderful and was only brought out for special occasions.
The Festival of Light didn't have a gift giving tradition, but I had decided it was the perfect time to give my friends and business partners their very own Theed Tech SuperPAD-01s! This earned me many hugs and kisses from the excited Kyla and Asherré, and an awkward pat on the back from Gavin.
Yes, the name is cheesy, though pretty typical for the electronics industry here. I'd even spared a couple for Lars and Sunde to their surprise, especially when they heard how much I would be selling them for. This wasn't just generosity though, it was marketing; I asked that they show their SuperPADs to all their friends and colleagues.
The previous week, I had filed my patent with the Naboo Commerce Authority, this was the most tedious process so far, sitting in their office with a protocol droid going through flimsy forms for hours. Once completed, the patent would be valid for the Chommell sector, which contained Naboo. It would be sent on to Coruscant for consideration for the wider Republic.
Of course, the patent could be tied up in Republic bureaucracy indefinitely, but really my device was better protected by secrecy than any patent. Without understanding how to copy code from one kind of device to another, it would be impossible to reproduce.
Another challenge was working out a suitable price point. A personal holocomm costs around 2000 credits, a ridiculous amount of money given that the entire manufacturing cost for my first batch of devices was around 400 credits each, not accounting my hours of boredom assembling. Zomir paid me 1000 credits per standard month, which was a generous wage for retail, and this seemed a reasonable price for my versatile device. It would be an affordable luxury, that almost anyone could reasonably save up for.
If the first 100 we sold went for this price, the business would make 60,000 credits. Naboo didn't have a sales or value added tax as I remembered from the UK, but businesses paid an considerable 35% corporate tax on their profits. 15% of this for Naboo and 20% to the Republic, which seemed pretty oppressive.
Apparently, members of the Trade Federation and Commerce Guild could get huge exemptions to these and there were lower rates in the core worlds. For small independent businesses in the Republic's rim members, these oppressive rates had been in place for centuries. The idea of incentives to support start-ups and small businesses was a distant fantasy.
After giving a Zomir his cut I would still make almost 20,000 credits, or put another way, two whole years of my already generous shop wages.
---
It took less than three weeks to sell the lot.
I shouldn't have been surprised really. Everyone I had shown a SuperPAD had wanted one, it was that simple. The ability to make holocalls on the go, for half the price of a normal holocomm even despite the larger form-factor, would have been enough on its own. The other functions put it into a whole other league.
The older Pannians had made it a must have item for those traveling for work amongst their plasma industry colleagues. The only hard part was persuading some people that this wasn't an elaborate hoax.
Some doubted that I had actually made them in my bedroom. One potential customer even suggested that I must have stolen them from some advanced military research lab, which I guess is no more implausible than using knowledge from another reality.
Zomir had let me resign from the shop after the first week, I was enormously grateful for all he had done to help me start out. I offered him 10% of the business but he argued me down to just 1%, he insisted that would give him all he could want for his retirement with the success he expected me to have, without any further effort on his part.
I offered my other friends similar deals, but all steadfastly refused. This was my success, and they didn't want to take what they saw as my money. I resolved that they would at least never have to pay for any of my future products and services. It feels like the least I could do.