as you may have read i and the former geotrax team have been working our butts off on a new product for bia-sport.com for almost a year.
i had agreed to work even harder and push another china trip in before our lawsuit to keep the bia schedule from slipping. i had been working so hard i had gotten a bit behind on billing and when i got to the states this time a lot of warning bells started going off. rather than hiring a firmware guy to work for me my boss cheryl instead hired a firmware guy and a new mba to manage the firmware guy.
she also failed to tell me she was going to be unable to pay invoices and let me put more money on my credit card and pay people out of my pocket. the bells where going off so loud that i almost did not do the trip. it seemed at the time i was getting set up to be fired as soon as i got back from china to make way for the new “team” but i was reassured that this was not the case and this was just a “temporary” problem and i/we where first in line for any money coming in. so i agreed not wanting to be the bad guy and jeprodize the project and went to china where i put in a week of 20 hour days and we almost got everything working.
apparently we did too good a job because shortly after returning from the china trip i was told i and the other guys working for me where no longer needed. by this point i was owed a total of 70k. 45k to me personally so basically i had been working the last 5 months for free. the best part was how i found out. i went to checkout the latest firmware and my login was rejected. the next morning i called my boss to ask her about it and as she told me i was fired as of that day and she had no plans to pay me and as we where on the call she shut down my email.
it is amazing what people can rationalize doing, apparently the being honest and looking out for people who work for you i learned in kindergarden and then again in the marines is lost on some people. the good news is the Singaporean guys running the contract manufacturer in china where great and expressed there appreciation of all the work we did. i hope they do not suffer the same fate as we did.
the product has great potential, the one problem the accuracy of distance at slow speed is right up our ally having done this at sport bug. had we stayed on we could have solved this. not sure how they will solve this problem probably now, probably with clever marketing!
in any case we live and learn, good news is i did get a joint ip use agreement from bia in exchange for a reduced rate for our services so stay tuned for some new gps tracking and or watch product down the road. photo of my laptop on my way to the hong kong airport in my delux van with local beer! bia watch on laptop also working.
cheers roger
