SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ENTERPRISE : A Little Knowledge : Young Firm Aims to Make Learning a Multimedia Adventure
Nearly every week at Knowledge Adventure’s nondescript headquarters in La Crescenta, the company’s chairman and founder, Bill Gross, watches as a group of children compare his latest experiments in interactive educational software--”Bug Adventure,” say, or “The Discoverers”--to video games like “Streetfighter II.”
And nearly every week, he says, they like the video games better.
“We want to make open-ended exploring as exciting as a regular old video game, and we’re getting there--I see glimmers of it from the kids who use our products,” says the intense, bespectacled Gross. “But we have a long way to go to compete with MTV and ‘Streetfighter.’ ”
Nonetheless, the glimmers were bright enough to attract the attention of Hollywood producer-director Steven Spielberg, who last week said he plans to develop multimedia software projects with Knowledge Adventure. He has also made an equity investment in the 3-year-old firm.
Like many multimedia investors, Spielberg is taking a flyer. Knowledge Adventure had sales of $18.5 million last year, but no profits. Yet the company is growing fast, with sales expected to reach $35 million this year, it says. Its crowded offices are bursting at the seams. Staff meetings are held in the hallway. The work is so intense that Gross often sleeps only a few hours a night.
One sign of Knowledge Adventure’s growing pains came in February, when Chief Executive Rod Turner resigned, citing a difference in visions for the company. Insiders said Turner wanted to take the company public sooner than Gross thought prudent. Gross says the company will go public eventually, but he won’t say when.
More important than Spielberg’s investment, to Knowledge Adventure, is what he can offer in prestige and creativity. Revered in high-tech circles as one of the few Hollywood types who understand how to blend entertainment and technology, Spielberg was courted by a range of companies involved in multimedia, from video game firms to software giant Microsoft Corp. That he chose Knowledge Adventure reflects the ascendance of interactive learning in a field long dominated by what are known in the industry as “twitch games.”
Spielberg was not available for comment, but his business manager, Gerald Breslauer, did not rule out the possibility that he would make another multimedia investment as well.
For the moment, the $6-billion-a-year video game business is where the multimedia money is. By contrast, American consumers bought about $400 million worth of educational computer programs last year. But multimedia analysts and an increasing number of entrepreneurs like Gross believe that learning is the most natural application of the new technology, which lets users jump around at will through reams of video, graphics, text and sounds stored on a shiny CD-ROM.
In an interview with The Times earlier this year, Spielberg said he had no interest in producing “interactive movies” or video games, where players choose plot variations and different endings.
“I bemoan the loss of control,” he said. “It would be like making a film just to have everyone remake it over and over again.”
But the director--known for his films “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jurassic Park” and “Schindler’s List”--spent hours playing Knowledge Adventure’s CD-ROM “3-D Body Adventure” in the glass-walled conference room at his Amblin Entertainment production company a few months back. The program enables the user to fly around inside the heart chambers and arteries like a molecule traveling through the anatomy in a sort of multimedia “Fantastic Voyage.”
“He played every single module!” recalls Larry Gross, vice president of customer satisfaction, who accompanied his older brother on the visit. “It was pretty fun to see my brother . . . knocking the socks off Steven Spielberg.”
By all accounts the chemistry between Spielberg and Gross was key to the director’s decision to work with privately held Knowledge Adventure, which just hired its 100th employee and boasts only about 4% of the educational software market.
For his part, Gross likes Spielberg’s films all right. But the self-described “total engineering nerd” was most impressed by the Hollywood mogul’s fast-paced brainstorming on how to improve products like “Body Adventure.” So far, the firm’s CD-ROM titles--including “Dinosaur Adventure,” which came out by happy coincidence around the same time as Spielberg’s dino-thriller “Jurassic Park,” last summer--have been more like multimedia reference tools than stories.
“But he took one look at ‘Body Adventure’ and said, ‘That human body should walk on, look down, and notice he has no clothes on,’ ” Gross remembers. “We would never have thought of that.”
Nerd or not, Gross, 35, has some idea what it takes to run a successful business. Raised in Encino, he and his brother started out as a team at Portola Junior High, where they found they could buy candy bars in bulk for 4 cents each and resell them for 9 cents--a penny less than the local candy store.
Moving on to Caltech, where the introduction of the first IBM personal computers changed their lives, the brothers started a firm called Gross National Products. They developed two programs that made the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 easier to use and accepted the firm’s offer to acquire their start-up and employ them at Lotus’ Cambridge, Mass., headquarters.
By the summer of 1991, Gross’ son David was 4 years old and about to start kindergarten. Like all kids, he liked to imitate his dad, which mostly meant sitting at a computer and typing away. In his quest to find something more appropriate than business applications for David to play with, Gross came across a multimedia Beethoven CD-ROM (now available commercially from Microsoft).
“I had goose bumps all over my body about how great Beethoven was,” Gross says. “It let me in on a non-academic way to discover beautiful things on my own.”
A few months later, Gross founded Knowledge Adventure, collecting venture capital funding and investments from Paramount Communications Inc. (now a unit of Viacom Inc.) and AT&T; along the way. But as part of the democratic culture he strives to instill, Gross has made sure more than half of the firm is owned by its employees.
Although Knowledge Adventure is still losing money, its products have met with critical and commercial success, and it continues to churn out new ones. In the past few months, for example, the firm has shipped five new products, including an interactive version of the IMAX movie “The Discoverers,” which producer Roger Holzberg describes as “30 minutes long and eight miles wide.”
At the title’s premier at the IMAX theater in Los Angeles, Knowledge Adventure invited previous customers to watch the movie and then play the interactive version on computers set up outside the auditorium. Michael Lamb, 13, thought it was pretty neat, though “Bug Adventure” remains his favorite: “The praying mantises are cool.”
