FWIW- I'm pretty sure this is the guy who TDII is working with. I've emailed him to confirm and get any other information I can about what's going on here.
Alan Fetzer has over fifteen years of experience as a senior executive in the Information Technology, Videogame, Internet and Telecommunications industries. Fetzer's business skills include business development and venture financing for early-stage companies and negotiating strategic business partnerships with large corporate partners in North America, Asian and European markets.
Fetzer has served as an advisor to leading Silicon Valley technology companies; managed one of the first digital special effects film studios; overseen the creation of dozens of video and software game titles for a major game producer; and served as a technology consultant to Fortune 500 companies.
Fetzer has advised senior executives at top technology and entertainment companies on how to best integrate their products and services with emerging digital media and the World Wide Web. His clients have included major corporations such as Twentieth Century Fox, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center, Antec Corp., a developer of fiber-optic television cable systems, Virgin Digital Studios, Toshiba and Zing Systems, an interactive television consortium consisting of TCI, Continental Cablevision, Comcast, and Mitsui Comtek.
Fetzer's ties with the entertainment industry go back to Boss Film Studios an Academy Award winning special effects studio where he served as chief operating officer from 1991 to 1993. While at Boss, Fetzer pioneered the development of one of the first high-resolution digital studios using Silicon Graphics workstations, IBM supercomputer technologies, and advanced software applications from Wavefront Technologies, Alias, and Softimage. Combining his management skills with his knowledge of emerging digital technologies, Fetzer supervised the production of award-winning digital special effects for such films as Cliffhanger, Last Action Hero, andTrue Lies as well as nationally broadcast TV commercials for clients such as Acura, Budweiser, General Motors, and McDonalds.
Earlier in his career, Fetzer was recruited to become president of Taito Software, the North American subsidiary of Taito Corporation, a $1 billion company based in Japan and the world's largest operator of coin-operated arcade games. From 1986 to 1991, under Fetzer's direction, the company's sales in North America rose to $50 million with distribution in over 15,000 retail outlets in North America. Several of the 50 software titles developed during Fetzer's tenure became international bestsellers and many garnered awards from Newsweek, Parent's Choice, and the Software Publishers Association. An innovator in the field of interactive multimedia, Fetzer managed development of game titles for a variety of hardware platforms, including Nintendo, Sega, and multimedia home computers.
Fetzer's previous work experience was in finance and management consulting. After graduating in 1981 from Yale University with a Master's in Fine Arts, Fetzer went directly to Wall Street, where he applied the rigorous discipline of his first love, classical music, to venture capital and corporate finance. He completed several private placement and IPO financing deals, and then joined Data Resources, Inc. (DRI), the economic consulting division of McGraw-Hill. As a management consultant, from 1983 to 1986, Fetzer advised members of the Fortune 100, such as Exxon, Texas Instruments, and General Dynamics, on the financial and economic outlook for their markets.
Well-respected in both the digital production and multimedia industries, Fetzer is a frequent guest speaker at conferences concerning emerging digital media and new technologies. He has chaired panels on digital editing tools and MPEG compression, as well as on film and television production at the I.E.E.E. Compcon annual conferences in San Francisco. In addition, Fetzer serves on the Council for the Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which supports the arts at MIT.
Aside from business, Fetzer plays and records classical guitar music (he began his career as a virtuoso classical guitarist while still a teenager), converses fluently in Spanish and Portuguese, and fly fishes for trout.
