Accidental invention

WESTBORO-- After spending about five years drifting between dot-com startups and raising nearly $100 million, marketing specialist Mark Anderson found himself on his couch watching Oprah, with his young boys whirling around him blasting each other with toy laser guns.
     Unemployed and nowhere near a dot-com millionaire, Mr. Anderson and his son Sean had a “Eureka!” moment. While his sons shot each other with their laser toys, he joined the fray, shooting back with his television remote, which seemed to work. Mr. Anderson said he told the boys they could invent a similar laser game that kept score and involved multiple players, unlike the relatively unsophisticated game they played in the den that day.
     “After helping companies raise about $100 million and make only $7 million, I found myself unemployed,” Mr. Anderson said. “This is what you would call an accidental invention.”
     Two years after the dot-com implosion, Mr. Anderson and his sons are marketing their invention, called TinyTag, which will be available on a limited basis in some area stores this Christmas.
     Mr. Anderson has multiple trademarks, including one for the game and another for the name SeanO Toys, the company he created to sell and market the product. A patent is pending for the game itself.
     Mr. Anderson and his sons Sean, 8, and James, 11, with the help of friends and neighbors, including Matthew Von-Maszewski and his uncle, Bob Bragg, a researcher at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, made a prototype of the laser tag game in a toaster oven. A neighbor wrote software and another acquaintance crafted the electronics. The components and wires were soldered together then baked onto a circuit board in the toaster oven.
     “Uncle Bob and I talked on the telephone several times to discuss how to properly power TinyTag,” said Matthew. “We worked through various battery type capabilities. I then experimented with circuits and changes to the toy's software. The end results amaze even me.”
     The game is simple. Two or more players zap each other with the handheld units. The units have a transmitter and a receiver to both shoot “lasers” and record hits from others. Once a transmitter records seven green lights, or scores, that player wins. If a player's receiver registers seven hits or red lights, that player loses.
     The game comes packaged with two units and will retail for $14.99, Mr. Anderson said. Once the prototype was made, the Andersons hired a Japanese company to design and manufacture microprocessors for the game. The microprocessors were shipped to a Chinese company where they were assembled, packaged and shipped back to the United States.
     The Andersons have a deal to sell them at the The Whiz on Route 9 in Westboro and have other deals pending with other area toy stores, Mr. Anderson said.
     Mr. Anderson and his sons learned much about starting a business and marketing toys -- and now they are learning even more about the vagaries of international commerce. The 10,500 members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union recently went on strike for 10 days, which closed all 29 ports on the Pacific coast.
     The Andersons ordered 25,000 TinyTag games from the Chinese manufacturer, but most of the games remain aboard an idle container ship anchored in the Chinese port of Yinkou because of the strike. The ship has been unable to make its delivery because of a heavy backup at the U.S. ports.
     As a result, the bulk of the Andersons' initial order will not make it to area stores by Christmas, Mr. Anderson said. He said about 4,000 units will be on the shelves before Christmas.
     Mr. Anderson has devised a marketing strategy for TinyTag similar to the extreme sports industry. Through a Web site, www.seano.com, and the words of Sean and James, youths will be encouraged to join the company's “Street Team,” which will pitch the game to their peers by word of mouth.
     Once they become team members, youths will be encouraged to market the game to classmates and neighborhood friends. In exchange, they can earn a discount on company merchandise and get free T-shirts, bumper stickers and other logoed paraphernalia. The game won't be marketed in Westboro schools, however, (Sean is in the second grade at Annie E. Fales School; James is a sixth-grader at the Mill Pond School) because the town's schools forbid bringing toys from home, James Anderson said.

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