Marcus Morton is a veritable jack of all trades. From running his college radio station at Louisiana Tech University to VP/Promotion at EMI Records to motion picture producing and film writing to technology entrepreneur, his career has been dynamic and fast moving.
After selling his first tech start-up company (One Net Now) to Earthlink, he and his partner Dr. Mike O’Neal went back to the drawing board and created Network Foundation Technology, a company with remarkable forward thinking insights –
Marcus Morton has his roots in records and radio. After programming and running his college radio station at Louisiana Tech University, Morton hooked up with EMI Records in the early nineties and embarked on a music industry career that culminated with a VP/Promotion position with the label. In 1997, he exchanged the music business for the film business in pursuit of another passion. Morton produced a number of motion pictures, most notably You Got Served, a music intensive Dance film starring B2K that opened #1 at the box office. Parallel to his film producing and writing business he started a software company, One Net Now, with his tech partner Dr. Mike O’Neal, a long-time Computer Science professor at LTU. The two principals eventually sold One Net Now to Earthlink, which at the time was the second largest ISP.
Next mission was Network Foundation Technologies or NFT, a company co-founded by Morton and Dr. O’Neal. NFT is a technology that has multiple applications to the online business world. Its core technology aims to dramatically lower the costs of live and pre-recorded online broadcasting by employing a distributed system that utilizes a portion of the upstream bandwidth of the viewers watching a program to help transmit the broadcast signal on to other viewers.
Given Morton’s experience and knowledge of the radio and music industries, he feels the NFT applications to each industry promise new frontiers and limitless growth potential for both.
You and your partner are quite the entrepreneurs. Regarding your original start-up company, what attracted One Net Now to Earthlink ?
Earthlink was interested in us primarily for our technology. At the time Earthlink was the second largest ISP in the blossoming Internet business. When Dr. O’Neal and I sold One Net Now, he had to work with Earthlink for one year to integrate the technology. In fact, our entire technical staff was retained for that time period to ensure a smooth transition of the software, and many of them still work for Earthlink.
What prompted Dr. O’Neal and you to go back to the drawing board and create NFT?
We had just experienced the success of selling our first start up company to Earthlink, so
once Mike had finished working with Earthlink we started looking at where technology was going and tried to determine where we can get ahead of the curve. We basically went back to the thinking process to come up with new ideas and applications in the digital space world. At the time broadcast audio and video streaming on the Internet was starting to become the next step for website implementation and presentation. Our goal was to look at this issue pragmatically attempting to discover technology that could broadcast audio and video over the Internet in a very cost effective way. That’s when we founded NFT, with all of the technical ideas coming from Dr. O’Neal, who is our CTO (Chief Technical Officer).
How many patents do you currently hold on the NFT technology?
In the early part of this decade we started writing our patents with the focus on what the software was going to do and how it was going to do it. Then we started coding the software. We had our first patent issued in 2006. We have two other patents that are in the process of being issued, and seven more pending behind those three.
Who was your initial beta-test client and when did the testing begin?
We wanted to start small as we had done with One Net Now and gradually grow our concept. It was around 2004 that we started to roll out and search for our first beta-test client. Our first customer was Clear Channel Music Group (Live Nation) at the time. They contracted us to do broadcasting work associated with Ozzfest. It was a partnership between Sharon OsborneManagement and CC Music Group. It started as a three month opportunity and wound up being a two year deal.
How does the NFT technology work?
When doing business on the Internet, it’s all about attracting traffic, unique visitors, page views and ultimately, building a sizeable user base. NFT technology is a cost savings solution that allows you to save money in reaching your audience on the Internet by effectively addressing the issue of guaranteeing a specific quality of service to end-users regardless of the turnover that continually occurs in distributed networks as new viewers tune in to the broadcast and others tune out.
If your intent is to broadcast audio and/or video over the Internet, the bandwidth to reach consumers is quite expensive, particularly if you’re broadcasting in a linear fashion, like a radio station does 24/7. Our technology enables you to save money on the bandwidth as your audience grows, which will give you a higher rate of return on any revenue that’s generated. With the NFT player it also allows you to extend your brand in a very customized and unique way.
