A surprisingly small Paris-based company that’s been around for a surprisingly long time, having accomplished a surprising number of accomplishments, given their surprisingly sparse revenues.

STG Interactive was started in 1999 by Alexis Tamas (tech guy) and Amaury Grimbert (biz guy) with the intention of changing the world through frogans. From what I gather, the further they got into the endeavour, the more they realized that, if they were going to make the idea work – really work – they would have to take responsibility for all aspects of the technology.

For instance, in 2001, they had the first version of Frogans Slide Description Language (FSDL) completed and the first version of the Frogans Player ready. But the company who they had contracted to set up their address server clusters had dropped the ball, and that forced them to withdraw the release date. Since then, the main frogans network has been built “in house” (hosted in a carrier hotel on the Internet backbone), and is ready to roll, and FSDL v.3.0 and the new Frogans Player are getting their final tweaks.

Today Amaury and Alexis are still at the helm of this continually small, yet far more mature company, set atop an Internet-wide address-networking system, and nestled in the same four-room office in Paris. There are about six or seven people here on any given weekday, and for the moment I see a lot of code being churned out.

The big push now is to get FSDL 3.0 and the new Frogans Player finalized and ready for download. Only then will the public will be able register frogans addresses and that the revolution can get under way. It’s no small matter, because it’s the sale of frogans addresses (1-year address, 12 bucks a pop) that’s going to pay, not only the 7-plus years of R&D, but also the continued operation of the main frogans network, as well as the continued development of Frogans technology.

These are exciting times.

“If we were the Monkees, we’d be ready by now.”
– Frank Zappa