Mid 963 ARR (37 BBY)
Hursh Nalt's funeral was a modest affair.
His parents had thanked me for bringing his body back.
I knew intellectually that when someone was killed off world, unless they were especially important or wealthy, they would usually be buried in space or on whatever world they had died. I also believed…no I knew it was the very least I could do, and couldn't really handle gratitude when I felt so much guilt over what had happened.
When I had arrived back on Naboo, Cota had taken me aside and surprised me with a hug. My loyal second-in-command understanding that now both my off-world expeditions had gone awry; I just needed her support.
I had contacted Lieutenant Panaka about Hursh's death and the actions of the Trade Federation. Really there was nothing anyone could do about it; there was too little proof, it happened outside the Republic, and they held far too much power. Still, he thanked me for the information, if nothing else it added to the Security Force's (increasingly grim) picture of Trade Federation activities.
I was determined, with Cota's encouragement, to channel my feelings productively. Something Kua Tek had said had stuck with me, that Rebaxan Columni was for the benefit of all Chadra-Fan. She had meant this very literally; Rebaxan was effectively a state-owned corporation, which accounted for more than 80% of Chad's planetary economy.
Theed Tech was my company, even with the small pieces I had given to key people (and Zomir), it was my personal property, and I wasn't going to change that. It felt important to keep clear control of my innovations and Theed Tech was my vehicle for change, but what did I want that change to be?
Yes, I liked making money, I really did. I would receive a weekly update from our Head of Finance, Eloy Chi showing how many credits were coming in and it gave me a small thrill of success every time. Despite this, I did not feel like the goal was just to be as personally rich as possible. If I wanted, I could sell TheedTech right now and already have enough money to buy a nice villa in Naboo's wine country, living in luxury for the rest of my life.
On Earth, I believed there were generally two kinds of tech billionaires. Those that claimed their technology made the world a better place, and those that believed their tech and wealth gave them the means to make the world a better place.
The first group made themselves as rich as possible and said the world would be better because of the great things they were making. Sure, tech can change people's lives for the better, but I didn't believe it inevitable. Just look at the galaxy I was living in; despite incredible technology existing, there remained was all manner of horrors as well.
The latter group used their wealth to fund huge charitable endeavours and applied their technology to solving societal challenges. These were the group that had inspired me in my old life and were in someways what I hoped to be in this one.
Maybe I was viewing them through rose-tinted glasses, and their apparent generosity was all some elaborate tax scam, but I wanted to emulate the spirit at any rate. I also didn't want to fall into the trap of saying I'll do something in the future, and never actually getting round to doing so.
I therefore decided that every year from now on, 10% of Theed Tech's profits, would go to fund a charitable foundation. I decided to name it the Theed Tech Trust, further amusing myself with the alliteration in English. Now I just needed to work out what it would actually do.
I had spoken to Kyla about my idea after the funeral, and she looked at me with so much pride I couldn't help but smile. Kyla had completed her training and was now a senior medic, and had all sorts of ideas for how such a trust could help. So, I made her the co-chair alongside myself.
Obviously, seeing as she was only 29 and completely inexperienced in this field, it was a choice some might question. However, I felt a senior medic at least has some credibility, and was certainly no less equipped for the role than I was.
With the trust set to receive tens of millions of credits in its first year alone, there would be money enough to hire experienced staff to actually manage the organisation day-to-day. I would have Aria support the trust as she did Theed Tech itself, so it would probably end up the most efficient charitable organisation in the galaxy.
We would have many decisions over the following weeks about the different things it could help with, but one thing we decided very quickly. The trust would give grants to young adults from working class families, to help with the costs of training for a professional role. These would be named "Hursh grants".
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While I had not had as much time to focus on my research as I would have liked, I kept playing around with the code of different devices, trying to think about what additional software could be added to our SuperPADs.
I remained deeply frustrated at having no means to create my own games yet, there just was no good starting point to adapt with the very limited ability to manipulate the code available to me.
I had attempted to have Aria analyse code, using her powerful analysis processor and protocol droid grade translation tools. For whatever reason, she would just get very confused whenever she looked at it and even perhaps a little upset. When asked about it, she said it all just 'felt wrong' and that she didn't like it. It is hard to say the extent to which Aria's feelings are genuine emotions or simply means of communicating errors, but it seemed unwise to push her either way.
My best theory is that something in the droid operating system is designed to prevent droids from understanding it. Some ancient failsafe perhaps, which may in part explain why coding is a lost art. If you need droids to understand the ancient languages and encryption in code, but the droids themselves cannot read it, how do you go about researching it?
However, I had managed to come up with two new features by analysing the code of other devices. The first of these was the ability to connect to external earpieces and other audio devices. I believed it would make a huge difference to user experience, rather than having to always find a quiet corner for a private conversation.
It had proven quite tricky to get the devices to use their transmitters' short-range linking capabilities, akin to Bluetooth on Earth. There was not one consistent protocol used, instead many different bits of code for devices with different origins. It had therefore taken analysing a very large number of comm devices to get the function to work as I intended.
The second function was in a similar vein, text messaging, sort of.
Our devices did not have a keyboard or a touch screen, so we didn't have a means to input text. What we could do however, was enable the device to render voice recordings into text and then transmit these messages in text form. Similarly, a received voice message could be converted into text.
I wasn't sure how popular this function would be in practice, but I saw this at least a stepping down towards a texting function in a future device if we could develop a suitable input medium.
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It seemed that identifying the traitor in Rebaxan Columni had significantly reduced the attacks on their ships. They had probably been feeding the Trade Federation the shipping schedule. The first few shipments had come through safely, though one of our own chartered ships had taken some fire from pirates before managing to escape into hyperspace.
Having finally settled our supply chain issues, and Jaarl having gotten our production lines humming along, we were finally starting to reduce our order backlog. As I was learning throughout this process, solving problems, usually meant creating new ones. Solve a supply problem then you need to streamline production; to streamline production, you need more supplies.
Having somehow managed to both secure our supply chains and increase our production efficiency, we needed to think more about sales and distribution. We had been getting orders from people through word-of-mouth and then delivering the SuperPADs through a third-party droid courier service. This was fine for hundreds or thousands of sales, it was really not going to keep up with hundreds of thousands of sales.
I had gone to Cota with a strategy based off some experiences from Earth, that I thought would suit our needs. I wasn't an Apple person, I gamed on PCs and I had an Android phone, like any thinking person should. However, I grudging admit to some of Apple's clever business tricks, which might work here, namely the Apple Store.
We had considered selling our products on to existing retailers, but I felt that building a connection with our customers was important for the long term. We didn't want to just sell them one product, we wanted them to keep buying products and services. Cota was rightly concerned that we only had one product, so it would be quite an odd shop. This led to accessories and customisations.
We would initially only be selling one real tech product, the SuperPAD, but at the Theed Tech store, you could pay for a different colour case, pad bags, shoulder straps and so on. Given the art driven culture on Naboo, we would eventually have artists design accessories, just like I had seen Asherré do with painted flowers on her and Kyla's pads. All of these things cost virtually nothing to produce, and we would similarly sell with only small markups, but the point this would all help make the SuperPAD itself an exciting product as possible.
The staff would be able to help with common technical issues, and install software upgrades as we rolled them out. For the launch, the staff would be able to install the communication upgrades I just invented for a modest fee of 100 credits. We would also sell some ear pieces thar we knew worked seamlessly with the pads.
A fashion retail giant in the UK called Primark, was famous for almost never advertising. They would instead just open a big shop in the most prominent location in a town and let people's natural curiosity do the rest.
Cota loved this idea, but she had a way to top it. We had the means to send a short holo-message to every existing SuperPAD on Naboo. The message would just say Theed Tech, then give a time, date and location, nothing more. Sure, these people already had their pads, but it would create enough of a fuss to get the store attention.