YellowDog

Idea

Introduction

YellowDog releases the spare processing power from people’s computers, giving computer users money for nothing.

This is then offered to animation studios giving them their own personal supercomputer to improve how they render animations.

We believe this has the potential to create the world’s fastest super-computer. There are 8.8 million people in the UK between the ages 24 & 35; there are 2.3 million students in higher education, 89% have laptops. If we joined together all these laptops we would create the fastest supercomputer the world has ever seen, over 4x the current fastest. That’s enough processing power to render a film like Toy Story in 1 minute 12 seconds.

Intended impact

93% animation studios interviewed by YellowDog have problems with turning their computer models into the final film, a process called rendering. We have found that:

• They run out of computer power. In the words of one animator, ‘there’s never enough’. This causes project delays and may result in additional capital spend on IT equipment.
• When the rendering is outsourced to external render farms, the time the job takes and its cost are unpredictable.
• Render farms often have complex IT processes; complexity that the artistic animators do not want to be troubled with.
• It’s not unusual for there to be errors in the final rendered animation from render farms.

YellowDog will change everything about how studios render animations. YellowDog would provide:

1. Predictability of cost and time taken. Studios only get charged what is quoted and the time taken to process is precisely calculated up front.

2. Ease of use: compared to many technically complex render farms, YellowDog is very easy to use and interact with.

3. Control. Studios decide when their project would be completed: the faster it gets done, the higher the price.

4. Quality: every processed frame is checked using advanced algorithms to ensure its quality.

We believe this will help studios control and save costs, do more render jobs every week and, most importantly, keep their clients happy.

For the computers users, YellowDog gives them money for nothing.

This could be a cash payment straight into the bank, or a donation to their chosen good cause. The amount would vary depending on the power of their computer and how long it’s available to YellowDog. A computer that’s less than two years old and is used eight hours a day would earn £5 a week. £260 a year.

Substantial accomplishments to date

January 2015:

• YellowDog was incorporated in January 2015.
• YellowDog was accepted into SETsquared – a high tech/high growth business incubator in the South West of England.
• Proof of concept built showing that the speed of rendering jobs can be increased 10x by parallelising the processing over multiple computers.

March 2015:

• Product development ready for pilot launch in July 2015.
• YellowDog trailer website launched (www.yellowdog.network) capturing additional market data:
o 89% studios who responded want to be kept up to date with how YellowDog progresses. Four beta customers identified.
o 98% computer users would be interested in renting out their processor for a reward.

Monetisation strategy

The YellowDog business model is two-sided:

1. Animation Studios pay YellowDog for the amount of computer power used to complete their render.

The price is set per hour and is charged by the second. The more computing power the Studio requests, the higher the price and the quicker the render completes.

2. YellowDog rewards Computer Users whose machines are used to complete the render. 15% of the overall cost of the job is distributed across all the computers used to carry out the work.

3. YellowDog pays royalties to the providers of the render engines.

Use of proceeds

This investment would be used to accelerate YellowDog's commercialisation, making sure we incorporate feedback from the pilot.

The £150,000 will be allocated:

• R&D: 65%
• Marketing: 18%
• Payroll: 12%
• Office and Admin 3%
• Ops: 2%