Spending time in Karl Smith's Allentown workshop, it's easy to be captured by his enthusiasm for his invention: Truest North Compass.
"This compass takes you where you actually want to go, some place you actually care about," he explained.
More a "storytelling device," Smith's invention is programmed to always direct its owner toward their favorite spot on Earth. Of his early customers, 15 or so couples have used it as part of the wedding-engagement stories. Others have selected their own unique locations. The customer chooses; Smith's programming work obliges.
A former software programmer with a PhD in Biophysics, Smith sees romance in how his compass helps people "celebrate stories that shouldn't be forgotten."
The obvious question that went unasked: to what location would he program his personal compass to point? A likely answer would be to this spot in Buffalo where he has worked to perfect his idea. He and his wife--a medical resident--and their young child moved here from Pittsburgh 18 months ago.
"I really love the entrepreneurial lifestyle of every day there's problems to solve and I have no idea how to solve them," he laughs.
"I fail a lot, but when I do succeed, it's pretty great because, you know, I'm doing something that nobody has had to figure out before."
Asked for an example, he goes down a wormhole into the cinematic world of "The Matrix" where he learned to work around the interference caused by the device's magnetometer. Reviewing the transcript of our conversation multiple times, I get lost as he explains how Neo saving the world from destruction provided a lesson on how to save his invention.
While that technical expertise helped to secure jobs at Google and Amazon working on Alexa "and a couple of other places," Smith's imagination is its own powerful motor. He says he was "making the rent" as a children's storyteller, "Doctor Sparks," a gadget-filled character who toured the Northeast until the Covid-19 pandemic brought an end to the fun. Smith credits a high-tech game of hide-and-seek devised for his young niece and nephew for jump-starting the push to "Truest North Compass."
Smith reflects on his time in Big Tech programming software on "important things, but they were so abstract it was hard to derive a lot of meaning from it." The results from great effort might produce "minuscule improvement" for the user. It's different when he hears from customers of Truest North Compass.
"It just makes me feel like I've done something I can hang my hat on. This is a really cool thing people like."
