it's time for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teals you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile emails pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher and while you're online maybe check out this website scorebit.io That's SCOrbit.io Why? Because I've got Jay, I've got Brian And I've got Ron here Jay Adelson, Brian O'Neill, Ron Richards Doing great things in the Bay Area And you've seen SCORBIT if you've watched InDisc If you were at TPF at the vendor booth So guys, first of all, thanks for joining us So first of all, Jay, how are you enjoying Pinball? This is amazing, it's my first one And it's the most amazing experience I've ever had in Pinball Too small though, don't you think? It's really tiny. How do you fit in here? A little crowded. It's super, super small. But I love it. It's been incredible. The people are so much fun to meet. That's the best part of the whole thing. Brian O'Neill, who I've been seeing a lot. Brian, one of the top players in the world. You and I were... Actually, you were the one who actually knocked me out at Pintastic. But I'm not surprised the way you've been playing. And that was a nice second place finish. This isn't your first rodeo here at Pinburgh. Having fun? Yeah. Pinburgh is my favorite tournament to play in every year. and I love coming back here. You like the match play just like city champ. City champ, yeah. So obviously I love match play and this is the best place to do it. What about you, Ron? What about tournaments for you, Ron Richards? What do you think? I enjoy them. This is my fourth Pinberg, third or fourth Pinberg, I think. Fourth, fifth maybe, Brian's saying fifth. I'm not nearly of the caliber of a competitive player that Brian is, but I came up in the San Francisco scene. I now live in New York and I play with Greg Pavarelli and all the guys in the Sunshine League and that sort of stuff. And I'm just having a blast. I'm actually playing my best pinball in years, so I'm having a good time. I might be C. I'm crossing my fingers. My goal was to stay out of E, and I might have made it into C. That's good. You know, when you said, I'm not as good as Brian, Brian just gave a nod like, yeah, you darn right. He knows it. Well, that's the thing. We started playing pinball together. Like, that's 10 years ago. Yeah, like 10, 11 years ago. Yeah, we were hanging out in a bar in my neighborhood in San Francisco, and there was a medieval madness, and we just got drunk and played it all night and then got obsessed, and it just happened to be the same month that the San Francisco Pinball Department League was starting up, and so we just wanted to play more pinball, so we signed up for this league, not knowing anyone, not knowing about competitive pinball, never heard of the IPA, and then we met Andre Mazenkov, we met Darren Ensley, we met all these great people who've been in pinball for years and learned about this whole scene, so it was a blast. It's been a great 10 years. And I know Jay's connection because you officiated Allison and Brian's wedding. That's right, and you better believe ever since that day I've been hearing nothing about pinball and beer stories. And so many, many times I've sat around the table with these guys, and they've told me about places like this and the tournament scene and the people they're with, and now I'm a part of it, I guess. Well, you're more than just that. As we mentioned, scorebit.io, where you can find out more information. The first time I saw it, I think, would have been, and that probably was the launch, 2018, in-disc. And what is this on the screen? The scores are immediate. They come on there. You don't have to grab paper and pen or wait to scroll through certain games where you don't see the score. What made you decide to come up with this software? I'll start with you, Ron. Well, we've been working on it for a few years now. Actually, it came from playing pinball and saw somebody writing down their high scores on the game after they finished it. And this is like before Pindigo came out, before other apps that did this. And I was like, oh, there's an idea. Make a way to keep track of your scores. Did it have anything to do with horrible penmanship? and you were like, oh, I need something a little cleaner. No, just the fact that the person who I saw do this was just doing it in a text file, and I just like, that's a very low five. There's got to be a better way to do this. So I mentioned it to Brian. He said it was a dumb idea. And then I mentioned it to Jay and he said Moved to New York Yeah and then Jay was like okay that cool Good to fun with that I not really into pinball yet um and so we kept on tinkering it took about a year to get Brian into it at the same time Jay and I were talking about projects that we could collaborate on and we were talking about a global scoreboard kind of idea for video games and then we were actually at California Extreme and Jay had the idea and he's like you know it'd be really cool if you took your score idea and you made a box that went in the machine and automatically had the score go into the app and we were like yeah that is exactly and then took about another year to convince jay to come on board with us to do it and then a few years ago the three of us kind of uh we we got we got rolling with it and finally got it built so i know nothing about software i know how to uh i guess activate it once it starts i would have no clue on how to create the stuff but my goodness if it was going to happen anywhere i guess san Francisco, it makes sense to happen somewhere in the Bay Area with all the technology there. Brian, it's been a godsend. I mean, to see how clean it is, how nice. I'm so excited to see this expand. And you play in so many different tournaments. I guess the different thoughts of where this can go is just endless. I mean, we've only seen really just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah, for sure. I mean, like I even scorekeep at a lot of tournaments too, like at Indisc and stuff. and it makes it so much easier to keep track of your scores and it sends it right to Carl's app. Never drains. Never drains, yeah. So it's amazing sort of where we can take it. We can do solid states, we can do DMDs and LCDs. And so from there we're going to go with operator features and other things like that. And, you know, when you mentioned that to me before we started recording, I was like, operators? Now what's the interest there? And Jay had some great points. I mean, if you're an operator and you have a number of machines in a region somewhere, right now, if something breaks down, you don't know until the next time you visit it. And so the idea on the simplest level is give them data around their machine being just online and then taking it to the next level around analytics and being able to optimize pricing and even dynamically change some of the pricing and features like tournament settings and whatnot. Tournament settings? Well, yeah. I mean, imagine that you have a tournament that you're running in a location, and the tournament's over. Wouldn't it be nice if everything could return to their original settings? Even the legacy machines. Right, like putting extra balls back on, some ball safes, things like that? That's right. There's many things. Like, when we ask operators, what do you want? I mean, the list is pretty long. But, like, at the very top, it's things like managing payments. It's things like managing all kinds of analytics. and of course most important of all the health of the machine is it in fact functional did the bartender shut it off because a ball stuck and can you get that thing earning again so ron you've obviously had to find out what the operators are looking for jay mentioned some of those things were there things you were surprised when you said oh i never really thought of that as you were creating this software i mean honestly no because we had thought about it and that's it you know we've been we've been uh had the benefit of all working in the tech scene in san francisco and being like second nature to us is looking at everything and how can you solve a problem? How can you use the digging is a nice sound effect. But how can you use technology to solve problems and make life better? And it all boils down to, as I explained this business to my wife, she's like, what are you doing with these pinball machines? And I just said, every pinball machine out there is not connected to the Internet. This will do that. And she's like, oh. And the light bulb goes off. And she's like, okay, yeah, do that business. It's like, okay, cool, we will. but um just you know that opens so many doors and it's basically unlimited of what you could do with it um and it's just great to see like we have we have more ideas than we have time to do and prioritizing and coming up with what the key features for operators for players for home users um and that's how you know that's kind of what we're you know running down that list and doing what we can to get it out i know brian will know this too from his connection of tournaments and certainly uh the volume of play on stern machines we heard george gomez talk about you know connectivity being the next wave for stern machines That great and that probably will be the future But as you know we talking about DMD games We talking about solid states We're talking about LCD games. So the games that are already out there won't have that connectivity unless you have scorebit. Yeah, exactly. The thing with Stern is that, yeah, with their connectivity, it's only going to work with Stern games. Yeah, brand new games, Stern games, and we work with every type of game, except for EMs for now. So, you know what? I am shocked to hear you say, for now, when you talk about EMs. And you're laughing, but I have a feeling you're going to do it. Well, it's funny. When we first started, one of the things that everyone talked to us about was how hard it would be to get technology that would speak to all these different eras of machines. And believe me, it was really, really hard. to build something that could do what it does. But EMs is another example of something that's hard. It's not impossible. We have a few different strategies on how we would attack it. It's just we're going to prioritize what the people, our customers, have been asking us for. And for now, that's solid states, DMDs, and modern sterns. And the reality is that EMs are great at a place like Pinberg or at the Pacific Pinball Museum or places where there are museums with EMs. But most bars don't have EMs. So, you know, really focusing on where the majority of the machines are DMD, solid states, moderns And that's where we'll get the biggest buck I think we want to solve the EM problem just because it's fun You know, just because it's a challenge How many solid states are even in New York? Not enough, to be honest with you That was my biggest problem moving from San Francisco to New York There's so many great solid states in the San Francisco Out in bars, a free gold watch I went to New York and it's like I can count on one hand how many solid states are out there But that's amazing And again, for those that are scorekeeping at tournaments And so all those solid states, you're like, oh, you got to wait for this to go. And there's no way to double flip and see the scores. And now when you add in the functionality of what you can do for operators, this is some big business. And I'm sure people are excited and chomping at the bit to get score a bit. And you're taking reservations now, aren't you, Jay? Yeah, that's right. We're at this point right now for the early adopters, for the people who want to get first in line, we're taking reservations. And we also have a beta program so people can sign up for our beta on our website. We have a number of people who are already beta testing it right now, like a free gold watch right now in San Francisco. If you go in, we have a number of machines that have our equipment installed. And what we're hoping is that we'll get all of the features ready for production and be able to ship early next year. As I was thinking about the different variety of tournaments, and Brian, we were talking about how much we love Pinberg and match play formats. There are a lot of different formats. flip frenzies are the thing that have really taken over over the last 18 months let's say i could see score a bit working with that yeah for sure like uh when you're playing games like when you're when you're playing games as fast as possible yeah you want to uh feed that into things like uh match play and yeah and the great dane himself andreas has already done some amazing things i love marmaduke he's awesome uh he but who doesn't right but you know the flip frenzy format that he's got on match play is spectacular. That would go so well with scoreboard. Yeah, and what's great is I work with Andreas. I actually didn't know that. That was your day job. You mean you don't play pinball 24-7? Exactly. Andreas, you know, I can just be like, hey, let's get this connected. Let's get this set up with scoreboard. I think the biggest thing is that while we're building a business and we're going to sell products and we're going to have an app and stuff like that, for us, because we're pinball players, we just want to make pinball better. Like this is our way of doing it. We're not going to make pinball machines. We're not manufacturers. Like this is our little, Andreas is doing what he's doing with his app. Carl does what he's doing with Neverdrains. This is how we can add to the scene and hopefully make the community kind of move it forward in a way. All right. Let the dumb guy who knows nothing about tech ask a dumb question here right And it not me of course I just the facilitator I thinking of the people that are listening The lowest common denominator which is my main audience All right so I got a few displays out on my machine Does it matter with score a bit No, it doesn't matter at all. I'm not replacing the displays. That's good. In fact, you know, we designed the device to be able to work pretty much with every kind of technology out there without having to swap anything out. Now, let's say you already have, Let's say you have a colored DMD in a device. We don't care because we're getting our data directly from the MPU of the machine. And sometimes we get it from the display. And sometimes we get a serial connection like a modern spooky machine, which will give it to us directly into our device. We don't care. The operator or the owner of the machine doesn't have to make any changes to the hardware inside. What has been the biggest challenge so far? I mean, I'm really not hearing any, but there has to be something that you went, oh, okay, that might take a day or two longer to figure it out. Just getting the breadth of games and recording everything and figuring out, just recording DMDs and frames and things like that. There's just so much work that's been involved, and getting to where we are today is years worth of work. But it sounds like a real labor of love. I mean, this is hopefully going to be very profitable for you. I obviously wish the best. And again, we've talked about Scorbit.io, S-C-O-R-B-I-T.io, to basically put a reservation down. Isn't that right, Ron? Yeah, you can, for $25, you can put a reservation for an order on a Scorbitron, and that $25 goes against your order. It's fully refundable if you don't want to have it. Like, we're not doing any pre-order. We're not take the money and run or anything like that. We just want the early adopters to be able to raise their hand and say, yes, I want one of the first ones. And as Jay mentioned, you can also sign up for the beta program if you want to get first access to the app. And you can sign up for our mailing list and do stuff there. And yeah, I mean, you know, it is a labor of love. Like we're doing this because we love pinball. And that's been the main driver. As I hear this, I just think, wow, this is another one of those next evolutions in pinball. Like there'll be a time if people listen to this episode on pinball profile three, five years from now, like, oh, that never used to be? I thought that was always the way. I'm really excited by this, too, and I think of what streamers have to do. And there's so many different streamers, whether it's just playing the pinball machines themselves or especially in tournaments. Papa Pinball does a wonderful job here at Pinberg. ScoreBit's really going to help streamers, too, don't you think, Jay? Yeah, absolutely. With the automated scoring, one of the things we've done is created this API or automated programming interface, which allows people to create visualizations. we've created a couple for streamers so they can put it on their their live streams and actually add it to to the screen so while one player is playing and you can't see the other people's scores on the normal you know whether it's the dmd or the display you can with the scorebit interface and i noticed that scorebit's now a major sponsor too on ifpa that was very nice of you brian yeah um you know josh and all the gang over there has been desperate for money because He doesn't want anything? Is that what you're saying? Well, we'll see what happens this weekend. What's going on? But yeah, the IFPA has been great with helping out tournament directors and organizers. And we just want to give back to IFPA and do whatever we can to help facilitate tournaments and making everything improve and get better. Sign up for Scorbit. Get registered right now. Scorbit.io. I can't thank you enough. Ron, Brian, and Jay. Thanks, guys. It was my pleasure. Thanks. This has been your Pinball Profile. You can find our group on Facebook. We're also on Twitter at Pinball Profile. Email us pinballprofile at gmail.com. And please subscribe on your favorite podcatcher. I'm Jeff Teolis.