A New Way of Keeping Scores
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Sitrick, who was at the rehearsal with a video cam and two members of his staff, is a cofounder and former owner of Arena Football, but the eStand is a product more in line with his own diverse interests. A Niles East High School graduate who played the guitar well enough to be offered a contract by Nashville’s vaunted Tree Publishing when he was 15 (it was vetoed by his mother), he started his professional life as an engineer for Ford. Later, as an engineer at Texas Instruments, he went to law school on the side, and in the 80s he and a brother opened a legal practice in Skokie and Chicago. (Another brother, Michael, runs a high-profile PR firm that specializes in spin control.) In his spare time Sitrick has developed networking technology now widely used in video games and helped start a company called Sigmedics, which developed a neuromuscular stimulator to help people with spinal cord injuries walk.
For years after he gave up paying gigs with bands, Sitrick continued to play with six or seven people once a month or more–and was always frustrated by the chore of getting multiple copies of the music together. “I’ve got degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, and I got to a point of thinking, this is ridiculous,” he says. “If you can automate word processing, why can’t you automate this?” Now, after more than a decade of development, an unspecified but “significant” financial investment, and a pending patent-infringement lawsuit against a would-be competitor, eStand is offering several models (student and professional, small and large) of what Sitrick calls a user-friendly “appliance”–a networkable music-display workstation that can store up to 40,000 pages of music. The music can be imported electronically or scanned in, modified on-screen with a finger or a stylus, exported to CD-ROM or another computer, sent wirelessly to other eStands, and even printed out for players to take home. Sitrick doesn’t have distribution lined up yet, but the machines, which range in price from about $2,000 to about $12,000, will be available directly from eStand (www.estand.com) later this month.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Bruce Powell, Stephen Anzaldi.
