Andre Gray, the Godfather of Internet Inventions, is a highly regarded independent inventor of Belizean-American heritage who has been ranked as the number one inventor in the world for the past 30 plus consecutive years and is widely considered one of the five greatest inventors of all time. For his world-changing inventions, Gray has been awarded a plethora of awards & accolades including the five regional NAACP Awards from Elkhart and South Bend, Indiana, Key To The City Of Bridgeport, The Washington Mail Person Of The Year 2021, and the one-time prestigious Johannes Gutenberg Inventor Prize, to name a few. A genius whose inventions have had a deeply profound impact on modern civilization, Gray is the acknowledged inventor of each of the following:
(dot) RPM: Audio Codec For Computer Music—a highly influential paper on audio compression (1982). It provided the foundational mathematical formulas for mp3, AIFF, WAV and every audio-video codec format in the world, both past & present.
“Internet Killed The Video Star” (1988) first song ever uploaded to the Internet and is now universally acknowledged to be the Internet anthem. The birth of online digital media and a multi-trillion dollar industry..
“inkling” World’s first Internet Bot –with artificial intelligence (1988). Bots are responsible for 75% of all internet activities. Internet bots drive search engines and web growth more than any other technology. Without internet bots, the web would be a lot smaller and search engines would be useless.
Voicemail Icon design (1988). Used on the Internet and now on all 15 billion mobile phones and counting. This also counts as one of Andre Gray’s great design, and is as recognizable as his Bling Coin logo design (1993) using the Thai Baht symbol, which, in turn, inspired the Bitcoin logo design two decades later.
Retrogrooves: World’s first Digital DJ turntables software (1989). Today, 98% of all DJs in the world use DJing softwares.
Electronic Ticket (1991). The travel, leisure, sporting events, live events, and every other applicable industry now uses paperless tickets around the world. The electronic ticketing industry is now a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Ringtones and Ringbacks (SYNC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE) (1994). SYNC is also the world’s first downloadable app. But more than that, the downloadable apps sector is now a trillion dollar industry and is directly responsible for creating many millionaires and billionaires. Ringtones are on every mobile phone in the world – 15 billion mobile phones and counting.
Mind-Over-Matter-Technology. (1994). Controlling electronic devices by use of the mind only. Facebook, Nissan, Neuralink and others were inspired by this technology and now uses it. Andre Gray invented this branch of science and technology roughly 23 years before the founders of Neuralink (and later addition of Elon Musk) made their public debut.
Electronic Press Kit (EPK) (1995). Indispensable online branding & marketing tool. EPK single- handedly gave birth to Social Media. Social media, be it good or bad for society, has had a very corrosive effect upon traditional media and has ushered in a new paradigm.
Microgrooves-E (1998). World’s first mobile phone multimedia player capable of playing entire albums and recording/playback of audio & video. Every Smartphone has these features now. This invention, along with Inkling bot and the SYNC Programming Language, may very well be Andre Gray’s magnum opus.
Online Music Sales Certifications (1999). Tracking music sales over the web, hence the birth of big data analytics.
SNAP (Synthesizer Algorithms Programming) (2008). Vendor neutral synthesizer programming language.
Microgrooves HD (2016) improved vinyl records format.
Microgrooves Digital (2016) improved vinyl records format.
Microgrooves Green Tea (2016) improved vinyl records format.
CYNTI: One-World Cryptocurrency. The first serious attempt at creating a cryptocurrency for the whole world to use that is geo-politically neutral.
Side Projects And Other Innovations
The Birth Of Cyberpunk Music
Gray is such a great inventor that even his so-called side projects have greatly influenced society. For instance, In 1979, while attending a routine summer school program in Brooklyn, NY in collaboration with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center headquartered at Columbia University in New York City,Gray made what he seemly thought was a simple demo of a song he cooked up in his head and brought to life through a Fairlight CMI synthesizer, the first computer the then 13 year old had ever worked with. The result was a song he titled Cyberpunk, a word he coined that is a portmanteau of Cyber from the word cybernetics and punk from the music genre punk rock. Without realizing it, Gray unwittingly gave birth to a new genre of music and a name to an entire sug-genre of science fiction which includes literature, cyberpunk anime, movies like the Matrix, Blade Runner , video games, fashion, basically a whole new dystopian world of high tech–low life.
Bling Coin Design
On December25, 1993 Gray uploaded to the internet the image of a silver coin with a Thai Baht symbol in the middle. This fictitious coin, which Gray named Bling, was supposed to be the currency used by the cyberpunks in an online cyberpunk anime micro-series he was developing, but has yet to come to fruition. The bling coin design, however, served as the direct inspiration for Satoshi Nakamoto and the Bitcoin community as the worked through various bitcoin design logos before settling for a less ornate design, but nevertheless retaining the Thai Baht symbol, so much so that Andre Gray is widely considered grandfather of the Bitcoin logo design. Today, the Thai Baht symbol is generically synonymous with all cryptocurrencies and is one of the most recognizable logos in the world on the level of Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse. This one inspirational design alone, makes Gray a great designer, too.
Hyperloops: Online Cyberpunk Anime Micro-Series
Not only did Andre Gray do much to jumpstart the cyberpunk music genre and movement with his song named Cyberpunk, but he was also fully immersed in the cyberpunk culture that on December 25, 1993, Gray uploaded the trailer for an online cyberpunk anime micro-series to the internet he called Hyperloops. Though the series has yet to see the light of day, the word the Gray coined, hyperloops, would resurface many years later as the name for an Elon musk’s project named hyperloop, which are tubes for fast moving vehicles. The Musk named hyperloop project, too, proved to be only a concept, at least for now.
Jitterbug Hover Car (Concept)
Of all Andre Gray’s inventions, designs and innovations, the Jitterbug concept hover car is the least celebrated . Released exactly at midnight in the year 2000 to ring in the millennium with the upload of four hand drawings showing the front, back, left side, and right side of the vehicle, the orb shaped vehicle initially garnered a slight buzz on the internet before it petered out by the end of January 2000. About ten later, though, a car with a very similar shape won the Chinese car of the future contest.
Occupy Mars
inventor André Gray actually started the “Occupy Mars” slogan on September 18, 2011 as a parody of the Occupy Wall Street movement which had officially started the day before, on September 17, 2011, and was trending on social media. On a more serious note, he also clearly stated that his slogan “Occupy Mars” is an audacious global calling card for the exploration of the solar system, universe and, perhaps, multiverse. A quick online forensics investigation of several of his now deleted pseudonymous Facebook and Twitter accounts traces it back to André Gray. Since then, “Occupy Mars” has spawned a cottage industry with various online stores selling mugs, T-shirts, posters, sweatshirts and many more items. Furthermore, practically every space exploration program in the world, whether government or privately funded, has adopted the slogan “Occupy Mars”, especially Elon Musk and his SpaceX company.
Andre Gray is always inventing and innovating, so there is no telling what he will invent next to disrupt an industry or create an entirely new one that never existed before. But one thing is for sure, he is, by a very wide margin, the most impactful and influential inventor of the late 20th century and early 21st century, or any century for that matter.
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