A true pioneer of the computer era has developed a product in Fredericton that simplifies media production and is now preparing to use it to help manufacturers and companies demo their products.

Dhomas Trenn is the head of OneSimpler, a Fredericton company that is marketing MasterControl — a single platform that lets the user control a range of devices on a single tablet or panel, even if the controls on those devices are markedly different. It has already been adopted by some of the world’s largest media companies, which use it in production of film, music, video and other media. Producers in these fields often have to adjust the sound, lighting, camera shot and other factors, and doing so from a single dashboard makes life easier for them.

“MasterControl is designed to allow you to master all the subsets of features on devices so you don’t have to be an expert on every device,” said Trenn in an interview. He said that using MasterControl can simplify complex tasks and increase production quality while it reduces training time.

In 2017, Trenn plans to push MasterControl into a new market. Manufacturers and tech companies have to demo their products, and resellers of these products often have to demo more than one product in a sales call. MasterControl can help them simplify the demo process, easily achieving tasks like instant replays, or switching seamlessly between demos of different products.

The story of how Trenn got to this point spans four decades, back to 1976. At 10 years old, Trenn was one of the first people in Canada to own a personal computer, and one of the country’s first developers.

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For the last 40 years he has been working as a freelance technician and programmer, developing technology for clients all over the world, especially in the media business.

He understood that producers had a problem: their production shops contained all these different devices and they could not master all of them. So Trenn came up with MasterControl to fix the problem and used it in his consulting contracts.

The media companies liked the solution so much that many asked to buy MasterControl and use it in their studios. So Trenn realized that, first, there would be a market for the product, and second, that it may extend beyond the media industry.

He took OneSimpler through the latest cohort of the regional accelerator Propel ICT and is now examining how to expand from a lone wolf programmer into a growth business.

“I now have a much better appreciation of all the components in the bigger picture,” he said.

He’s looking for a partner on the business side to help him scale the enterprise. That partner might bring capital or maybe they would work together to find funding for the company’s growth, he said.

In any case, he does plan to grow the business and is now looking into hiring staff for the first time in his 40-year career. The larger team, he said, will work at getting MasterControl in the hands of manufacturers and tech companies.

“We now have two manufacturers who have both expressed that they are opening it up to their reseller chain to see how it goes,” he said.