An 11-year-old boy’s terrifying battle with leukemia has led to creation of a Dana Point-based charity that brings movies, games, videos and educational content accessible on any device for children cut off from the outside world while they undergo medical treatment in hospitals.
“We exist for one reason—that is to ease the pain and suffering of sick, isolated kids,” said Jim Carol, chief executive and creator of the GameChanger Charity.
Carol, a longtime area tech entrepreneur, knows intimately about that pain.
It was his son, Taylor Carol, who was diagnosed in 2006 with a rare form of leukemia that was expected to kill him within weeks. That started Jim Taylor and his family on a five-year-long battle against the disease.
“We were humbled and slammed to the ground,” Jim told the Business Journal late last month. “It was five years of just the worst pain and suffering I could ever imagine.”
Tech Founder
Carol pioneered streaming video technology for smartphones by founding PacketVideo, a fast-growing tech company based in San Diego, in the late 1990s. PacketVideo was eventually purchased in 2010 by NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan’s largest mobile communications operator, for about $160 million.
Carol spent six years developing the new GameChanger project which launched in 2007. He visited 250 hospitals worldwide—including 180 in the U.S.—to learn what they needed. He gutted a warehouse in San Juan Capistrano to build a lab that recreated hospital rooms for testing.
Carol senior spent years building a massive server platform driven by millions of lines of code, personally enlisting help from some of the world’s biggest internet companies to pull it off. Â
He says the GameChanger technology is valuable and he asks: “Can we monetize this intelligently and do even more good?”
Amazon, Microsoft Ties
The charity’s board includes some heavy-hitters in the tech sector.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a unit of the Seattle web giant, donated $1.2 million to GameChanger Charity. AWS’ VP David Levy sits on the charity’s board as well as Tim Stuart, CFO of Microsoft Xbox; Steve Huffman, co-founder and CEO of Reddit; and Emmett Shear, co-founder and CEO of Twitch.
A 127-page U.S. patent was awarded for the nonprofit’s private, cloud-based, live-streaming content network. Carol donated the patent and all IP to his charity.
Carol, who has lived in Dana Point for 38 years, has been nominated for a Business Journal 2021Â Innovator of the Year award; the winners will be announced at a luncheon on Sept. 9.
Hospital Partners
The charity, co-founded with son Taylor, now has more than 250 hospital partners.
The GameChanger Private Network, accessible anywhere in the participating hospitals, also provides live streaming from popular content creators, songs and games—all carefully curated for kids.
The cloud-based tech platform is ad-free and is free of charge for the young patients and their families, as many of the youngsters face long hospital stays for illness and injury.
GameChanger Charity provides “a safe space for patients and families by enabling a walled-garden experience through a combination of privacy, curation and moderation.”
“Throughout Taylor’s long battle, he was forced into isolation where he would spend months alone and quickly developed a deep love for video games,” the GameChanger website explained. “They served as an outlet, as they helped him feel like a kid again, allowed him to communicate with peers, and distracted him from the harsh realities of his situation.”
The charity also provides character-based scholarships, as well as age-appropriate gifts of games and toys.
Thus far, the charity has raised more than $20 million in donations and has helped over 30,000 children and 6,500 caregivers around the world.
“We’re having an impact,” Carol said.
Revenue Generation
A 64-year-old who describes himself as a “tech nerd,” Carol is exploring other ways to generate revenue such as licensing the GameChanger technology.
“We don’t know what the final model will be. Will it be moving the tech into a stand-alone for-profit or is it smarter to license our technology to companies in this space?” Carol said. “We have proprietary technology. We have revolutionized the safe distribution of content to hospitalized and isolated humans.”
It will take a bit more time of research to map the organization’s future, he said.
“We invented this tech and it’s profound and it’s going to change the world. I can’t just keep it a small, easy-to-run boutique charity anymore,” the GameChanger Charity CEO said. “This is now the real deal.”
Carol sees a $2 billion market opportunity for the space.
“The technology will always remain with GameChanger no matter what we do. We will always maintain the rights to donate it, no matter if we sell it or license it. We’ll never give up the rights of the charity to have the first bite of the apple.”
Marrow Transplant
Son Taylor was eventually moved to Seattle Children’s Hospital, where he received a bone marrow transplant.
“He is cured,” his father said. Taylor went off to Harvard at age 17 and graduated with a BA in English in 2017, when he also fulfilled the prestigious role of Class Marshal. He now works at Lyft in the San Francisco area.
Looking back on the roughly five years he spent in the hospital, Taylor says “there’s obviously physical pain that patients endure on a daily basis” while “the sense of acute isolation is crippling.”
Gaming “created a digital community that I could be with at moment’s notice whenever I was feeling a little bit better,” he told the Business Journal late last month.
Taylor has been involved in the charity “since day one,” according to his father, who calls his son “a Dana Point kid.”
“We started it together. My son is the inspiration behind this.”Â
