LIVEdigitally

I first met Blake and Jason Krikorian at CES 2002, while working for Mediabolic and demonstrating the Pioneer “Digital Library”, a home media server device that was way ahead of its time (and unfortunately never shipped). I still recall the day in May 2004 when Blake called my cell phone and said “what are you doing for lunch?” and upon hearing I had no plans, told me he’d pick me up 20 minutes later. Odd, considering he lived in San Mateo, but that is exactly what happened. We went to Johnny Rocket’s in San Francisco then followed it with a coffee in a Starbucks. About 30 seconds later, Blake’s pulled out his Thinkpad, connected to the WiFi, and started watching and his controlling his TiVo back in San Mateo. By the time I heard the first “do-doo!” sound, I knew I was in (although my buddy Ron repeating the phrase “take the job, take the job” to me about 15 times certainly helped).

My first actual day of work as VP of Product Management was almost three months later, in August 2004, after my wedding and honeymoon. I shared an office with Blake, Jason, and Dee (the uber-executive assistant), and was immediately tasked to write the spec. A couple of hundred pages and a week later, I had a draft. I believe that was the last time that document was ever viewed, but needless to say, we built our product. Our first semi-public showing of the “Slingbox” was at Fall RetailVision 2004 where we won the Best Hardware award, despite not showing the hardware to a single person during the show. Very good times.

Next up was CES 2005, where we formally unveiled the Slingbox at a small “pod” booth in the Innovations Tent. Yup, that’s right, Tent. That was a great CES – the entire team (9 of us) worked together really tightly staffing the booth, doing demos, getting food and beverages, and working the typical18-ish hour days. We captured some phenomenal media attention during the show, and were truly overjoyed when we learned we won the Best Home Media Device award in the Best of CES Awards. This was a very gratifying moment for me personally, as the previous year another product I had a big hand in building and demonstrating (the Denon NS-S100 home media server) won the Best of Show (overall!) award. It’s not quite like the Habs winning 5 cups in a row, but it’s probably about as close as a geek like me will ever get!

My next big demo was a month later at the Texas Instruments Developers Conference, where I joined VP Greg Delagi on stage to demonstrate the Slingbox to about a 1000 TI developers. I demoed after SawStop but before Wakamaru. Nice placement, I must say. Now to properly set up the moment you have to understand, we only had a handful of working Slingboxes at the time, and they were a little delicate. While hauling around my demo kit, the connectors slowly got loose enough to the point where the cables didn’t always fit in right. During my demo, as is the rule, everything was going wrong. When a VP from TI came over to help hold in the cable, he accidentally broke the connector off. I like to think that I didn’t even stutter as it occurred, but something was clearly amiss in the demo. Either way, I still did better than Wakamaru-san.

I’ll open by saying that despite switching to a Mac recently (because the Sony Vaio SZ-VGN460N is a terrible, terrible laptop) I’m not completely drinking the Steve Jobs Kool-Aid. I don’t like iTunes, and I don’t understand how more people aren’t crying foul at the Apple monopoly that is the iPod + iTunes music store. If it were any company other than Apple, the phrase monopoly would get used a heck of a lot more often. But, as a good friend of mine likes to say “the rules of physics do not apply to Steve Jobs.” He’s right.

So I like the Amazon MP3 store because it is open, not closed. Open content is good for consumers, period. You choose the software player on your computer, as opposed to it choosing for you. You choose the gadget to play it on, whether its your MP3 player or your cell phone. You burn it to your own custom mix CD, or you just listen to it on your PC.

Regardless of how much the current players (RIAA, music labels, Apple, etc) like or dislike this flexibility, this has been the de facto standard for music since the dawn of the cassette deck in the 70s. Let me repeat this, because it’s important: if you are 60 years old or younger, you were brought up in a world where purchasing music gave you rights to consume where, when, and how you chose.

My how this world has changed, and all thanks to the Internet, and for the worse. As consumers our rights are diminishing rapidly, all under the banner threat of “illegal downloading”. In fact the punitive damages surrounding “illegal downloading” are so severe you’d think Al Qaeda invented Napster and BitTorrent.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity, if any of this rings true and you want to learn more about how much the media industry has spent bribing congress to take away your rights, please pick up a copy of Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. If you are familiar with it, and want to use the most effective weapon you have (aka your checkbook), go buy a few MP3s from Amazon (and read this too). Showing monetary support for an open initiative is important. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but definitely in the long term.