I have one final post for the SlingMemories series, but I decided to switcharoo the order. I left Sling Media in October 2006, and unlike all my ex-girlfriends, we managed to break up and remain on good terms. This was really important to me, as I felt (don’t laugh) pretty emotionally tied to the company. Even today when I talk to clients and talk about “how we did it back at Sling” I still use the word “we” not “them”.

At CES 2007 I was reunited with the crew as I lingered at the bigger, better booth Rich and Tami had put together. I sat a row away from the team when Blake was on stage during the CBS keynote to announce Clip+Sling. I saw their impressive partner pavilion. And I had my chance to hold the Emmy the Slingbox won. That too was a great moment – how often does a tech/product/marketing geek like me get to be part of something that wins an Emmy?

Over the course of 2007 I’ve watched (and often blogged) Sling’s news (here’s my highlight of the year). I still check on the display of the units when I walk into a Best Buy. I IM with someone from the team every few days, and love seeing them pop up on TechMeme when news comes a-flying. Actually, as I read this, one could almost accuse me of being a stalker.

There are many ways to look back on the ventures we’ve participated in; the products we’ve built. Most of the people I talk to seem to reminisce with negativity, either toward “the management” or to the product/service/company itself. After all, it’s easy to do this, as odds are fairly decent the relationship came to an end at a low note. Heck, we all remember the past either rosier or darker than it once was.

For me, watching Sling in 2007 was generally with pride. I wondered if they’d pull off Clip+Sling. I remained curious about the SlingCatcher. Were there doubts? Yup, I don’t deny. But Sling remained true to the first description I gave my friends when I joined the company: it’s going to be like a rocket ship. I don’t know if it’ll burst into flames on the launchpad, go massively off-course, or make it into orbit, but no matter what it’d gonna be a heck of a lotta fun to watch. I certainly wasn’t wrong about that!

CES 2006 was so big for Sling that it needs it’s own post. Team Sling began arriving over a week before the show to build the booth, which expanded from the 4-foot-wide table/pod in ’05 to a 20′ x 30′ massive area for ’06. To add a little spice to the event, both Rich and Tami had foot/knee problems during setup, which is precisely the time you really want to be flexible and mobile.

The demo was more than just a demo. We had an actor (Eldon(sp?)) who did a phenomenal job soaking in the Sling “vibe” and literally packed the area full of people every 30 minutes. At first our neighboring booths in the Sands were a little annoyed at our traffic pull, but once they realized they were able to benefit from the spillover, we were all BFFs.

CES 2006 was the first time we publicly demonstrated SlingPlayer Mobile and was the announcement of the PAL version of the Slingbox (more on that later). It was also the “now-that-we-can-look-back-with-20-20-hindsight-the-way-too-early” announcement of SlingPlayer Mac.

Personally it was a really fun show. The whole team from SlingCommunity was there, helping with demos and hanging out with us at the booth. A half-dozen original Slingbox beta testers showed up, which was a nice treat as I’d never met them in person. I also met Jeff Chiusano, the first (registered) Slingbox owner. Other Slingbox owners/fans were there, as well as tons of people new to the world of Slinging. I had a blast, even with the 18ish-hour days that were spent entirely standing and demoing (the same thing, over and over, for six days). I love CES.

I know a lot of people in the marketing field who hate the show (or all tradeshows). They hate talking to random people who walk up. They hate the grind. They hate the pace. I’m not one of them. I love it. I love the chance to talk to everybody I can, especially if its about a product I built. I love to get the “win” during a demo/pitch. For me that “win” is someone getting why the Slingbox is cool – I don’t as much care about the specific close/sale, I care more about that moment. Probably explains why I’m not in sales…

When the product actually launched I was up in Beaverton with the CSR team. I remember a few of us hopping in a car and driving to three different Best Buys looking for Slingboxes and asking the blue shirts questions (I had helped prep some of the training materials for the staff). That first day only a couple of them knew what we were talking about, but the ones who did were extremely excited about the product. The next day I spent a little bit of time on the phones myself, answering questions from the “earliest” adopters. I’ve always been a big proponent of providing outstanding customer service, and I think having direct interactions with your customers is one of the only ways to do it.

The Summer of 05 was a bit of a blur. We put out a few software updates to boost the video quality of the product quite significantly, and began work on new features and the SlingPlayer Mobile software. All the while we enjoyed watching the growth on SlingCommunity.com and tracking the sales stats from the retailers. At this point, I was still the VP of Product Management but was also running all the community/viral activities, and flying around to speak at conferences and events. I was stretched a bit thin, so when Rich Buchanan (VP of Marketing) came around and asked to me to pick just one of the two jobs I was doing, I decided to try something different in my career. After about 8 consecutive years of product management/marketing/development roles, I took on a full time marketing position as the VP of Market Development. My role was basically “evangelist” but since (a) I was doing a lot more than just that and (b) the term has so many different meanings, we decided Market Development was more appropriate.

The last product I worked on before taking the full-time external role was the SlingPlayer Mobile software. This was a very interesting challenge as there were plenty of people getting TV/video onto mobile devices at the time, but our task was trebly hard as we also had to deal with networking/latency issues and the ability to provide an interface to remotely control a connected device (like a TiVo or a cable box). I also like to think we hit the nail on the head for this one, as I may be biased but I still consider the software the best mobile TV experience I’ve seen to date. Special kudos to Vicky for taking the ball and running it into the end zone (and then some)!

For those of you who have only “attended” CES, you should know that for a consumer electronics company, planning starts many months earlier. The months of November and December (yes, including holiday times) are spent fairly dedicated to the humongous tradeshow. Rich and Tami spent many days and nights planning the booth to perfection, while Brian J lined up the back-to-back press meetings for Blake, Jason and myself. But even with those capable hands, there was always things that had to get done to be ready for the show. And we knew CES 06 was gonna be a doozy!

In March 2005 we kicked off our original beta program. We had 100 pre-production Slingboxes painted bright orange ready for testers in the US and Canada. Our testers spent three months performing various tasks such as “try Slinging from 5 different ports to 5 different locations” and “hook up the Slingbox to every gadget you have in your home, and let us know if the IR codes work”. Our testers not only prevailed, but became absolute advocates for the company on various online communities. My friend Brian M did a great job managing the beta program, keeping the community actively engaged while managing the early version of SlingCommunity and having a baby at the same time. Also, a special shout-out to Jim D for the being #1 bug reporter of all time (you’re all in my memories, but I can’t very well list everyone’s names here now, can I?). I still wear my “I had an orange one” t-shirt with pride, and hope the rest of y’all do too.
Right in the middle of beta we had come to the point where the first production units were about ready to roll off the assembly line. I flew to Xi Xiu, China, a small town (100,000 people) near Shenzhen, and spent a week with the factory workers perfecting the appearance of the Slingbox. I learned a heck of a lot about plastics, molding, tooling, and more while there, but thankfully after 5 long (long!) days they had it perfect (okay, close). It was an odd trip for me as I spent the entire week only having one person to speak with, and not seeing a single other foreigner in the town. I was literally gawked at in the shopping center. Thanks again Kelvin for being a great host, and introducing me to delicacies like Kung Pao Frog as well as Sweet and Sour Chicken Knees. Okay, I made up the names of the dishes, but you get the picture…

Our official launch was June 30th, 2005. In all candidness, I have never ever seen a team come together more tightly than we did in those 4 weeks leading up to launch. Blake was pushing us all extremely hard, constantly raising the bar on the quality he wanted. I remember one Saturday afternoon he wanted to make sure we really were compliant with the UPnP implementations on most routers. So he went to Best Buy, Fry’s, and CompUSA and picked up every different router model he could find, and hand-tested each one. Needless to say, the bar was, shall we say “high”? But he felt that the only way a startup could really win was to make absolutely excellent products, and good just wasn’t good enough. I have to say, I may have kvetched about it at the time, but looking back there’s no question he was right. I’ve never seen the insides of Steve Jobs’ lair, but I have a hunch there’s the same pursuit of excellence. But would Jobs take you out to the local Red Robin to celebrate the launch? I don’t think so!

The last few days before launch had each team double- and triple-checking its work. We, along with the beta testers, shone the flashlights into every nook and cranny of the setup wizard, the packaging, the documentation, the Web site, the community, everything. I personally flew out to Beaverton Oregon to train our customer service representatives in those last few weeks and showed them every last detail of the way the box functioned. We talked about how to make sure the customer support experience was nothing like how “other” CE companies handled it. Again, massive attention to detail. By the way, while I’m at it – Blake, you were right about the D10.

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.