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Places I've Worked and Consulted!
Skyfire - Skyfire is the first mobile browser to support Flash 8,9, Quicktime, Javascript, WMF, embedded Real etc - the list goes on. It's super impressive and very disruptive. I'm assisting w/ strategy and business development. Lots more news to come, definitely check it out. Tellme - Tellme (now Microsoft) powers directory assistance (DA) for a variety of companies like AA and Fandango. I'm consulting, helping them with their new Blackberry application distribution strategy as well as their mobile media buying. Dell Mobile - I'm consulting for Dell Mobile, helping them with SMS, WAP, mobile marketing etc. Dell has the opportunity to make a really big footprint in mobile - exciting times ahead. 212Media (Hungama Mobile) - So I'm consulting with 212Media which is Hungama Mobile North America in deploying their ringtone services in the US. Although the mobile content industry has recently taken a beating, ethnic content is still wide-open and with Hungama's focus on Indian content, there is a great opportunity to generate a lot of revenue in the US. Chuck D Mobile - I consulted as a mobile music expert assisting Chuck D with the deployment of a web and WAP storefront. This also included the bizdev required with the operators to get the catalog on deck. Got a refresh on the 10s of revenue-shares in the ringtone business especially when you are on-deck. When selling content, make sure you have a lot of checks! Guba - Consulted as a mobile video expert to help them understand the mobile video world. Guba used to be the Usenet search engine (and we know the focus of Usenets :), they have morphed into a video repository like a YouTube. Looking forward to seeing them execute a mobile video plan. DeviantArt - Consulted as the mobile expert to the leading art community on the web. Assisted them in setting up an "off-off-deck" mobile wallpaper service. DeviantArt is an Alexa Top 100 site and delivers nearly a million wallpapers each month - great experience to be part of such a success. PlayPhone - Consulted as the Product Manager for their mobile content management system. PlayPhone distributes prepaid content cards for ringtones, wallpapers and games into retail. It's was interesting to take a lot of former learning and re-apply it to build a superior system. Kodak Mobile - Worked as the Product Manager for Kodak Mobile - that includes product planning / definition, roadmap definition for Web, WAP, clients for US and EU -- This was a great experience, learned a lot about global wireless and becoming an expert in the mobile imaging area. MobiTV - Contracted / worked on a 2-person team and developed their BREW client -- this was before MobiTV launched; I was there for the launch. This has become an uber-success story, live television on your phone, with 2M+ users, last I checked. Antenna Software - This was my foray into enterprise wireless (field service / field sales), gained some good experience with RIMs, Palms, PPCs and realized how long the sales cycles are in enterprise wireless -- nobody can say enterprise wireless is anything like consumer wireless -- integrating with the Siebels is just nightmarish. Cellmania - This was my first "pure" wireless job out of college, I was doing sales engineering and product management. Learned quite a bit about WAP / app distribution / portal / messaging market (SMS, MMS etc) -- since this was a struggling startup at the time, survived the numerous layoffs and basically wore every hat. Now, they have rebounded and they are definitely giving Motricity a run! Slomedia - This was my part-time (30-40 hrs a week, ha!) job through college. It was an internet incubator (kind of like Idealabs) but with a focus on media / internet companies. I was responsible for developing these concepts. Met a lot of famous people / learned a lot about media / Hollywood and gained an interesting perspective since I essentially was working for a VC. Selectica - This was a summer internship (when this was like a 50 person startup) and this is where I thank Jay Shah for teaching me OOP (beyond classroom theory) and Java programming (school at the time only taught us C++). I wrote HTML frame editing tools for a DreamWeaver type product. Sun Microsystems - This was another summer internship where I did IP / technology evaluation for the supply chain market and for embedded Java - was definitely an interesting experience, wrote a couple demos for the JavaCard. Lawyer Defend Yourself - This was my job upgrade from Fry's, I was a net admin / pc admin for a firm of 10+ employees at the time -- good foundation into computer networks. As a side note, I learned a lot about the law process and actually, very recently did some expert witness work for them in the area of internet advertising. Fry's Electronics - Everybody has worked there at some point :) This and actually CompUSA were technically my first real jobs. I was a computer technician at both places, the guy in the back fixing your computers. I was debating whether I should include this here especially with the perception of the Fry's staff, ha! |
My Own Projects / Companies!!
ToneThis - This is my desktop media product and my plan to become the leader in off-carrier distribution! - it takes your desktop MP3s, images, apps and videos, converts them into the appropriate format and delivers them to your phone. It's doing great, we've been approached with acquisition opps, we're a CNET Top 10 Mobile app and we sell in Walmart! If you want MP3 ringtones, check this out - we were recently featured in the NY Times Dec, 06 as the best ringtone editor application in the market. Learned a lot about the wireless personalization industry, D2C and wireless audio / video. Veeker - I co-founded Veeker with the highest profile team I've ever worked with. I'm working on the product, technology and all things mobile. We were featured in MobileCrunch Oct, 06 as the most disruptive mobile video service ever, hopefully we won't disappoint. Veeker stands for "a video peek into life". We are creating some interesting views into mobile video that will hopefully result in making video communication a lot more fun. I've learned quite a bit about mobile video / streaming and not surprisingly this stuff can be unnecessarily complex. BTW, check out our daily Veeker mobile video citizen journalism commercial during the NBC nightly news! Pubwalk - This started as a weekend project to learn AJAX and do some advanced JavaScript and is now ballooning in traffic. I told you I liked bar-hopping so I built a "Web 2.0" application that merges the pubs and food from Citysearch with Google Maps and lets you plan your bar hop route (plus late night eating :). Mobile of course has been integrated with Dodgeball, check it out. Phase 2 is the LBS mobile app, which is in development -- it is an incredible mix of location and presence. I'm working with a lot of different companies to figure out this maze of granularity. FYI, Wired and PC World have both independently noted Pubwalk as the Top 5 mashup in 2006 along side with Pandora FM, Mappr, Google Transit and Weather Bonk (PC World) Otasoft - This was a bluetooth location based services concept / product. I ended up contributing to and memorizing the location profile in the BT expert group and gained significant knowledge in the area of LBS services / technology, specifically etc. We attempted to get Loc info via BT APs and then relay that info to the operators so they could provide LBS over the cellular network. Worked / backed by Hiep Pham, the founder of Widcomm (now Broadcom), ended up writing an interesting paper on the state of BT apps and it's future. FYI, someone stole the domain from me on renewal! VisionMine - This project has been placed on the backburner. We developed a concept / complete business plan / prototyped a demo of facial recognition SDKs that could be used for targeted markets. Facial recognition is an interesting area in that accuracy is often determined by the assumptions you can make. If you can make good assumptions on the dataset, you can achieve / solve some amazing things for niche markets -- Update: we've been on the back-burner too long and now Riya launched (which is very similar) :( There is still a mobile angle! - Need to ping buddies at Neven. PocketTella - Contact me if you are interested in finishing this project. I started (2003) the first Gnutella 1.0 implementation for the PPC using C#. I need to implement the sharing piece which is a bit more complicated since mobile devices have dynamic IPs and thus files need to be proxied over a server. I need to move this project over to Sourceforge since I intend to opensource it. -- Update: 4 yrs later, and now I see Peerbox Mobile, I'm glad this has finally been done! Gamr - This project never got kicked off b/c I spread myself too thin :) Gamr.com (domain I own as part of Veeker), was supposed to be an ad-supported free mobile game portal. I've got the domain, I've got 900 games from my ToneThis distributor, I've got auto-JAR-adwrap technology and I've even got a patent (as part of Veeker) on opt-in mobile advertising. I've been a very big fan of mobile advertising well before the AdMob's of the world, I'm glad to see them and GreyStripe's GameJump do so well. Subsidizing content through ads is def. a vision I have maintained and expressed when I launched ToneThis in 2003. Moblexa - This product has a real-wow factor and has the potential to be a PR magnet. I'll be releasing it soon and you'll read all about it :) AP Positioner - Contact me here again if you want to help me finish this. I've spec'ed a tool where you can input a floorplan, materials of walls, TV locations, DB strength of AP etc and it can determine how many and where to place your APs to achieve X percentage of coverage on your Wifi network. This has numerous real-life advantages (ie if Boingo could deploy one less AP in every 10 coffee shops they deploy to, that's huge savings plus if I want to achieve better coverage I want to know it). The physics with multipath etc got pretty hard so I need help! I have / had parties interested in acquiring this tool. mFlection - This is my Teleflip knock-off - in the process of figuring out how they worked, I created this. I added one improvement, an algorithm to shorten the text using regex - SMS is limited to 160 chars and since mFlection allows you to send text messages from your desktop, I'm sure most will exceed 160 chars. I need to actually replace this algorithm with a hueristic phoneme based text replacement algo but this will require more time than I have right now. The actual relaying is not hard to build. I'll make a public front-end soon. Terazima - This was my first startup out of college. We grew to reasonable size, almost 10+ folks involved at some level at one point. I learned a lot about P2P technologies / developed a lot of contacts, learned a bit about the VC pitch process / valuations / financial modeling and learned a lot about team dynamics. We reverse engineered Napster, Scour and Gnutella using a packet sniffer. 5 engrs who never worked outside of internships starting a company, ha! Surprisingly, we did build some cool stuff and we did get the support of a small Incubator - we ended up selling this company to Vidomi. The last thing we were working on was distributed resource mgmt - so imagine, utility computing on the network and then determining resource allocation based on user / machines rules / profiles etc using P2P technology. I've met all the P2P guys! Retribution - I developed a game treatment, and put together an incredible creative team. The next step was building a prototype at which I hit a brick wall. Without spoiling the game, it's for the PPC and it's a boxing RPG using SIP input but it revolutionizes user control -- a completely different approach that hasn't been done in wireless gaming to date, and I'm pretty familiar with this industry. Several mobile gaming companies were like wow (and still in 06) when I told them the concept. Unfortunately, the Grafitti APIs, even if you hack them are just not capable enough - I'm curious to see what kind of APIs the iPhone makes available...? If you are a CE coding expert and have some specific expertise in character recognition and Graffiti, give me a shout - this is def. a fun project and the PRD / artwork is already there! Matchstudents - I developed this website in my spare time on weeknights in NYC. It became one of the largest, if not the largest student-focused personals sites on the web. Learned a lot about internet marketing / student / college market. Established a nation-wide campus rep program which was def. interesting. I also think I know the webmasters of every major student site. Began scoping a college fantasy sports site to leverage my strong user-base, never pursued it. Friendster came along, commoditized these services and destroyed me. Should have sold it to FinancialAid.com when I had the change :/ |
Random Contributions / Advisor Work :)
Scalado - Scalado is one of the leading mobile imaging companies in the world. They are the application on the phone that lets you edit your images. I'm a mobile advisor to Scalado, helping them in the US market. GotoMobile - Since Oreilly is planning to shut down the ETel blog, I am now blogging for GotoMobile run by my friend Kelly Goto. Like with Oreilly, I'm only planning to post once every few weeks, but I will keep it interesting - def. check it out. Oreilly ETel - So I'm the mobile business blogger for Oreilly ETel. I'm only planning to post once every few weeks but I'm going to keep it thought-provocative. Def. check it out and do contact me if there is something you want me to write about! Klicksports - I'm a mobile advisor to Klicksports - Jose daVeiga is doing some very cool things with SMS and sports mobile marketing. It's a cross of Solow, Limbo and some new alternate distribution paths. If you ever attend a college bowl, def. check it out, they are already powering the mobile campaigns at the games. LinkSV - I'm an advisor to LinkSV helping figure out how to "mobilize" their services. LinkSV is a sister company to LinkedIn allowing you to browse the industry through companies rather than individuals. BuzzD - I'm a mobile advisor for BuzzD which is a very cool SMS mobile nightlife service. BuzzD was started by my friend Nihal Metha who previously started IPSH (Omnicom Mobile). In any case, with his mktg expertise, I'm certain BuzzD will be a success (and as you can tell from Pubwalk, how can I say no to a mobile nightlife service)! Muse - I'm also a mobile advisor for Muse. Again, this project hasn't yet launched, so I can't talk about it too much but it's definitely one of those "that's too simple". A messaging concept w/ real revenue potential - looking fwd to seeing it launch. Oomble - I'm an advisor to Oomble which is a service that allows publishers to rapidly create mobile content storefronts. This is the long-tail of mobile content, the creation of micro-storefronts by any content provider. Check out there very clever approach using a browser extension - it's very cool. Kiwibox - I was a wireless columnist for Kiwibox which is the leading teen portal (in contrast to Bolt or CollegeClub which are the leading college portals). Question and answer format and lots of fun - check it out. MedicalPocketPC - This site was acquired by Microsoft. Learned quite a bit about the medical wireless industry and I fully believe this is an area I should be focusing time in, since there is a lot of money to make here over the next 5-10 years, given the HIPPA laws etc -- there are a lot of mandates to bring IT to the hospital to cut costs. Actually made an entry into this industry by prototyping a PDA app that interfaces into dental mgmt s/w. Rapstation - I worked on several pieces of this site for Slomedia, met Chuck D who owns the site and really became part of the "free music" movement. Chuck D recently Chuck D Mobile, I'm doing some interesting things with them and ToneThis. Redband - This was another Slomedia project. It was a DHTML masterpiece, I implemented a SMIL renderer using DHTML, great for some of the media presentation stuff they were working on. At the time, in 2001, this was unchartered - Gmail has now made this popular. Anyways, too bad they went bankrupt and their homepage is now an animated GIF. Bryant Park - I contributed to the free Wifi AP deployment at Bryant Park in NYC as a former member (when I used to live there) of the NYC Wireless Users Group. This was an interesting project, since outdoors AP deployment requires more industrial equipment etc - I believe we used all-weather high-powered SmartBridges APs. Actually this whole area is quite fascinating with all the standards and new security protocols etc -- I'm just trying to keep up! Remote WAP Admin - I developed a WAP interface into SSH in 01 so I could remotely restart computers and run some basic UNIX commands. This was immediately after Ricochet went out of business and getting a Omnisky subscription with a Palm was just too expensive. I actually got 2 companies using it, never really pursued it beyond that. Zeropaid - I used to be a P2P columnist for Zeropaid which is (IMO) the leading P2P information portal. Zeropaid has been around since day 1 when Napster was first released. Check it out. |