Maddux, 42, markets Promptu, a voice-powered remote control for television that will be available this month. Until then, you'll just have to continue flexing your index finger.
"With hundreds of TV channels and thousands of shows available on demand, people are lost. Six years ago, our founder, Paul Cook, who's 81, realized this and thought, 'How are people going to be able to find anything to watch? Voice recognition would be a great way, because it's intuitive to ask for things.' So the company was founded with this sole purpose of improving navigation, and it has taken us four years to develop the technology.
My team here is responsible for defining every aspect of the consumer experience, from the remote control to the graphic onscreen interface. I started out in Silicon Valley building new consumer technologies for Apple and Hasbro toys, and learned great lessons about the importance of maintaining a very tight relationship between the consumer and engineering. Not just focus groups, but rich prototypes where we do usability tests and find that if an idea doesn't work, we go back and do it again. Some of our design breakthroughs came through our usability testing. For example, you can do voice-activated channel surfing because users suggested it. I can say 'scan documentaries,' and then automatically it scans through all the documentaries that are currently on TV, changing channels every three or four seconds; I just have to say 'stop' when I find something I want to watch.
We have heard from users that they love the serendipitous discovery part of voice-powered search. They find shows they never knew existed on channels they never even knew they had. For example, I recently did a search for Bob Denver, who played Gilligan. You'll see the results and you'd expect Gilligan's Island to show up, but you also find that he shows up on The Love Boat. Who knew he was on The Love Boat?"
This past July, Krikorian, 38, launched the Slingbox, a $250 gizmo the size of an extra-large chocolate bar that redirects your home TV signal to your laptop or desktop PC.
"A few years ago, my brother and I had been traveling extensively, and being Bay Area natives, we didn't want to miss San Francisco Giants games. We realized there was really no way for us to access them. I'm a mechanical engineer by training, he's an MBA and lawyer, and we had started a firm five years earlier in which we were incubating products and then spinning them into large consumer electronics and tech companies such as Microsoft and Toshiba. We thought, 'Let's go for it.'
The idea was something we've now coined 'place shifting,' which means letting you watch your TV wherever you are. Basic cable, DVR--whatever you have in your house is the service you'll get on your computer. If you're sitting in a Hong Kong hotel room and you want to tune in to Desperate Housewives, you can simply watch as if you were on your couch back home. We've actually had a few requests from users to put a special 'boss' button in place on their computer so at the stroke of one key, a spreadsheet pops up. We have a joke here that part of our goal is to destroy office productivity.
The unthinkable part wasn't the technology but creating a new consumer brand and selling hardware products at retail. A typical VC or industry pundit would say that's crazy when you're competing against these huge corporations. The thing is, we really wanted to see this sucker done right. Too many times we had seen a new product that was spun into these huge companies, and it either would never see the light of day or would not be executed to the level of excellence we were looking for. We launched nationwide in every single Best Buy and CompUSA retail location. Now competition is going to start coming from the big consumer-electronics guys like Sony and Samsung that have billions of dollars to promote. I take them very, very seriously. So we have to continue to innovate. Our success is up to us."
Email
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Buzz Up!
LinkedIn
