Founder of Plug and Play, Saeed Amidi presents Mavizon with the winning award.
Last week, we had the great opportunity to present Mavia in front of 400 of silicon valley’s finest at the Plug and Play Tech Center in Sunnvale.
Although we didn’t understand it was a “competition” we were excited to introduce our product to a lot of new people, including 75 prominent VCs. We were really most excited at the chance to be a part of an event that hosted both Ron Conway and Omid Kordestani (Google) as guest speakers.
There were a total of 30 really great companies, with some really great momentum. Companies like Gizmo.com (500 Startups Alumn), CardSkid, and Repost.us were really stand-out competitors. Gizmo.com and Repost.us also took home awards.
We gave a three minute pitch, and won 1st place based on the VC panel of judges, as well as the “Fan Favorite” award based on audience vote. We’re thrilled to have the recognition, and it really gave us a nice boost heading into CES and Beta!
If you want to see the pitches, you can check them out here.
So a pretty exciting thing happened today. I’ve been testing out a pre-production Mavia unit for some time now. The features have all worked for some time, but today I experienced the power of Mavia full circle and wanted to share…
It starts with my check engine light coming on a few days ago (please ignore the gas light and dust 
).
Check engine light- 150k miles - LOOKOUT!
I’ve loved my 2003 VW Passat and it has served as the faithful guinea pig for all things Mavia. Without Mavia when my light came on, it was off to the mechanic I go… But today I whipped out my handy iPhone and opened the MyMavia App.
Boom - Trouble code found.
Glad to see that Mavia caught the problem, but I wanted to learn more…. tapped the arrow and wham! Info info info.
There is the techno mumbo jumbo - and a service center locator!
Well, the code was helpful but I still don’t know how big of a deal it is. I could select “Find a service center” but I’ve got faith in my social networks. I’m also willing to bet a few of my Facebook friends or Twitter followers have some car experience.
Sharing my problem with my networks...
I decided to share the problem on my networks, and check out the response!
Facebook to the rescue!
Within 10 minutes, I had a really great starting point. Went to the gas station, filled up on gas, tightened the cap – no more check engine light, no more looking like an idiot to the guy at NAPA. Mavia saved me time, money, and in this case proved our theory we have at Mavizon – Your friends on Facebook and Twitter are a very powerful force <- and that is VERY cool.
This past weekend, one of our potential partners invited us out to spend the day at the Indy 300 at the Kenucky Speedway (right in our own backyard!).
Jen couldn’t make it, so it quickly became a guys day out at the race. It was an awesome experience to say the least – garage and pit passes, meeting the drivers, and some unreal photo ops! Now, if we could just get these cars equipped with Mavia ….
Here’s a few pictures snapped throughout the day… (CLICK images to make them bigger)
4th row seats aren't too bad....or are they?
Let's get a bit closer to the action - How about the pit?
Founder, Marc, with Rodger Penske
Nice shot of the Verizon Team before the race.
Mavizon engineer, Jordan, goes hands on with the $50k steering wheel...
Will Power, and Team Penske give us some pre-race thoughts.
Meeting driver, Will Power, immediately before race time.
What an incredible day!
Thought i’d dust off this blog to talk about our past few months of Beta testing the Mavia connected car solution.
Back in June, we gave out free devices to a handful of people to see how they used the device and interacted with our website (sorry, it’s a tease I know). What the beta testers didn’t know is we had sprinkled in devices manufactured in two different plants, and spead accross two cellular service providers. Generally, we got what we expected from the testers- great feedback on our look and feel, but negative feedback on our number of available features.
I say we got what we expected because we knew on the launch date that we had not yet implemented the most compelling features. While all of our core functionality was working properly, we knew the Beta users would want more compelling or ‘cool’ things available to them. We also knew that we were crunched for QA time, and we discovered a number of bugs that needed to be squashed. We essentially wanted to test our core technology with this group and rely on the second Beta group to grind down our feature set.
One of our biggest bugs, was the realization that literally half of all of the released devices had a manufacturing error. Upon further inspection we learned that all of these devices were from one manufacturer – ouch! We’ve decided to build a few more devices at three manufacturers and implement a production level QA process.
In the end, our first Beta group did an incredible service for us by helping us through our growing pains. Although their experience was fun – they really wanted more features before they could accurately form and opinion on the product. Even so, they stuck it out and opened up with some great ideas we are working on implememnting now.
We’re hoping to do a second (BIGGER) national test later this fall. By this time, we’ll be settled on a manufacturer as well as a more complete feature set. I’ll blog about some of these features as they get nailed now – but I’m really excited about them – and having seen them in action I can say with some level of confidence our future users are going to find them valuable…
For now, we continue on the strategic partnership path pitching and forming new relationships almost daily. I’ll leave you now with a few teaser screen captures of what our Beta users got to get their hands on….
A taste of the user's home screen.
Find out where your car is, and where your friends are.
RELATIVE offers? Based on where I am and where I am going? NICE.
We have five positions up for grabs and thought we’d announce it here first. We will be in area (San Francisco, Palo Alto, Silicon Valley) for interviews starting on May 9.
Mavizon is an incredible place to work, and the west coast group will be given a chance to build a culture and a working environment from scratch. A truly unique opportunity to get in a well-funded start up at the base level.
Experienced Platform Architect
We are looking for the head of a founding team tasked with building “from scratch” and maturing a platform to host media and lead generation products for local advertisers. The ideal candidate will have an ability to build and coach a highly effective team, deliver on strategic initiatives and manage multiple priorities effectively. This position requires deep technical expertise in platform development and provides the opportunity to impact the team culture from ground up.
• They will bootstrap, deliver and sustain the ad platform engineering road map.
• Provide technical and managerial leadership to the Ad Platform Engineering team.
• Communicate status, risks and progress back to engineering and business leadership.
• Evangelize platform investment by justifying benefits visually and via metrics.
• Manage project execution and delivery, while also generating ideas on new products.
• Know how to engage consumers of the Ad platform to understand their needs and further address them to increase adoption.
Data Mining/Machine Learning Software Engineer
We are looking for world-class Big Data miners and Machine Learning engineers. The game is to dig into machine learning and information retrieval opportunities from our ever-growing mountain of hyperlocal data.
• They will have leading edge experience in machine learning, information retrieval, and/or data visualization
• Very strong grasp of recommendation, clustering and classification algorithms and data structures (you know how to decide between Naïve Bayes classifier and K-Means clustering)
• Command of your favorite programming language (preferably Java, Python, R)
• Expertise in Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL (HBase) and Cloud Computing is a huge plus
• Graduate degree in Computer Science – a relevant PhD is a definite plus! Excellent communication skills
Senior Systems Engineer, Cloud Platform Engineering
We are building a cutting-edge Cloud Platform Engineering team—specifically, Linux Professionals to help build the world’s premier cloud computing platform. We are looking for upper echelon Systems Engineers capable of operating at an extremely high level in a Linux-based environment. Our System Engineers figure out the hardest technology problems, and build high quality, architecturally sound systems to execute on critical business strategies. They are expected to handle personal project management, execution, and ongoing support of the products they deliver into production. The optimal individual for this role will be a Linux operating system expert who understands virtualization and Linux interaction with the latest cloud hardware technologies.
• Requires solid understanding of Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, NLP or Data Mining—big plus
Large Scale Network Engineer/Architect
Someone to help design and build (or choose) the infrastructure needed to support the ambitious cloud based platform—from the hardware and networking side.
Experienced Ad Platform Software Engineers
These are senior level web-application developers (Ruby, PHP, Python or Java)—who have specific experience in building and maintain a high-traffic, high-availability Ad or Search Platform. Ideally, they have experience from working in Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft (web products), Google or AOL.
Interested developers can send resumes and cover letters, along with an explanation of which position they fit and why to hr@mavizontech.com.
I thought it might be a good thing to gather my thoughts from the MobileX conference I spoke at a few weeks ago in Lexington, KY. MobileX is a gathering of mobile startups, investors, idea guys, coders, etc., to talk about lessons learned, how-tos, and what’s next in the mobile space. The event was started in Lexington by Awesome Inc., an incubator/co-work space.
The MobileX conference was fairly successful for all involved. For the hosts, they enjoyed a large crowd, a decent local media flow, and even a few Lexington “big wigs” stopped in. As for the attendees, well they enjoyed some great breakout sessions from Brian Wong, CEO of Kiip.me, Nihal Mehta, CEO of localresponse.com, and Sam Soffees, engineer at Scribd.com. Any person with an ounce of drive in them I’m sure was inspired and fired up to get out of the conference to build something.
Coders doing their thing in the Technical track at MobileX
Now for the value to me personally – I’ve realized that any time I’m invited to lead a breakout session or speak to other entrepreneurs it forces me to step back and recalibrate my thoughts and attitudes. This helps me make sure I still believe in what we are doing and how we are doing it.
My take away from this engagement was the re-confirmation that being refreshingly transparent about what is and isn’t in your business is key. In the startup world you see some of the best bizdev people you’re ever going to see. Sometimes too good. All too often you see a great speaker with magical points on how to lead people to success. The problem is often time these guys are really exaggerating what really exists in their business. I won’t call them lies exactly so much as exaggerations that lead to disappointment. So is this wrong? I’m not so sure. It is a fine line bizdev people walk.
My solution? I try to be as transparent as possible. For example, during this talk I made it clear that we are not out of the woods yet. Just because you take some form of funding, get media attention, or hire people, doesn’t mean your company is a success. This is another point I like to share with would-be startup guys: what is the end game? In fact, I often ask this of people we hire at Mavizon. If the end game is to raise 10 million in capital then retire as soon as you can – you probably need a wake up call. In “Rework” they call it a commitment strategy. I think it is more of a reality plan. I love to dream as much as the next guy, but if you think retiring on a yacht is the goal you’re nutty. What would these people do on a yacht for the last 70 years of their life?
I like business. It is like a drug. If one business fails, or succeeds, I’m sure everyone at Mavizon will be looking for whats next – and that’s a very cool thing.
As I shared these thoughts at the mobile conference, I wasn’t sure how they would be received from a group of people with dollar signs in their eyes talking to VCs. I was pleasantly surprised when a number of people approached me and wanted to talk. I hope they gained some value from the ideas shared, but the fact is there is no rule book. If anybody had the right answers, we’d have a lot more successful startups. That is about where I ended with the talk, and I’ll do the same with this post – Treat your business like an art. Art doesn’t have rules and neither does startup culture. Even so, everyone seems to know good art when they see it.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in a peculiar kind of place. Prior to the past few weeks, I was ‘busy.’
I often hear people say they are busy, but then notice they earned ten new animals in Farmville, or see six new youtube videos gushing out of their twitter account. I think the word ‘busy’ really just means ‘I don’t feel like doing that.’ I’m a firm believer you make time to do things you want to do. For me, I wanted to be pushing hard to get Mavizon some attention and make some things happen with our Mavia device, so my time was filled – taking trips, talking to partners, managing a hardware build etc.
But now, Mavizon is in a place where the fanfare of CES has worn off (Minus one EXTREMELY exciting Fast Company piece about us being the #6 Most Innovative Consumer Electronics Companies of 2011 ), the hardware is finally out of my hands, the contracts are being written with potential partners, and now I’m left with a lot less to do than a few weeks ago. We have however, turned up the software development to an all time high, and coders are heads down.
Basically what this means is I have to take a backseat for the time being. That is unless I can learn to code in the next week – not likely.
I never realized how hard this could be until now. I wanted us to get to this point all along, of course, but now more than ever I see how one performs in the cold seat is as important as how they perform in the hot seat. There are things I could stick my nose into, or have some opinion in – but I’d honestly slow things down – and that’s a high price to pay for pride. Just letting the people we hired do their job is much more efficient. For now, I’ll try to be the best backseat driver I can be; working on smaller research projects or new deals may not be as fun as taking center stage at this conference or that, but I’ve got a feeling it will serve Mavizon the best. I’ve also got a feeling things will be a lot more exciting on my side of things in about a month…stay tuned.
Last week, I had the chance to swing by the CTIA Wireless conference in Orlando Florida for a day. What the conference is can be summed up in one sentence really: “CTIA Wireless is CES minus the blenders, TVs, Jump Drives, and two exhibit halls plus cell towers.”
There. That’s it.
Really though, the valuable meetings still take place and there is tons of cool tech. In today’s tech world, I’d say connected things are king and this show is all about how to connect those things. I saw LG’s sweet new tablet, and a pretty cool booth design by Nokia, that consisted of getting coffee from a booth bunny turned barista, then setting your coffee cup on a glowing table while you update your status from one of their new phones. Come to think of it, coffee and updating your status was pretty much the focal point of every booth. Interesting.
As for what the show meant for Mavizon…
It was mostly a meeting filled whirlwind. It served as an awesome venue to touch base with TelCo partners, as well as some of our suppliers. Although there is nothing “new” to report, we did have some great conversations about future Mavizon products, beyond Mavia that is. What technologies are those? Check them out here.
Jennifer Meyer is the senior project manager at Mavizon Technologies. She recently returned from her first Costa Rica trip.
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A few members of the Mavizon Costa Rica team.
I recently had the opportunity to spend some time working in Costa Rica with our Mavizon group based there. As you may have read previously, our parent company Samtec has a manufacturing plant in Heredia, Costa Rica, and Mavizon has begun cultivating a software development team there. Madison’s trip down in early January was focused solely on recruiting more talent, and resulted in 5 new software developers added to the Mavizon-Costa Rica team. By late February, it was my turn to travel.
The initial purpose of my trip was to smooth the transition for the new hires and to help set the tone and structure of the workday. It didn’t take long to figure out that it would be so much more.
From a working/professional perspective it was of great value to be there working side by side. Daily video chats are great, but nothing can substitute the value of face to face interaction when you want to get something accomplished. I was able to work with Priscilla (industrial designer) and Mr. Bob (graphic designer) to begin a mobile app UI overhaul, got to tweak the structure of our weekly Sprints with Luis (lead software developer) and was wowed by the focused and diligent work ethic of members of the software development team (Mauricio, Jose, Tomas, Jaime, Hugo, & Luis). As an added benefit, I was able to meet and develop relationships with people from Samtec’s administrative side that had once only been email addresses to bombard when I had a problem.
Perhaps the most rewarding part of spending time with the Costa Rican Mavizon group was getting to know them better and connecting on a more personal level. We ate together every day, went on adventures through the Costa Rican countryside, and they taught me so much about a different culture. Meeting their families, friends, and loved ones put my work in perspective and served as a humbling reminder that as Mavizon grows, the decisions we make everyday affect the lives of more and more people.
Not only was this trip rewarding on a professional and personal level, but it also served as a great reminder that I love my job. At Mavizon we’ve somehow hit the personnel jackpot and I’m truly honored to work with these people (in both New Albany & Costa Rica .
I’ll leave it with a few random things I learned in Costa Rica:
- I must learn to drive faster, but walk much much slower
- Imperial & Bavaria (cervezas) are delicious
- I am capable of many things…except putting sunscreen on by myself
- We are juice deprived in the U.S.
- Monkeys quickly lose their cuteness factor for those around them long enough
- No matter where you are, there will be a stunning landscape for your viewing pleasure.
- The word “cheesecake” on a menu is a trick! (Costa Rican adaptation is terrible—comes with jelly on top and has texture of birthday cake)
- There’s an engineer somewhere that thought it was a great idea to build roundabouts in the middle of highways
- Everything tastes better with a dousing of natilla. (sour cream served in an enormous packet)
- I can’t wait to go back.
-Jenn
A little 'free time' at the beach.
A little fishing.
I recently had a chance to speak with a small group of college freshmen about their next four years. As a relatively recent grad, I think the goal was to somehow inspire some of the group to really take advantage of everything they will be offered in the next four years. I’m not sure if I really inspired anybody, but it did force me to take time to re-examine what has worked for me over the past 6 or 7 years. When I got back into the office, and told the Mavizon team what I had talked about – they thought I should record the thoughts somewhere. So heregoes:
I really think during college students are given an incredible amount of opportunity. I don’t just mean that they get the chance to join lots of clubs, meet new friends, and join fraternities and sororities (Although I believe that all has a place) – but I mean the chance to play the “i’m a college student” card. I had a professor tell me once that “You can do sh!t in these next four years that you would never be able to do in real life – you can do stuff that normally would land you in jail, but for the next four years, just say ‘im a college student.’” Looking back, he may have been talking about having fun and partying, but I think I took it as permission to take some risk – mostly in career development.
I explained to students that while you are young and just starting your career (whether that is in a start-up or other) you really are like a rookie, and you need to treat yourself as if you are rookie of the year. I strongly believe that during college and immediatly after we have a once-in-a-lifetime situation where we are untainted and un-embittered by the standard corporate world while at the same time being hungry for work and to start climbing the ladder. In other words, low expectations are met with huge opportunity-and that is a very cool thing. I think we must all take that opportunity and play it up as big as we can. Take some risks. Knock on the CEOs door. Send a letter to the president of your dream company and ask for a job. I really don’t see how anything bad can come from that. In fact, I’d be willing to bet your drive and idealism will be downright refreshing to most.
I do think the window of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity will eventually close in the sense that we will all get older, more experienced, and have higher expectations, but I don’t think this advice burns out. When I look down the road a few years, I don’t see myself pulling the plug on risk taking or being a driven person. I think even people who have been doing the same job or pulling the same lever for twenty years can be refreshing if they commit to it. In fact, maybe there is opportunity there- to mix years experience with the vigor and drive of a 22 year old college graduate – I guess i’ll find out when I get there.
