Sifteo, a venture-backed consumer electronics start-up, is seeking a Marketing Lead to help deliver a new interactive play and learning system to consumers.
We are looking for someone who can develop and execute a focused messaging and outreach plan, who can build and deliver a quantitative marketing program, who can build the right channel relationships, and who is excited about jumping into a start up environment. You’ll be working with the co-founders and the product team, and you will be responsible for the full marketing program for the product on a start-up budget.
You’ll be coming up with the taglines, building the marketing metrics, devising pricing strategies as well as making CES happen end-to-end and helping out on customer service phone calls.
I returned recently from a visit to our contract manufacturing partner in China – I always enjoy going there and seeing how things are progressing. I could write at length about the ways that start ups like us can and do work with massive, highly resourced, highly skilled factories in the Far East – but I’ll save that for another post.
I’d instead like to share with you some photos and thoughts about “Shanzhai” products being made in China. (Bunnie Huang has written extensively about the Shanzhai and I jotted some notes down a while back as well. Google the term for more info.)
In a nutshell, “Shanzhai” refers to groups of engineers, designers, hackers and manufacturers operating in China that build electronic products for gray-to-black markets: knock-off “iFones”and the like. These guys are not just simple counterfeiters though; they are creating all kinds of new (and often strange) products outside the normal channels of large companies.
Because they don’t care about obeying IP or trademark restrictions, they do some stuff you won’t see in your local Target or Best Buy. And because they operate outside the law, they do some crazy brand mash-ups too.
Walk around the electronics markets in Shenzhen and you’ll see these devices. I saw a great iRobot-branded iPad knock-off with the Android character on it, which was a pretty excellent combination of three brands.
But here’s one I really liked: the G1-on-the-outside + iPhone-on-the-inside smartphone. (Apologies for the picture quality, I took them with my very official iPhone 3G):
The creators of the device faithfully recreate icons and interactions down to the tiniest detail, but they do deviate in interesting ways. First, the real last-mile polish is just not there. The touchscreen is just difficult to use: you have to scrape with your fingernail and really push. I think they used a cheaper resistive touchscreen.
But it has a fully working TV tuner: straight-up rabbit ears! You can tune in to local TV and watch it on your phone. The antenna even rotates so you can watch in landscape mode.
It’s easy to dismiss these products as the work of cheats and counterfeiters, but that is only half the story. A lot of innovation is occurring in the Pearl River Delta, unencumbered by law and protocol. As an entrepreneur here in the USA, it is fascinating to observe this kind of hardscrabble creativity playing out in different ways in different places.
Earlier this week we hosted a visit by Stupid Fun Club here in our new space. We piled into the conference room to demo and play with the latest Siftables games, talked about what each of our companies are up to lately, and brainstormed some Siftables application ideas with Will Wright and the rest of the Stupid Fun Club team.
Thanks to SFC for taking the time to stop by! We hope to visit your studio in the near future and keep up on each other’s projects.
Dave and I recently posted some thoughts on where user interface is headed, how this might impact the way we interact with information – and what this might mean for new products and new start ups.
We are excited to announce a new round of funding from Foundry Group and True Ventures. We partnered with True when we formed the company last summer, and we’re proud to have Foundry join us now. This funding is going to allow us to ramp up and get the product out to the world!
We’ll be sharing more about what we are up to in the coming months, so stay tuned. Thanks to everyone for all your support! We’re plowing forward, full steam ahead, 88 miles per hour. (By the way, if you are smart & creative & hard-working & nice and interested in joining us, check out our job posts.)
If you aren’t that familiar with what we are doing, you can read a little press blurb we put together regarding this news, included here:
Sifteo Inc. Closes Series B Funding with Foundry Group and True Ventures
Sifteo Inc., a consumer electronics startup based in San Francisco, has raised $9M in Series B funding from Foundry Group and True Ventures. The company aims to launch the world’s first tabletop game console. Their product – Siftables – is a collection of smart physical tiles that enables new ways to play and learn. Siftables gained attention at TED 2009 when it was still a research project at MIT. The creators of Siftables, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, co-founded Sifteo in July 2009 to commercialize their technology.
The startup plans to use the funds to launch a consumer product based on Siftables, and is currently hiring for engineering and game developer positions. Sifteo previously raised $1M in Series A funding from True Ventures and is also supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.
Many thanks again to our growing community for all your support and feedback, from forwarding the TED video to friends, to following us on Twitter, Facebook, and our mailing list and volunteering to help us with play tests. It makes our work even more meaningful knowing we’re creating something that has the support of people all around the world.
A quick note – come visit us at the Stanford Cool Product Expo today – we’ll be there from about noon to 6pm. It’s at the Alumni Center, for those of you in the know. Josh and Dave will be showing the new industrial design and some new games.
Dave and Jeevan just got back from SXSW, which was a whole lot of fun. We had a short interview in a piece by the Independent Film Channel (IFC) about The Future! We’re about 0:50 seconds into the 2 minute piece, but you should watch the whole thing – Doug Rushkoff starts things off and there is a neat augmented reality demo at the end.
You can see a brief glimpse of our new prototype! It’s working well – it’s a pretty thorough re-think and re-design of the MIT prototype. We changed a bunch of things, but kept the functionality and high quality of the original. Most important, this version is designed for mass production!
Note how Jeevan nods thoughtfully while Dave and Negin, the interviewer, speak. Years of training goes into an acting performance like that.
Headed to SXSW this year? Dave and Jeevan will be around, and Dave will be participating in the Beyond the Desktop panel this Monday, March 15 at 3:30pm (in Ballroom A, the #1 rated most awesome Ballroom in Texas).
We anticipate a lively discussion on where UI has been and where it’s going, mixing in perspectives from design, technology, and business. Please come by!
On Thursday we hosted 20 students from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) Silicon Valley Program, as well as CMU ETC faculty Don Marinelli, Jiyoung Lee and Carl Rosendahl. These masters students spend part of their time “embedded” at Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, where they have their own workspace and do coursework towards their degree. At the same time they can interact with EA people and experience what it’s like to work in a top-notch video game company. Sounds like a great experience!
The students checked out our latest demos, getting a peek at our take on the next wave of social, tabletop gaming. For those of us at Sifteo, it was a chance to make contact with a group of smart people that will be the next generation of creative+technical game builders. We talked about the capabilities of Siftables and the game mechanics that they uniquely enable. We’ll keep in touch with this group going forward — thanks to the students and faculty for visiting!
