Echobit

The last ~90 days have been filled with breakthroughs on many levels.

The creativity and hard work that has gone into our journey during this time has been inspiring and fruitful.

Three things stand out as our biggest endeavors over the last few months:

• Advisors
• Alpha
• (The search for) Investors

So on the first topic of advisors, it is my pleasure to announce that we’ve recently completed the assembly of an international board of advisors consisting of top-tier consumer tech and game industry experts and luminaries.

They are:

• Wim Stocks – Former President/COO, Elephant Entertainment; Executive VP, Atari; Executive VP, GT Interactive
• Robert Stephens – Founder, The Geek Squad; and recently named CTO, Best Buy
• Maxime Julien – Former COO, Electronic Arts; VP Operations, Ubisoft
• Jim Rossignol – Author, This Gaming Life; founding blogger, Rock, Paper, Shotgun; writer for PC Gamer, Wired, and Edge
• [Name Not Currently Publicly Available] – Award-winning game company Co-Founder/Creative Director

On behalf of Echobit, I’d like to welcome Wim, Robert, Maxime, Jim, and You-Know-Who-You-Are to the team. Your experience and talents will bring many valuable perspectives on the gaming landscape in the weeks and months and years ahead. We are thrilled to have you working with us to make Evolve the best online gaming platform in the world.

It’s been a long winter. For me personally, there are many things about it that I’m glad to be leaving behind. One of those things is the “snow tire” that’s developed around my waist over the past several months. Working it off has proven to be difficult. There’s just something about getting up at 5:00am and chugging around a dark, frozen lake four times a week that feels arduous and seemingly fruitless much of the time.

Then yesterday, something changed. While I was out in the Spring sunshine on a 10-mile run, it happened:  I found myself  ”in the zone”.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, running started to feel good. No longer was I even thinking about it. No longer was I trying to convince my body to keep moving. It was easier. And not only was it easier, I was going faster.

So too, has been our experience at Echobit. The last few months have been challenging. And even though it hasn’t always felt like it, we’ve been quietly and steadily making important progress…

Since the beginning of this year:

• We’ve closed a small seed round of capital
• We’ve successfully applied for and been granted an H1B visa for our Co-Founder, Soren Dreijer
• Our engineering team has come onboard full-time
• We’ve updated our company and product websites; and
• We’ve put out three compelling releases of our VPN platform, LAN Bridger (in less than a month)

But perhaps what’s most exciting for us is how Echobit has found itself in a zone of its own. Our vision has never been clearer. Our updated plan is presenting us with an even more exciting path. And finally, our work on Evolve is starting to get easier—and gain momentum.

Q2 promises to be very satisfying, as we get into better and better shape. Goals over the next three months include more fundraising, another release of LAN Bridger, providing a public peek at Evolve, plus a whole lot more behind the scenes.

So here’s to a great Spring. And thanks for joining us on our journey.

You’ve probably heard about the critical security fixes that Microsoft released recently. This means that whenever you distribute a new build of your product, you must remember to ship the latest version of the VC++ redistributable package with it (VC++ 2005 and 2008). If you don’t, your customers will get endless side-by-side misconfiguration errors.

If you’re like me, you still want to be able to run debug builds on your test machines. As always, you need the Debug CRT for that, which I’m sure you know isn’t part of the redistributable package. Microsoft has documented two ways of installing a debug CRT on test machines:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa985618%28VS.80%29.aspx

I personally use the second approach since I know exactly which files get copied to the target machine and it’s just less intrusive in general. Read more…

I apologize for the lack of posts lately, but we’ve got a lot of stuff going on at Echobit these days. I’ve spent most of my time researching and experimenting with the cool new product we’re cooking up at the moment. At this point I can’t really talk too much about it, but expect much more information later this fall.

We entered the MN Cup 2009 earlier this year. It’s a competition for startup companies and their breakthrough ideas. The semifinalists were announced last week and we made it into the next round. We’re extremely excited to be one of the 49 companies that were selected from over a 1000 submissions.

More information to follow as we progress through the competition.

I’ve been traveling quite a bit lately and I’ve found it particularly convenient to simply remote into my machine at the office and do all my work through Terminal Services (or are we supposed to be calling it Remote Desktop Services now?). This allows me to access the virtual machines and the servers located at the office without major latency. If you’ve ever tried using VMware Server Console through a VPN connection, you know what I’m talking about.

I always listen to music when working. At work, that’s not a problem since I’ve got all my music stored on my work computer. However, when on the road all my music is stored on my laptop. This becomes a problem since my laptop’s music player cannot be accessed without first minimizing the fullscreen remote desktop window. Read more…