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.

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.