Helius to Acquire PointeCast

So here is the news that I have been sitting on for a couple of weeks now. A week after joining PointeCast in the end of April, a company meeting was called to inform everyone that we were being Acquired by Helius an IPTV solutions company...I am sure many of you now are wondering just what an IPTV solutions company is. Essentially, they build software and hardware that enable large enterprise accounts to more effeciently communicate with employees or even clients. Helius has focused on two main sectors, the Training and Learning space and the Digital Signage industry. The PointeCast rapid authoring tools fit well with both of these sectors, allowing end users to rapidly create, deploy and modify their content. Further PointeCasts Portal product will supplement the existing Helius Training and Learning solution. You can find the official press release on the Helius site or on the PointeCast site Not a bad way to start out with a company!

One of those side Projects

So as promised I am following-up the second post with a few deatils about some of the projects I have been busy with. The first of them being Pression. Pression was the offspring of 10Speed Media. As 10Speed Media was winding down, I was tasked with unloading the company/IP. I tenatively negotiated two diffeent deals, each which would have put a little coin back into Provo Lab's coffers and would have provided equity in the new company. Unfortunately both of these offers were rebuffed and so Pression was born. What I didn't mention was that Pression was actually a group of my friends and I who saw the opportunity in the Video advertising space. So we decided to engage a local developer, Scott Lemon and build the product ourselves. We took things slow and now are the proud owners of an amazing video delivery system that can be coupled with any backend tracking system. Additionally for those who don't have the backend tracking system, we have partneres with a leading service providr and have white labeled a robust tracking system. For the time being we are beta testing the product and will soon be shopping the technology around. The video advertising space is still very young, but moving and growing quickly. I look forward to report more in the near future.

So life is a little hectic...

Since I posted last I have changed jobs twice, started two side projects (which became larger than a side project), and have been near a nervous breakdown :) Well maybe not that bad, but I am sure I came close to causing my wife to have one. So a little detail to that opening ramble. When first creating this blog, I was working for a start-up company 10Speed Media which focused on video affiliate marketing. A very novel idea, but one that ultimately wasn't managed appropriately and ran out of money. The technology just wasn't able to get out of idea stage. I ended up being the last man standing, trying to sell off the assets. I put together two potential deals for the company, unfortunately both were rebuffed by the owner, Paul Allen. So in January of this year, I left 10Speed for QualitySmith. QualitySmith is a lead gen company that specializes in the Home Improvement and automotive categories. I had been consulting with them since November as 10Speed started to wind down, but couldn't turn down the position of VP of Marketing, even though the company was head quartered in Walla Walla Washington. So starting in January I was traveling back and forth between here and there. I was officially home for 5 days (weekends included) in the month of January...as you can guess this started to drag on my home life. Additionally, the work environment was not optimal, with my management chain continually looking to second guess decisions and crowd my decision making ability. These things combined to my leaving the company in April of this year to join a local start-up by the name of PointeCast I have officially been on the job a little over 2 weeks and am really just now getting my feet wet. I have been tasked with both customer acquisition as well as conversion marketing. I plan to keep up a regular (or at least a much more regular) posting schedule. Stay tuned to hear about some of the other cool ideas that I have been working on. (Consulting projects as well as Pression