Sifteo, one of our portfolio companies located in San Francisco, is seeking a Marketing Lead to help deliver a new interactive play and learning system to consumers.  They 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.

For a video demo of the product, see: http://sifteo.com/

Siftables are gesture-sensitive video tiles that form a smart, distributed system for games and education. The technology has been spun out of the MIT Media Lab and has been featured on the Science and Discovery channels, presented at the TED conference, and has been written up by Engadget, Gizmodo, New Scientist and Wired.

The following is what they are looking for in an ideal candidate:

- 5+ years of professional experience in marketing consumer electronics and/or interactive games (this isn’t your first rodeo)
- organized: you are thoughtful and meticulous in all you do
- agile: you are willing to dig into (and adapt) our target customer profile as we learn more about product/market fit
- creative: you love to execute low-cost, grassroots outreach events
- writing skills: you can dash out tight copy with your eyes closed
- communication skills: you love talking to engineers and designers (maybe you are or were one), understanding their ideas, and working with them to deliver a great product
- resourceful: you can win big results on tight budgets
- decisive: you can pare away good ideas from the great ones and focus on measurable plans
Please send resumes to jobs@sifteo.com with subject "Marketing Lead"

If you have followed our investment in Oblong, you know that it is one of the most innovative companies that we’ve ever invested in.

They spoke at TED this year and the video is now available.  Witness the future of computer user interfaces and collaboration.

Today, we announced our investment in Sifteo.  It was also picked up in PEHub. 

I’m really excited to be a part of the team.  Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next popular generation gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch. 

I addition, it’s another investment that we’ve made with the fine folks over at True Ventures, so that only adds to the happy factor. 

Check our their TED talk for a great demo of what they are working on.  And if you ever happen to meet Dave, let him know that you really like his shirt that he wore that day. 

Yes, this is not a misprint.  Zynga (makers of Farmville, Mafia Wars, Fishville, Yoville and many others) is hiring two lawyers.  If you are interested, email me your resume and a short cover letter and I’ll forward directly to the company.

Corporate Lawyer:

Zynga is seeking an experienced corporate securities/M&A lawyer (7+ years out).  The ideal candidate will have several years  of big firm experience – bonus points for in house experience, but not required.  Primary focus will be M&A and corporate securities/financing work; ’33 Act and ’34 Act experience would be a nice plus.  The right person for this position must have high standards of personal excellence, a high energy level and an ability to thrive in a fast-moving environment with frequently shifting priorities. This person will work in our San Francisco headquarters in Potrero Hill and will report to Karyn Smith, Senior Attorney. 

Patent / IP Lawyer

Zynga is looking for a highly qualified Patent Counsel (7+ years of experience with in-house history preferred). This position will report to the General Counsel, Reggie Davis at the San Francisco headquarters.  This position will provide comprehensive intellectual property legal services to various groups across the company, but will primarily interact with our studios and operations and business development teams to drive our patent prosecution efforts.   In addition to patent prosecution, this person will render legal advice and support in matters covering a broad spectrum of intellectual property subjects, including acquiring and protecting intellectual property rights, drafting and negotiating intellectual property related agreements, and evaluating and advising on third party intellectual property rights.  The applicant must be admitted to the USPTO.

I’ve known and worked with both Reggie and Karyn for years.  Reggie previously was at Yahoo! and Karyn was a partner at Cooley Godward as well as her own firm later.  They are both super smart, class acts and would be great to work with.  In fact, if there was any company that could take me out of my legal “retirement” it would be Zynga along with Reggie and Karyn.

Again, email me if interested.  Jason at Foundrygroup.com

Seriously.  They are hiring engineers.  And you know that you love music, love working in an ultra-cool environment with great folks and want to get in on the ground floor and make a real difference.

They have VC funding from Foundry Group, Alsop Louie and SoftTechVC.  They have tons of plans, too, to make a world-class product.  What’s missing?  You are. 

The only potential downside is you’ll have to listen to me at meetings, but you’ll be able to tease me about my bad hip and receding hairline.  Also, Samir, their CTO is cuddly. 

Come on Boulder, respond!  And if you aren’t from Boulder and want to live in a great place and work for a kick-butt company, let us know!  We love transplants, as we are all from elsewhere ourselves.

One of our portfolio companies, Organic Motion is hiring.  They are a really exciting company right in the middle of our Human Computer Interaction Theme.  In the company’s own words:

“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.

We are seeking to expand our Manhattan, NY based engineering team with applicants who have a solid mastery of practical C/C++ development skills combined with strong analytical and problem solving skills in a variety of areas including computer vision, computer graphics, networking, pipelining and optimization, biomechanics, and more.

We are looking for candidates having 2 or more years experience in a professional development setting in addition to a PHD, Master’s degree, or an exceptional Bachelor’s.

Required skills include some of the following:

* C, C++ (required)

* Stereo vision – 3d reconstruction / mesh creation & optimization 
* 3D programming (DirectX, OpenGL, Shaders, HLSL, CG, GPU) 
* Multi-threaded / multi-process programming

* Networking – sockets, RPC, streams, low latency hardware

* Computer vision / image processing

* Low-latency / real time 

Secondary skills:

* Game development
* Distributed systems
* Motion capture creation / analysis 
* Physics

* Scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, Perl, etc)

* UNIX, Linux

* Mathematical modeling, filtering, signal processing
* Biokinematics
* GUI development (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets) 
* Autodesk 3d animation suite API

Responsibilities include: 
* Optimization (single-core / multi-core / multi-process) 
* Algorithm development (raw 3D data analysis) 
* Application development (server and client side)

* Code maintenance and troubleshooting
* Supporting conferences and shows (past shows: SIGGRAPH, GDC, CES, I/ITSEC)

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic team with potential for rapid growth and access to a great deal of compelling technological resources. We are looking for individuals with fresh ideas and the skills to put those ideas to the test. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on a growing company!

If you are an excellent candidate, then please reply with your resume in Word or PDF format to careers@organicmotion.com. A code sample would also be a big plus!”

I’m looking for a Boulder/Denver based operations person to work part time with one of our companies.  Depending upon successful engagement, it could turn out to be for more than one company.

Basic qualifications:

1. Strong finance ability.  Not CFO, level, but able to keep 100% of the books of a small startup;

2. HR.  Be able to set up benefits and help with HR paperwork;

3. Office Management. Be able to set up supply deliveries; and

4. General Admin. Be flexible enough to take on other administrative tasks that the technology-only company doesn’t want to deal with.

My guess is that this is half day a week job at first.  Given the amount of times that I’m asked this question, chance for multiple clients is possible.

Email me if you are interested, or leave a comment. 

I am not sure if I have to issue a silly FTC disclaimer along with complimenting one of our portfolio companies, but I do have to say that I love Lijit. 

This isn’t something new, mind you.  We made the investment quite some time ago, but today I was reminded of another reason why it’s such a powerful platform.

I was reading my weekly stats report that shows how many people are reading my blog, where the traffic is coming from and what my most searched terms are.  I find the information illuminating and highly entertaining. 

Last week:

1. The top search that brought readers to my blog was “drummer jokes.” In fact, my drummer joke post is now 8 in the Google ranking.  Interestingly, my post was done back in April and it’s a total “one off” post.

2. As expected, there is always healthy traffic surrounding my Law Firm 2.0 thesis.  Last week the search term “lawyer layoffs” was a big director of traffic to my blog. 

3. As far as what people are searching for while on my site, I was surprised to find that the name of my high school band director and the name of a fellow high school percussionist were searched for.  If you were that person, email me.  I’ll set you up. 

Also, searches included FAS 157, How to get a Job in VC and other topics that I’ll have to take up (again) in the near future given the popularity of the subjects.

So thanks Lijit for showing me what my audience is interested in, instead of what I assume they are.  If you are a publisher and not using this FREE platform, what are you waiting for?  Let me know if you want a hookup.   

And for the guy who searched “AT&T sucks” on my blog, all I can say is “I agree.”

Bloomberg TV is running a show called Bloomberg Innovators.  One of our portfolio companies – Oblong – is the focus of the first episode that airs this Friday (10/30) on Bloomberg TV at 9pm and 11pm ET. 

Unfortunately, I became part of the show and had a bad hair day.  I’m speaking in front of my Donkey Kong machine, which good friend David Cohen points out the irony of me talking about the future of human/computer interactions while in front of a vintage arcade machine. 

Forgive the location and hair, but watch the show. It’s going to be great and feature an unbelievably exciting investment of ours. 

Yes.

In fact today, we announced our latest investment.  The company is called Organic Motion and they reached out to us having absolutely no connections to our group.

We met the company through our blogging at the Foundry Group.  It’s the second company (Brightleaf being the other) that introduced themselves to us after reading posts that we’ve written on our personal and Foundry Group blogs.   It’s really exciting to expand our network with new people and we are proud of the fact that we invest in entrepreneurs whom we’ve had no previous connections with.  Yes, the cold call still works if you have a great team, a great idea and fit within one of our investment themes.

In Organic Motion’s case, the company fit right into our human computer interaction investment theme, along with our previous investments Oblong and Smith and Tinker.

The company is based in New York City and is a leading innovator of computer vision and advanced motion capture systems. Their technology dramatically increases a computer’s ability to see and understand the motion of humans and other living organisms. The company offers groundbreaking turnkey and customized motion capture systems that utilize its patent-pending breakthrough computer vision technology.  For those of you interested in the space, this is the first markerless technology that we’ve seen that really works.

Welcome Andrew, Jonathan and team on our new partnership.  Thank you very much for finding us.