BigStep.Com Match.Com Libida.Com Microsoft WebTV 3DO U.S. West

January 1997 - July 1997. The "internet in hotel rooms" project widely covered in the press was delivered by the Acedata team in the San Jose Hilton. The "hotel project" was a trial collaboration funded by WebTV in Palo Alto (just prior to their $450m purchase by Microsoft) and On-Command Corporation in San Jose. WebTV technology was modified and integrated with On-Command's established resource allocation technology to deliver first an analog solution, and later an Ethernet solution. WebTV engineering & business development departments required us to run the whole program with "zero load" on the engineering department, unreasonable given the 100s of klocs of code that the team had to familiarize themselves with. The value we added was a sound management approach to first containing the scope and requirements of deliverables and getting sign-off from the 2 companies, then identifying the integration points and evolving the system design to create a minimal interface between the two teams to facilitate as much autonomous development as possible by the engineers. By facilitating relations internally and externally, we were able to get the engineers what they needed, and to get buy-in from various departments where there was initially great resistance due to the heavy workload at this young startup (WebTV). By managing the friction between corporate styles and expectations, we created a very strong bond between the members of the teams, and had considerable leverage at the executive-level at On-Command that we employed to get the project unstuck and moving again after internal politics there resulted in the loss of their engineering V.P. who was managing this project.