<a href="https://thespoon.tech/robot-smoothie-company-blendid-launches-equity-crowdfunding-campaign/" target="_blank">Robot Smoothie Company Blendid Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The Spoon</font>

Robot Smoothie Company Blendid Launches Equity Crowdfunding Campaign - The Spoon

<a href="https://thespoon.tech/exclusive-blendid-and-jamba-co-brand-new-smoothie-robot/" target="_blank">Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The Spoon</font>

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot - The Spoon

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

If it isn't crazy enough, it isn't worth pursuing.  Check out at https://www.blendid.com

Blendid

Founder & CEO

Led the strategy, programs & execution of all sales, merchandising, operations, inventory, and logistics (forward and reverse) functions to help drive the sales of NOOK devices in more than 800 Barnes & Noble retail and College stores and eCommerce. 

As the Exec Sponsor for Samsung relationship, led the company's strategy to exit the tablet HW R&D by building and launching 4 different co-branded tablet products with Samsung - Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK 7.0, Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 NOOK 10.1, Samsung Galaxy Tab E NOOK and Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 NOOK. 

Launched Barnes & Noble's latest and greatest GlowLight Plus, a truly innovative and very competitive high-res, water-and-dust proof EPD device that will take digital Reading and Learning to the next level.

Also led the development and execution of various programs to improve the customer care experience and drive the cost down by more than 30% annually by understanding the call drivers and creating a feedback loop to systematically address product deficiencies, along with improvement in support processes and channel mix.

I had the privilege of working and learning from some very talented people across all functions in the organization who diligently kept moving forward despite various challenges. Thank you for sharing the ride with me.

Barnes & Noble NOOK Media

VP Sales, Customer Care & Partnerships

Responsible for product management of cloud and commerce for NOOK (devices, apps and content). As part of this exec-level role, launched NOOK HD and HD+ tablets in more than a thousand Barnes & Noble retail and college bookstores and BN.com before the 2012 holiday season. As the Exec Sponsor for Microsoft relationship, led the bold international expansion for NOOK - development of a global catalog with local content acquired and onboarded in 10 languages, development and distribution of NOOK App for Windows 8 in 32 markets and 21 languages, and a global eCommerce platform that allowed consumers to transact in 15 different currencies - a feat that touched every part of the company and was accomplished in less than 12 months.

As the strategic priorities of Barnes & Noble and Microsoft changed, led the dis-entanglement of this relationship including termination of the commercial agreement that paved the way for College business to spinoff unlocking significant shareholder value.

VP Product Management, Cloud & Commerce

My job was to make sure that this rocket ship stayed on course, maintained its speed and performed at its optimum potential. We started Retrevo to make it easy for consumers to search, discover, get recommendations and buy products. We used machine learning and Big Data Analytics (before the term was coined) on large scale private and public unstructured data to derive product insights on a daily basis so consumers always got the guidance & buying experience that was comprehensive, current and objective. 

We were the only known eCommerce company that had a "Do Not Add to Cart" button. If we didn't believe in a product, we wouldn't sell that product on our site (of course, we would tell the customer which other retailers on the web they could buy it from if they still desired). We owned the consumer experience and built a network of retailers and distributors to drop-ship various categories of consumer goods that we believed in and sold on retrevo.com.

Raised venture capital financing from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Alloy Ventures.

Retrevo was recognized by Time Magazine as the Best Shopping Website in 2011 and at the time of merger with NOOK Media (a Barnes & Noble subsidiary) had millions of shoppers every month who relied on Retrevo to get product guidance and purchase experience. 

Orchestrated the sale of retrevo.com website to Shopzilla where it continued to grow while Retrevo technology and the team continued to break new grounds at Barnes & Noble NOOK Media.

Retrevo Inc. (acquired by Barnes & Noble NOOK Media)

Co-founder & CEO

At the time when wireless deployment was in its infancy and cumbersome, conceived the idea that wireless access points had to get simpler (to the point of becoming just the radio transmitters and receivers) and intelligence for configuring and managing them had to get centralized so service providers and enterprise customers could deploy and manage them with ease and with significantly reduced cost. 

This resulted in my incubating, securing funding, hiring, developing and managing wireless product line at Extreme Networks. Wireless product line consisted of sophisticated design SW that used triangulation to determine the best placement for wireless access points, access points themselves, centralized switches and system management software. This thin client architecture has now become the de-facto standard for wireless deployment in enterprise environments.

Extreme Networks

Incubator, Vice President and General Manager, Wireless Business

This was the time when broadband service was expensive whether you were buying a DSL line or a T1 line to connect from your home/business to a service provider in a metropolitan area. Some of us passionate technologists got together and introduced a new kind of network that offered the same broadband service at 1/10th of the cost of other services available at the time. 

We accomplished this by (i) dramatically lowering the capital cost using commodity/low cost IP/Ethernet switches and adding a sophisticated software layer on top of this for quality of service and reliability / redundancy and (ii) dramatically lowering operational cost by replacing people with SW - we turned backoffice inside out and developed a marketplace that allowed customers to select and provision their own services (connecting to various ISPs and ASPs in a metro area) and change bandwidth on the fly using the web without requiring expensive truck roll and operators. We also developed SW / predictive algorithms for capacity planning and utilization so these customer applications would run continuously without degradation in their performance across networks consisting of thousands of nodes. Telseon was acquired by OnFiber/Qwest Communications.

Telseon IP Services

Co-founder and Vice President of Engineering

Spearheaded and developed cross-business-unit technology, algorithms and protocols that allowed large scale, distributed network systems to auto-configure, communicate, support quality of service and enforce security of communication. Much of the innovation was incorporated in various IEEE standards such as IEEE 802.1p, 801.1Q and 802.1X.

Vipin Jain