Yesterday, Judge Folsom finally made his ruling in our long-standing patent litigation case against Echostar. When I joined TiVo nearly 4-1/2 years ago, this case had already begun, and it was one of the main reasons I was so optimistic about TiVo’s future. Well, the wheels of justice turn a lot slower than I had expected, but they do turn, and fortunately the outcome is as I had hoped.

Who knows what shenanigans Charlie Ergen (Echostar’s CEO) has planned next, but this ruling is very significant and most analysts seem to agree that ol’ Charlie has just about run out of options. The market seems to agree with TiVo stock up nearly 50%.

After a decade with TiVo, Paul has decided to pursue other opportunities. The Consumer Design Group, which Paul led, got together to create a really cool plaque which we presented to Paul on his last day. Here are some pics of the plaque as well as some shots of the group.

Great news today on our long-running patent case against Echostar. This morning, we issued this statement:

We are extremely pleased that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit unanimously ruled in our favor in EchoStar’s appeal of the district court judgment of patent infringement, full award of damages and that the injunction, which was stayed pending appeal, was ordered to be reinstated. Today’s ruling is confirmation of the value of TiVo’s IP portfolio, which is in addition to the other benefits TiVo has to offer. TiVo can now continue to focus on its goal to drive greater distribution in both its stand alone and mass distribution efforts.

The market reacted positively, sending TiVo’s share up nearly 30% – woohoo! Later in the day, EchoStar, remaining defiant, had this to say:

We are pleased the Federal Circuit found for us on Tivo’s hardware claims, but are disappointed in the Federal Circuit’s decision on the software claims. The decision, however, will have no effect on our current or future customers because EchoStar’s engineers have developed and deployed ‘next-generation’ DVR software to our customers’ DVRs. This improved software is fully operational, has been automatically downloaded to current customers, and does not infringe the Tivo patent at issue in the Federal Circuit’s ruling.

To which we subsequently responded:

Echostar has made a series of statements over the years related to the infringement of the TiVo patent that has turned out to be both false and misleading. At this point it doesn’t really matter what Echostar says by way of further self-serving statements. It matters what the courts say — and the courts have spoken.

Entertaining, no? Definitely not a dull day in TiVo land!

“We are extremely pleased that the PTO has now found all claims of the Time Warp Patent to be valid after conducting a reexamination of the patent requested by EchoStar. This decision by the PTO is final and not appealable by EchoStar. Today’s decision by the PTO brings us another step closer to ending EchoStar’s continued infringement and we are hopeful that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit will uphold the district court judgment of patent infringement and reinstate the injunction.”

Nice.

Paul thought it would be fun to do something special to commemorate Jeff turning the big Six-Oh. So we blew up a bunch of TiVo balloons and filled up Jeff’s cube with them. Well, actually, we cheated a bit. After blowing up a few balloons, we quickly realized that we wouldn’t have the stamina to blow up enough balloons to fill Jeff’s entire cube – manually blowing up balloons is quite hard on the cheeks and lips! So we laid down some cardboard (TiVo set-top box cartons, actually) all the way across his desk so that we’d only have to fill half the cube but still have it look like we filled the entire cube.

We also printed a bunch of signs directing Jeff to his specially designated parking spot for that day. Paul came in early Friday morning to set up the signs, but after all that work, Jeff didn’t even show up to work! What a slacker! The balloons were fine sitting in the cube over the weekend, but Paul had to set up the signs again Monday morning. Here are the pics I took.

Well, I guess the launch of the new TiVo HD isn’t a complete surprise since its impending release was first discovered a little over a week ago. Although the sleuth who uncovered the leak didn’t initially blog about it, others soon found out and word quickly spread. It didn’t take long before the leaked pics and specs were picked up and posted by a variety of other sites.

The TiVo HD Box is the culmination of a lot of hard work by the TiVo team and we’re all quite proud of it. My contribution to this killer product? The sleek-looking bezel.

There’s also a nice splash page for the product at TiVo’s website that looks like this:

An HD TiVo with two tuners for only $299? What the heck are you waiting for?!! Go get one now!

Cool! We announced a partnership today with Amazon that will allow you to download movies and TV shows from Amazon’s Unbox service to your TiVo for viewing on your TV. This is one of the capabilities that I was most excited about when I joined TiVo, so it’s great to see it now finally becoming a reality.

The internet’s flooded with articles about the announcement. Here are a few from the LA Times, USA Today, and CNET. Here’s the link on Amazon’s site as well as the link on TiVo’s site.

As mentioned previously, installing Windows XP Pro on Boot Camp was pretty straightforward. Installing Pro/E and Intralink (the file library/management system that integrates with Pro/E) went largely without a hitch as well. I was a bit worried about potential problems in getting Pro/E and Intralink to be able to pull the required floating licenses from the corporate server over our company’s VPN, but to my relief, that too went pretty smoothly.

Performance was very good, as could be expected since my MacBook Pro is, for all intents and purposes, a high-end Windows-compatible laptop. Of course, having to boot out of Mac OS X and then boot into Windows to run Pro/E is certainly not optimal. I still sought the ideal solution of being able to run Pro/E from within Mac OS X. It was time to try installing Pro/E on Parallels.

The official released version of Parallels (build 1970 as of this post) does not have direct 3-D graphics support and neither do any of the subsequent beta releases. However, the recent beta releases have reportedly sped up graphics performance by up to 50% so I decided to take my chances and install one of the beta releases.

I installed the latest Mac Build 3106 Beta 3 of Parallels. The installation was very easy – just follow the on-screen instructions, enter the Windows activation key and insert the Windows CD when prompted. The 3106 build is able to use an existing Boot Camp partition to run Windows, which was really what I wanted to do since I already had a successful installation of Windows, Pro/E, and Intralink on Boot Camp.

Unfortunately, there were several reports on the Parallels forums of people having problems with Parallels using their Boot Camp partition. I therefore decided to simply have Parallels install another copy of Windows (basically the default, recommended installation for Parallels) and not mess with my Boot Camp partition. I hadn’t activated Windows on Boot Camp yet so I didn’t expect to have any Windows activation issues.

There are plenty of blog posts, articles, and videos showing Parallels in action so I won’t go into any of the general details of using Parallels. However, I’ve got to say that this is some really, really cool software.

The next step was to install Pro/E and Intralink. As with my Boot Camp installation, the entire installation process went smoothly and I soon had Pro/E and Intralink running within Parallels. So what’s the word on performance? Well, although it actually ran much better than I expected, there is a definite performance hit when compared with Boot Camp. Spinning/panning/zooming assemblies is noticeably slower with the assemblies often moving in lurches. Manipulation of individual parts seems to be a bit better, but still not as “silky smooth” as in Boot Camp.

I’ve created a short video showing the application launch process, some manipulation of an assembly and part, and a regeneration of a part (approximately 130 features). A few details of my setup:

- Stock MacBook Pro (2.33 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB 667Mhz DDR SDRAM, ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM)
- 1028MB RAM alloted to Parallels
- Intralink 3.3
- Pro/E Wildfire 2

To give you an idea of the size of the assembly, the assembly in the video is one of a remote control with less than 20 parts. It may also be worth noting that the Pro/E and Intralink application launches are from a fresh restart of Windows. Applications in Windows generally launch faster on subsequent launches.

The bottom line on running Pro/E on Parallels? I haven’t spent a lot of time on it yet, but I’d say it is reasonably usable if you’re working on individual parts or drawings. If you’re going to be doing a lot of assembly work, you’re probably better off using Boot Camp for now. Then again, since I lean more towards being a Pro/E “power user”, I may be a bit more finicky when it comes to these types of performance differences.

Although not quite ready for prime time for me personally, I am very impressed with what the Parallels team has accomplished – big kudos indeed! And at the rate they’ve been improving the software, I’m very optimistic that these performance issues will be addressed sooner rather than later. 3-D hardware support will supposedly be forthcoming in the next major release of the software so I’ll definitely be following Parallels’ progress eagerly over the next few months.

I’ve been longing to be able to run Pro/E (the 3D mechanical CAD software that I use for product design) on a Mac for many years, basically ever since I started using Pro/E. With Apple’s move to the Intel architecture, it’s subsequent public beta of Boot Camp (which runs Windows in a separate partition and enables the option of booting into either MacOS or Windows), and the release of Parallels (which allows Mac users to run Windows without having to reboot), running Pro/E on a Mac had finally become a reality.

Although I follow the tech industry very closely, I’m generally not one of the earliest adopters of new technologies – I don’t even have an HD TV yet! So I waited until things had progressed far enough that I could be highly confident that I could get Pro/E running before I plunked down my hard-earned money on a new Mac.

Well, I made that plunk this week and have in front of me my newest toy – a screaming fast 15.4″ MacBook Pro with a 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM, and 256MB graphics card. Windows XP Pro is up and running via Boot Camp (installation was a breeze!), and although I bought a copy of Parallels, I haven’t gotten around to installing it yet. Parallels currently does not support direct hardware acceleration (but they supposedly will introduce this early next year) so I’ll likely have to run Pro/E through Boot Camp for a while. I don’t expect many problems installing Pro/E (I know someone who was able to do it without any problems); I’m more worried about being able to get Pro/E to communicate over the corporate VPN to obtain a license from our floating license server. More updates to come…

A white version of the TiVo Glo remote is now available for sale on the TiVo store. Functionally, this remote is identical to the black TiVo Glo remote. The difference is purely cosmetic – instead of glossy black, the front and back housings are glossy white. In addition, the keys are a dark gray instead of black to better match the white housings.

As with the black TiVo Glo, I wish I had some more pics to put up, but the only one I have is the one above taken from the TiVo website.