I’m happy to announce that Sling Media has shipped their first product, the Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, and that Walt Mossberg’s review of the Slingbox appears in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I’ve posted about Sling briefly in the past, here and here, and have been actively involved with the company as a board member since Mobius VC invested in them last October.

Since that time, the team managed to garner several awards at January’s CES and build some buzz, all while keeping their heads down in product development mode to meet an aggressive goal of shipping the product in the first half of 2005, which they did with a day or two to spare. You can buy a Slingbox online at CompUSA right now, or you can walk over to your local CompUSA store and pick one up off the shelves on Friday, with more retailers to be announced shortly. Congrats to everyone over at SlingMedia for a job very well done!

I may be biased, but I’ve been a beta tester for the past couple months and wouldn’t want to part with my Slingbox, which I’ve got hooked up to my DirecTiVo. Just yesterday, while at the office (hey, I’m a multi-tasker, what can I say), I managed to watch the last 15 minutes of Six Feet Under and also reactivate my Sopranos season pass using my laptop. And a month or so ago while in Pittsburgh, I watched the most recent episode of Entourage (which was sitting on my Tivo) from the comfort of my broadband-enabled hotel room. Pretty damn cool.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Slingbox

My wife Katherine recently pointed me to a very cool website that produces a historical graph showing the popularity of a name through time. The interactive graphing feature, the NameVoyager, is really well done and fun to play with. “What should we name our child?” is a common conversation today among our peers, many of whom are now firmly enagaged in the procreation phase of life.

When I was born in the 70’s, my name was on the rise in popularity, peaked around 1980, and has been falling steadily ever since, though it is still more common today than when I was born.

Since Katherine had already ruled out my suggestions that we name our son Agamemnon or Klaxtor5, we named him Quinn, aiming for a name that was relatively uncommon, yet not so rare as to be strange or difficult to spell or pronounce. Being word nerds, we also wanted a name with a high Scrabble score. (Never mind the fact that proper nouns don’t count, please.)

Update: Hunter Walk, the AdSense Partner Manager at Google, pointed out to me that another consideration when naming your child should be how easily discoverable they will be when using a search engine. I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of that myself, though I did reserve quinnmcintyre.com on his behalf.

Technorati Tags: Baby Name