deeda moves to Palo Alto!

If you've been following our work over the past two years, then you know how hard we resisted moving out to Silicon Valley after our early days in Boston. Instead, deeda decided to settle in Chicago in January, 2006. Our goal was to bring our capacitive touch devices to market while also completing our web, and desktop ecosystem. But why did we move to Chicago in the first place? The answer to this emotion-based decision lay in two areas:

1. Our founder, Atif Khan, was born in Chicago. Chicago was therefore a natural return to home after a long educational journey that helped develop the technology behind deeda's products.

2. Many people have asked if it's possible to succeed without being in "The Valley". In fact, we asked this question after reading this article in Business Week:

So Chicago lost a great opportunity with Marc's then little startup called Netscape. The rest is history. But we honestly believed that we could reverse this trend with Kiku, Menx, and Pi. All we needed to do was go out there and make it happen. Yet, even with all of our hardware development work completed, we still needed to find the right financial support to complete our products. 2006 led us down the struggling path of people who either "didn't get it" or were simply not plugged into the same tech startup mindset we desperately needed. Some of the comments we heard throughout the year were: "We don't invest in consumer products" - "We don't invest in hardware" - "If this is so much better then why isn't Apple or Microsoft doing this?" 2007 brought us the iPhone and the tremendous realization that Chicago had simply not matured since Marc Andreessen's early struggles.

However, Chicago did give us a lot of great deeda Team Members and advisers that came on board from Motorola - Casey Hill, Art Paton, Tony Palcheck, Tim Krauskopf, Mike Suman, Francis Jatico to name a few. Building a strong team is half the battle for any startup, so we're very thankful for their advice, participation, and undying support. Jeff Poon, our main guy at Alps Electric who worked with us on developing our capacitive touch hardware, also joined our cause.

But 2008 was the year we decided we needed to make a lot of big changes if we were serious about being successful. Our biggest decision was to finally embrace the community and environment that San Francisco and Silicon Valley had to offer. While it's never easy to just pick up and move, we closed out our final IP applications, wireframe development, and headed out West.

Today, we are located in the heart of Palo Alto. Dylan Schiemann of Dojo and David Weekly of PBwiki fame have made us feel right at home. The fact that the weather here has been sunny and in the 70's compared to Chicago's 20 degrees and snowing - has also helped a lot.

We should also apologize for the dark period over the past 3 months. As you can see there were a lot of big decisions going on here and we needed to time to make sure everything worked out properly. Our goal is to provide you with the unique services we have promised you from the start. We hope you see our efforts in relocating to continue our work as a sign of our serious commitment.

Before ending this post we would also like to thank you all for your wonderful emails of support. It means a lot to us!