Digital Chocolate

William M. 'Trip' Hawkins III is a Silicon Valley American entrepreneur and founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company and Digital Chocolate. Hawkins was the Director of Strategy and Marketing at Apple Computer in 1982 when he left to found Electronic Arts , a video game publisher. Electronic... Arts had a successful run for many years under Hawkins' leadership. It was once the world's largest video game publisher and continues to hold the top spot among third-party publishers as of the present day. Though he remained chair of the board, Hawkins transitioned from EA in 1991 to form 3DO, a video game console company. 3DO was formed in partnership with several other companies including EA. Upon its release in 1993, the 3DO was the most powerful video game console at the time. It was also the most expensive, costing US$700, compared to the low hundreds of dollars of other systems. Sales were poor due to weak games that relied excessively on full motion video sequences at the expense of gameplay.
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As a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Russell invests in consumer and energy related technologies and markets, including software,... electronic commerce, Web services, semiconductors, consumer systems, media and telecommunications. He is currently on the boards of Digital Chocolate, Friendster, Lilliputian Systems, Mobilygen, Quorum Systems and RazorGator.Russell also leads KPCB's investment in WildBlue Communications, and is also on the board of the non-profit organization Sustainable Conservation.Russell joined KPCB after seven years at Microsoft. At Microsoft he helped launch LAN Manager, Microsoft's first network operating system, then was the marketing manager in charge of Windows for Workgroups, a small-business networking version of Windows. For the first half of 1993, Russell worked directly for Bill Gates, during which time he researched the online market and recommended an entry strategy for that market. This led to the formation the Microsoft Network , Microsoft's online service. Russell became the first employee of this division and became its General Manager and then Vice President through April of 1996. Under his direction, MSN was developed and launched and reached over one million paying members. Russell was also responsible for the formation of the Slate project, Microsoft's World Wide Web political and arts commentary. He recruited the editor, Michael Kinsley, and was the business manager in charge of Slate until he left Microsoft in July 1996.Before Microsoft, Russell was a software engineer who wrote artificial intelligence applications for the financial services industry at Applied Expert Systems, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup, and was also an engineering consultant. He earned his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Physics in 1984 and an MBA from Harvard University where he was a Baker Scholar in 1989.
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