Built with Love

Beautifully crafted home media center products

Who is "US"?

I started this company with my beautiful wife, Maggie Kotzin. We are located in the heart of Silicon Valley and are enjoying the beautiful weather in Northern California.

How Flirc started

For a long period of time, my wife and I were using a wireless keyboard for our media center remote. That quickly grew old and we didn't want 'another' remote. We wanted to use our same television remote and I was baffled to find how complicated this was. Flirc was born to solve this problem and offer an extremely elegant and user friendly way to use any remote control with your computer, media center, or set top box.

Our Mission

After flirc was born, we acknowledged a widespread problem in the media center market. We have, and are working on a number of products that offer many elegant solutions for the living room. We're on to something, and we're excited about it.

Why?

Cancer Research

After 5 years of college, with no breaks and sometimes carrying 3 jobs in one quarter, I was in dire need of a vacation after graduating. I delayed my job at Cisco for three months and was going to use that time to travel to Europe with my girlfriend (now wife). But before my trip, I went to the doctor in suspicion of stomach pains and was told to cancel my summer plans, I had cancer.

Maggie stuck by myside without even a wince of hesitation. She cut off all her hair and donated it to Locks of Love.

I went through surgery and found that my cancer was in progression from stage 2 to stage 3, I had to do chemo.

It was a 6 month battle, and it was the hardest battle which can't possibly be put into words. But I made it through if not for my family, or Maggie, but the inspiration of my amazing oncologist Dr. Heinz Lenz at the USC Cancer Research Center. His uplifting character, insight into the genetic disposition that my family caries, and outstanding breakthroughs in cancer research is truly an inspiration.

I finished chemo and asked Dr. Lenz if I can cancel my plans to start at Cisco and work for him full time.

He said, "I need you in the industry". So rather than quitting my current full time job, I'm using flirc as my first way to make significant contributions to cancer research.

A portion of every sale will be donated directly to Dr. Lenz's USC Cancer Research Facility. If you would like to make a contribution independently of flirc, please do so by visiting the following link, and under special instructions put: Dr. Heinz Lenz.

A Special Thanks

There were a number of open source projects, products, services, and friends that made flirc possible. I'm forever thankful for their support, services, and now friendship.

I have to mention these guys first. The whole motivation behind flirc was so I can control my 'media center' pc with my television remote. And since the beginning, I was always trying to find the best media center software. I was delighted when XBMC was finally ported to the PC, and had the first alpha running on my machine within a week (it was actually pretty stable too). I immediately got rid of mythtv (it's about 10 years behind it's time). XBMC is like wordpress, and lies in the ranks of the best written, and best executed open source solutions in the world.

This is a double thank you. Git hub is one of the most amazing places to share code, but more so, this is where and how a great friend has been sharing code with me. Robert Curtis is an amazing engineer, great friend, and the best mentor. Thanks for your great friendship and inspiration throughout the years.

I'm in debt to this amazing company. They have been an invaluable part in reaching this goal and dream. From PCB's, to tutorials, to contacts, I could not have done it without them.

I also want to say thank you to Spoko Solutions. A design house that helped bring Flirc to reality and give the device a defining personality and soul.

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