Steve Bell
Director at Blastoff Labs
Steve Bell
Director at Blastoff Labs
Greater Reno Area
Overview
Work Experience
Director
2015 - Current
Blastoff Labs is an innovative search engine marketing agency based in the Reno-Tahoe Technology Park in South Reno, Nevada. Blastoff Labs specializes in Google and Microsoft digital advertising campaign development, optimization, and management having designed, optimized, and managed over 5,000 successful campaigns since 2016. 60% of clients onboarded since incorporation remain clients in 2022. All client work is performed by a small team of specialists at Blastoff's offices; no client work is outsourced. The Blastoff team are experts with search, display, video, and shopping campaigns operating on multiple ad platforms, and specialize in large-scale semi-automated complex accounts. Blastoff maintains all available SEM and Analytics certifications, renewing annually including Microsoft Agency Partner and Google Partner. Blastoff Labs contributes to digital marketing industry conferences and is a recognized Google Advertising Community contributor, with 90 "best solutions" for solutions to challenging Google Ads issues.
Guest Lecturer, Orfalea School of Business
2008 - 2010
At Cal Poly Steve taught Business 454, "Innovation & Entrepreneurship", as Guest Lecturer with Business School Professor Dr. Jeffrey Danes. He brought venture and angel funded technology companies into the classroom at Cal Poly, and engaged the students to work on and solve various problems the companies face. Some of the skills taught in the classroom through project research and competitions included primary market research, competitive analysis, market positioning, beta testing of a Drupal SaaS software application (using on-campus focus groups), launching a digital music agency, organizing 50,000-photo shoots of Cal Poly and SLO online, and conducting/publishing professional video interviews of entrepreneurs. CBS News San Francisco interviewed Steve about the project in 2009. A blog about tech startups, StartupTrek TV was created and articles contributed to bring the "inside story" on the formation and growth of technology startups to the web, as well as to network & cable television networks. The idea was to bring a fun new topic to reality television, which has an outsized impact on the US economy: the formation and growth of new technology startups. On successive summers, StartupTrek's TV crew took a 6,600 mile "road trip" across the Western United States, with Steve video-interviewing entrepreneurs in an ever-evolving but succinct 3-minute, 3-question format. StartupTrek built a small audience of Bay Area tech startup fans, entrepreneurs, venture and Angel capital investors.
Manager, Worldwide Wi-Fi and DSL Laboratories
2000 - 2002
Steve worked for HP-Agilent after they acquired his Wi-Fi Company, the Silicon Valley Networking Lab. HP executive (GM) Bill Mortimer, and Agilent CEO Ned Barnhold made the acquisition. After becoming part of HP, Steve was lucky to work with Chuck Acken as a mentor to integrate SVNL into HP-Agilent. Chuck spent many years working with "Bill and Dave", the founders of HP. Steve worked within HP-Agilent as Manager, Interoperability Conformance Labs (ICL) until integration of the SVNL operation was complete, and labs were established, in addition to San Jose, in Tokyo and London. During his tenure at Agilent, Steve evangelized both Wi-Fi and DSL conformance and interoperability testing throughout Agilent's instrumentation and testing divisions in the US, Asia, and Europe.
Founder & General Manager
1997 - 2002
The Silicon Valley Networking Lab played a significant role in commercializing Wi-Fi technology. SVNL certified 7,000 Wi-Fi (802.11 wireless Ethernet) products. SVNL did over $100M in revenue from it's launch in Feb 1997 through 2006. SVNL was initially going to be acquired by Hewlett Packard (HP); but when HP split into two companies (HP and Agilent, A on the NYSE) the first acquisition to cross the NYSE ticker, four days later, was A's acquisition of SVNL.
Member, Board of Directors and Compensation Committee
1998 - 2000
Steve served as a consultant to the Board of Directors of Network Peripherals (Nasdaq: NPIX) in 1996, a year before it became part of FalconStor. He brought in a team of consultants in to assist NPIX in re-positioning the company out of the FDDI (Fiber Distributed Data Interface) business, into the Gigabit Ethernet Switching Business. He ended up joining the Board for two years.
VP Marketing & General Manager
1993 - 1993
Steve served as VP/Marketing at Make Systems, which developed and marketed high-end ($250k ASP) network simulation tools. Make was funded by Media Billionaire John Kluge, and had 160 employees. Steve was a member of the executive staff, and ran both company-wide marketing, and an auxiliary business unit with P&L responsibility.
Director Product Marketing, Hughes LAN Systems (HLS) Subsidary
1990 - 1993
At HLS Steve had 5 Product Managers with a portfolio of over 100 legacy LAN, WAN, and software products. In parallel, they launched an ATM-based Enterprise Networking Chassis which competed with Cisco, Nortel, and various LAN switching startups. During his tenure with HLS, he helped found the ATM Forum including hosting their second meeting, in Palo Alto CA and speaking to a Plenary session of the ATM Forum in Paris, France. Steve had the opportunity to work closely with HLS 50+ strong worldwide direct sales force, traveling extensively to support them. He served as the "point of liason" between HLS and Hughes Aircraft Corporation. While they upgraded their 5,000-seat corporate enterprise network he advised Hughes on network architecture, strategic issues, and related technology issues.
Director VLSI Engineering
1987 - 1989
Steve managed a group of engineers who developed a bipolar/CMOS chipset that was a pin-compatible replacement for National Semiconductors' "8390/91/92" Ethernet Chipset. It went into high-volume production and ended up in hundreds of millions of Ethernet interfaces. He also managed the development of a two-chip 802.5 Token Ring chipset, that was implemented in Bell Laboratories' 1.75 micron CMOS dual-Polysilicon process. Steve's team gave a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in NYC, describing the innovative chipset architecture. The mixed-signal Token Ring chipset, like the Ethernet chipset, implemented all Physical and MAC layer functions. The front-end transceivers, data seperators, and phase-locked loops were an early CMOS "mixed signal" design. So the designs were of interest to the global semiconductor industry.
Member of Technical Staff (Engineering R&D)
1977 - 1986
At Bell Laboratories, after completing a Bell Labs sponsored Masters Degree program at U.C. Berkeley, Steve received two US patents; designed the System 85 voice switching mixed-signal chipset (co-patent on voice switch; now licensed by many cell phone manufacturers); contributed as a system engineer designing the ISDN '2B+D' line protocol; co-inventing a unique optical touch screen for the Unix PC. He also designed unique switched-capacitor CMOS trans-impedance amplifiers. Steve published Bell System technical papers, presented at ISSCC conferences; co-founded the "Intra-preneurial" (funded by Bell Labs) venture which developed the first digital, non-linear programmable hearing aid, which was spun off to private investors becoming ReSound Corporation (the chips can be purchased today - 2016 - by buying a hearing aid at Costco). He was a member of the team of Bell Labs Engineers which established AT&T's first digital ASIC design center, in Sunnyvale, CA (1986).