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Watch City Brewing Company. A nice place to enjoy good Waltham craft beers. And if you’re a ThinkFlood software engineer named Justin Nguyen, it’s also a nice place to make the honest mistake of losing the next product in ThinkFlood’s line of universal remotes for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad—RedEye mini.

Justin Nguyen—a Northeastern University 2009 graduate and movie trivia master—is a ThinkFlood software engineer working on the RedEye app, the little program turns the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad into a high-end universal remote, when combined with RedEye hardware. A dream job for a talented engineer like Nguyen who always wanted to work at a hip, young company like ThinkFlood.

On the night of May 25, he was enjoying the fine house beverages at Watch City Brewing Company, a legendary brewpub in silicon savvy Waltham, Massachusetts. He was happy. After all it was his birthday. He was turning 24 that very same day and he was celebrating. The place was great. The beer was excellent. “I underestimated how good Waltham beer is,” he typed into the iPhone he was using to test RedEye mini hardware in the field. The RedEye mini he was testing earlier that evening sat beside him, cleverly disguised as ThinkFlood’s original RedEye remote. It was the last Facebook update made by Nguyen while he still knew the whereabouts of the secret universal remote adapter, right before he abandoned it on a bar stool, leaving to go home.

It was a simple, honest mistake in the middle of celebration. Something that anyone from Matt Eagar to Adam Shapiro could have done. Knowing how ferocious and ruthless ThinkFlood is about product leaks, those beers may have turned out to be the bitterest of his life.

(Almost) Impenetrable Security

Until now, ThinkFlood’s legendary security had always worked perfectly. Perhaps there was a blurry factory photo here, or some last-minute information strategically whispered to some friendly media there. But when it came to the big stuff, everything was airtight.

At their Waltham campus, any gadget or computer that is worth protecting is behind armored doors, with security locks with codes that change every few minutes. Prototypes are bolted to desks. Hidden in these labs, hardware, software and industrial-design elves toil separately on the same devices, without really having the complete picture of the final product.

And lurking in every corner, the ThinkFlood secret police, a team of people with a single mission: To make sure nobody speaks. And if there’s a leak, hunt down the traitor and escourt him out of the building. Using lockdowns and other fear tactics, these men in black are the last line of defense against any sneaky eyes. The Gran Jefe Matt Eagar trusts them to avoid ThinkFlood’s worst nightmare: The leak of a strategic product that could cost them millions of dollars in free marketing promotion. One that would make them lose control of the product news cycle.

But the fact is that there’s no perfect security. Not when humans are involved. Humans can lose things. You know, like the next RedEye remote, the portable RedEye mini.

Lost and Found
ThinkFlood security’s mighty walls fell (on the midnight of ) Wednesday, May 26. At that time, Nguyen was at Watch City Brewing, just 2.5 miles from the company’s Bear Hill Road headquarters, having his fun. Around him, other groups of people were sharing the jolly atmosphere, and plenty of the golden liquid.

The person who eventually ended up with the lost RedEye mini  was sitting next to Nguyen. He was drinking with a friend too. He noticed Nguyen on the stool next to him, but didn’t think twice about him at the time. Not until Nguyen had already left the bar, and a random really drunk guy—who’d been sitting on the other side of Nguyen—returned from the bathroom to his own stool.

The Random Really Drunk Guy pointed at the RedEye mini disguised as the original RedEye remote that was sitting on the stool, the precious prototype left by the young ThinkFlood engineer.

“Hey man, is that your RedEye base station?” asked Random Really Drunk Guy.

“Hmmm, what?” replied the person who ended up with the RedEye mini.

“No, no, it isn’t mine.”

“Ooooh, I guess it’s your friend’s then,” referring to a friend who at the time was in the bathroom.

“Here, take it,” said the Random Really Drunk Guy, handing it to him. “You don’t want to lose it.” After that, the Random Really Drunk Guy also left the bar.

The person who ended up with the RedEye mini asked around, but nobody claimed it. He thought about the young guy sitting next to him, so he and his friend stayed there for some time, waiting. Nguyen never came back.

Thinking about returning the Wi-Fi-to-infrared bridge the next day, he left.

When he got home, he downloaded the RedEye app to his iPhone and tried to play with the networked universal remote. I was buzzed and exhausted, so after trying to get it working for two minutes or so, I gave up and went to bed,” he told me in a telephone interview.

He had no clue that something was amiss. “It seemed like normal RedEye hardware,” he said. “It looked just like one—except I was confused because it seemed like the device’s owner was controlling bar TVs with it earlier in the evening, despite the fact that it had no power supply. I reasoned that maybe he took the AC adapter home with him and accidentally left the rest of it behind.”

When he woke up after the hazy night, he took a look at what he had carried home the night before. He immediately realized that there was something very strange about this RedEye.

At first it didn’t appear to have any special features, just a sticker that read, “JN’s Rm,” in the spot where you would normally find the device’s serial number, MAC address, FCC ID, and IC ID. All of the usual hardware identification numbers had been scratched off.

He already knew that the power cord was missing, but it was more than that. The 30-pin dock connector was gone too. He picked up the device and was stunned by what he hadn’t noticed in the crowded brewpub: something inside the base station was loose and rattling around.

He held the RedEye hardware up in the morning sunlight and finally saw that there was something other than a circuit board inside. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake RedEye base station.

There it was, a tiny and glorious thing, completely different from everything that came before. He immediately started Googling for the “JN” from ThinkFlood, who was sitting next to him the night before. Several minutes later he found a picture of ThinkFlood developer Justin Nguyen.

He reached for a phone and called a lot of ThinkFlood numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to Nguyen, but no luck. The company had recently relieved him of his occasional telephone duties so he could focus on finishing code for the in-app TV guide, that would soon be free for all RedEye remote users in the US and Canada.

He thought that eventually Nguyen would check his voicemail, and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. The receptionists at ThinkFlood, who were unaware of the missing RedEye mini, thought the calls were part of an elaborate prank by ThinkFlood’s competitors (who often call to feel around for unpublished company and product information). Not to mention the fact that the caller’s tale was nearly identical to Gizmodo’s Lost iPhone Saga.

He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then? Walk into a retailer that sells the original RedEye system and hand the RedEye mini to a 20-year-old who might just end up selling it on eBay?

The Aftermath
Two days later, MoreControl.com got it for $100 in rolled quarters and a king size box of Swedish Fish. At the time, we didn’t know if it was the real thing because the RedEye mini didn’t work with the version of the RedEye app currently in the App Store (and all RedEye hardware is supposed to work with a single app).

Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to ThinkFlood. We had the portable universal remote hardware, but we didn’t know the owner. Later, we heard the whole story, but we didn’t know for sure that it was Nguyen’s RedEye mini until today, when we finally tricked a receptionist at ThinkFlood to transferring our call.

Justin Nguyen: Hello?

Steve MacKinnon: Is this Justin?

J: Yeah.

S: Hi, this is Steve MacKinnon from MoreControl.com.

J: Hey!

S: You work at ThinkFlood, right?

J: Um, I mean I can’t really talk too much right now.

S: I understand. We have a device, and we think that maybe you misplaced it at a bar, and we would like to give it back.

J: Yeah, I forwarded your email [asking him if it was his RedEye mini], someone should be contacting you.

S: OK.

J: Can I send this phone number along?

S: [Contact information]

He sounded tired and broken. But at least he’s alive, and apparently still working at ThinkFlood—as he should be. After all, it’s just a stupid, little universal remote dongle for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and mistakes can happen to everyone—Justin Nguyen, Gray Powell, Phil Schiller, you, me, and Steve Jobs.

The only real mistake would be to fire Justin Nguyen in the name of ThinkFlood’s legendary impenetrable security, breached by the power of locally brewed beer beer and one single human error.

The Complete Lost RedEye mini Saga:

• This is ThinkFlood’s next iPhone, iPad, iPod touch remote—RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood lost the RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood conceals prototype RedEye minis