I've played guitar for about 25 years now, and have been relatively restrained about adding new axes to my arsenal, until the last year or so, when three great new guitars found their way into my collection.
And when I went to pick up the Taylor at one of the finest guitar shops I know, Wildwood Guitars in Lousiville, CO, the Gibson SG Diablo, a limited edition SG from their custom shop caught my eye. How was I to resist such an aptly named and somewhat evil-looking guitar?
I've been eagerly awaiting the 3G iPhone for some time, and was mostly pleased with the new features, but the July 11th release date was a bit of a drag, as I'm no good with the whole delayed-gratification thing. Besides the higher data speeds and third party apps, the feature I'm most excited about is Exchange integration, given our shop at Foundry Group uses Exchange for our calendar, contacts and messaging. Oh, geotagging of photos is pretty damn cool as well.
But since I cannot truly be satisfied by what's currently available and am always looking around the corner, I might as well complain a bit. The iPhone needs a better camera -- with Samsung and others shipping 5 megapixel camera phones, the fact that Apple didn't bump up the pixel count beyond two paltry megapixels on the 3G iPhone was disappointing. As is the ongoing lack of ability to record video, though I'm hopeful this can be addressed in a future software upgrade and won't require another hardware rev. The late-breaking rumors of a front-facing camera for video conferencing were also intriguing, so that was another unfulfilled item on my wishlist. And, finally, I'd be more than happy to pay a premium for more storage, and I was really hoping for a 32GB capacity model. Looks like I'll have to wait until 2009 to get those wishes fulfilled.
Despite my bitching, I'll be in line on July 11th to get the new iPhone - it will still be (by far) the coolest phone out there.
From Slashdot: a dude named Thomas Rocicki has just proven that 23 moves is sufficient to solve an arbitrary Rubik's cube configuration, not including the impossible configurations created by dismantling and re-assembling the cube, the only method by which I was able to reliably solve it.
Rocicki had previously established it could be done in no more than 25 moves, but access to more compute power allowed him to shave two moves from the his cube-solver algorithm. Pretty cool. I'm sure if the Franklin Ace 1000 (props to you, Howard!) I used in my youth had the power of the renderfarm at Sony Pictures Imageworks, I would have been able to prove this using my highly sophisticated BASIC skills. Yeah, right.
Now this guy's algorithm just needs to be connected to the Lego Mindstorms Rubik's cube-solving robot I heard about years ago, which is also an incredible piece of engineering. Watch the video below to see it in action...
I've recently joined the board of a Seattle-based startup called Smith & Tinker. The picture here is one I took of the cool little figurine that co-founder and CEO Jordan Weisman gave me after our investment in S&T closed.
I cannot confirm or deny what (if anything) it has to do with what the company is working on -- they are keeping a low-profile until they are closer to product launch, so I can't say much about what they are up to, but check out my post on the Foundry Group blog for a teaser...
I post about cool gadgets frequently on this blog, but it occurred to me that I should also start a transistor-free gadget series, since there are plenty of clever and well-designed non-digital artifacts that can make our lives easier. So I will start with a great kitchen gadget that has been seeing daily use nearly every morning in the McIntyre kitchen: Poach Pods. These flexible silicone cups make perfect poached eggs every time. Crack an egg into the pod, set it into half an inch of boiling water in a saucepan, cover the pot, wait six minutes, and presto, you've got a perfectly done poached egg. Better living through silicone.
From the New York Times: researchers implanted tiny sensors directly into two monkey's brains, which were wired to a robotic arm. The monkeys were able to learn to control the arm and feed themselves with it using just their thoughts. Quite a stunning example of brain-machine interface technology. Of course, this is nowhere near ready for prime-time (human use) given it still requires a brain implant and a wire through the skull and scalp, but as a proof-of-concept for what is possible, pretty heady stuff. (Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.)
I've written before on my blog and the Foundry Group blog about our view that human-computer interaction (HCI) will undergo a substantial evolution in the coming years as increased computational power and new sensors and input devices allow us to move beyond the mouse and windows UI paradigm. While this particular example points to a future beyond the typical VC investment time horizon, there is ample opportunity in new interfaces and applications that do not require a direct neural interface, and it shows we are in for a wild ride and drastically increased intimacy with our machines.
So my partner Jason finally decided to put up a personal blog. He's been blogging for years now as the wizard-behind-the-curtain at AskTheVC and as a guest blogger on Feld Thoughts, but he hasn't had a more free-range vehicle until now. So go check out Mendelson's Musings. He also has a music page on his blog, which is a cool idea I might steal from him so that I'll have a place to feature my music-related musings.
It has been a couple years since my band Soul Patch last played live, and we've been itching to play ever since. But having children, starting a new venture fund and moving to Boulder, CO mean that the band is now spread among Boulder, LA and San Francisco.
Well, we're all coming together to play our long overdue album release party and celebrate the Summer Soulstice on Saturday, June 21st at 9:30pm at Redfish Brewhouse in Boulder. Given our geographic dispersion, this is likely our last gig for years to come, until we do our triumphant comeback tour decades from now...
So come check us out on the night of the Soulstice!
From Derek Siver's blog. Check out Twistori, a web page that gives you a real-time filter of the Twitter stream. Twistori shows tweets containing the words love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish. A nice anonymous glimpse into people's hopes, fears, anger and aspirations. And it is an impressive statement about the message volume flowing through Twitter at any given time.
I've been using a great service called PhoneTag (used to be called SimulScribe, the new name is much better) for at least a year now, and I have to say it is one of the best new products to emerge in a while -- a true time saver. I'd wished for years that this service would one day exist, so when I first heard about it, I immediately signed up. For those who don't know, PhoneTag is an automatic voicemail-to-text transcription service. Now when I get voicemail on my home or office phone (and it would work on my mobile phone too if I didn't have an iPhone. Apple, are you listening? Would be great if this were integrated into the iPhone's client-side visual voicemail.), PhoneTag creates a text transcription of the message within minutes, which is then sent to me as an email containing the full transcription, with the original audio attached as a .WAV to the email message, so I can still listen to the original if something is garbled in the transcription process.
I've always detested voicemail as a medium, which is a problem for me since I also dislike the telephone and never answer phone calls from numbers I do not recognize, which leads to even more voicemail. The tyranny of voicemail is that it forces you into a synchronous, real-time process as you listen to every message, not to mention all the brain damage associated with logging on and interacting with a voicemail system via a numeric keypad on a telephone. Even with the UI problems fixed via the iPhone's visual voicemail, the user must still sit through the full real-time recording of the message the caller left, and, let's face it, some people's voicemails leave a lot to be desired when it comes to conciseness and intelligibility.
The quality of the PhoneTag transcription is decent, though it often loses words, is terrible with proper names, and can be error-prone. But the beauty is that the service is good enough. You actually don't need anywhere near 100% accuracy to easily review even a badly transcribed voicemail in text form -- I can nearly always grok the contents of a message in text form and find that I seldom, if ever, need to listen to the original audio file. I'm guessing that I can read a text message 5x - 10x more quickly than a spoken-word version of the message, so PhoneTag easily saves me several minutes a day, and time is the one commodity I am consistently lacking.
PhoneTag is a great service and one that falls into the "I wish I had funded that one" category for me. Alas, we didn't close our new Foundry Group fund until the tail end of 2007, so the point is moot -- I wouldn't have been in a position to the back the company anyway. In any case, PhoneTag has definitely improved my day to day productivity, so I wish them all the best.
I've played guitar for about 25 years now, and have been relatively restrained about adding new axes to my arsenal, until the last year or so, when three great new guitars found their way into my collection.
I've been using a great service called