- The Devil Made Me Do It
- July 11th, Really?
- Lego Robot Solves Rubik's Cube
- Smith & Tinker
- Silicone Gadget
- Simian Cyborgs
- Mendelblog
- Soul Patch Live in Boulder, June 21st
- Dip Your Toe in the Zeitgeist
- PhoneTag: Great Service
- Soul Patch Reviewed in the LAist
- Minty Fresh
- Boulder, Email, Digital Life
- Billions and Billions Served
- Self-Assembling Modular Robot
The Devil Made Me Do It - Top
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.
Last year after we finished fund-raising, my partners gave me a Fender VG Stratocaster. And after NAMM this past January, I became the very proud owner of a Taylor Builder's Reserve electric guitar.
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?
July 11th, Really? - Top
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.
Lego Robot Solves Rubik's Cube - Top
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...
Smith & Tinker - Top
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...
Silicone Gadget - Top
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.
Simian Cyborgs - Top
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.
Mendelblog - Top
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.
Soul Patch Live in Boulder, June 21st - Top
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!
Dip Your Toe in the Zeitgeist - Top
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.
PhoneTag: Great Service - Top
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.
Soul Patch Reviewed in the LAist - Top
My old friend Tom Lewis, who I knew back in the day when we were both denizens of the Valley during the bubble years, just posted a nice review of Sooner or Later on the LAist. My favorite line in the review:
There is a jam band element to Soul Patch, with the expected chord changes, syncopation, and solo interludes exemplified in excellent guitar work by Ryan McIntyre. Where the band excels most is in the style found on "Greyboy", a kind of urban jazz sound that reminded me of the Brand New Heavies - it's a place where drummer Jason Mendelson's rhythms, McIntyre's guitar, and McCourt's perfect keyboards all come together with perfect balance.
Read the full review here. Thanks for the kind words, Tom!
Minty Fresh - Top
Move over Quicken, Mint.com has arrived. I just spent some time playing around with Mint.com after my wife Katherine set up the account. All I have to say is wow. As a family, we have endeavored from time to time to be regular users of Quicken. We would always eventually stop using it because Quicken was too hard to set up, only ran on one of machines since it was client software (making it hard for us both to check in on our finances), it seemed to regularly have trouble ingesting our online account data from our bank accounts and credit cards and it also would regularly lose categorizations of expenses. I'm only about 20 minutes in to using Mint.com, but it seems to have nailed all the issues we had with Quicken, making it much more likely we'll actually use this on a regular basis. Account setup was a breeze, it is easily accessible through a browser, the expense categorization functionality seems really robust and the interactive charts and graphs to analyze spending against your budget and relative to other users is really cool for a stats/analytics junkie like me. And it is free, though I would happily pay for the service. Bravo, Mint!
Boulder, Email, Digital Life - Top
We launched a blog on the Foundry Group website back in February, so since then my blogging duties have been serving two masters. On that blog, we post news about our portfolio, thoughts on VC in general and some "think pieces" on investment themes we are interested in and how we look at the technology world at Foundry Group.
The blog has been pretty active recently, with a nice post from my partner Chris Wand about our long-term interest and activity in email companies, a post my partner Jason Mendelson and I co-authored on our lives since moving to Boulder from SIlicon Valley nearly two years ago, and a post I just did today on our digital life theme, represented in our portfolio by our recent investment in Memeo.
So check out the Foundry Group blog when you get a chance.
Billions and Billions Served - Top
As long time readers of my blog know, I like to reflect from time to time on the relentless growth of processing capacity and storage density in the computing world. I'm about a week behind on the news, but felt compelled to comment on the story I saw on Slashdot last week, that Seagate announced they've shipped their billionth hard drive. Their first drive shipped in 1979 was 5MB and cost $1,500, or $300 per megabyte. Fast forward today, nearly thirty years later, where a terabyte drives goes for about $300, and the steepness of an exponential curve over time is revealed. Same price, one million times the capacity. By 2028, we all might have exabyte -capacity drives in our PCs.
My first hard drive was a 20MB drive in my Mac SE, which I got (thanks Mom & Dad!) when I started as an undergrad at Stanford in 1989. I don't know what the standalone cost of a 20MB drive was, but my Mac SE was a pretty sweet machine at the time: 1MB RAM, 20MB HD, an 800K floppy drive and a screaming-fast 7.83Mhz Motorola 68000 CPU. That CPU, along the 6502, are the only two chips I ever wrote assembly code for. Ahh, memories. With the student discount, I think the whole system ran about $3500, or about $7,000 in today's dollars.
Self-Assembling Modular Robot - Top
With a tip of the hat to Marc Andreessen (whose excellent blog is a part of my daily regimen), check out this video of a robot that gets kicked apart and then reassembles itself without human intervention. This is a (very) early alpha version of the T-1000. Cool today, scary tomorrow.