My dad pointed me to this story last weekend — research scientist Shawn-Yu Lin at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute reported that a team he works with has created the darkest substance ever made, one that absorbs 99.995% of light that hits it, making it about 30x darker than the “blackest black” previously known.

The applications of this nanomaterial could range from making stealth aircraft even stealthier to improving the efficiency of solar panels by helping them absorb more light.

Of course, my main motivation behind posting this story was that I could write about nanotechnology and Spinal Tap in the same blog post. After reading this story, all I could think of was Nigel Tufnel’s remark upon seeing the cover of his new album:

It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Technorati Tags: Nanotechnology, Spinal Tap

I’m happy to announce that we’ve officially launched a new and improved Foundry Group web site, marking the official unveiling of our new $225m venture fund. My four partners and I — Brad Feld, Seth Levine, Jason Mendelson and Chris Wand co-founded Foundry Group last year, and after many months on the road fundraising, we closed our fund this past Fall.

I couldn’t be more excited to continue my professional association with my four partners, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with since I joined Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000, and I am deeply grateful to our new limited partners and all the fantastic entrepreneurs, executives, companies and fellow board members I’ve worked with over the years — we would not be in the position to do what we do without their support and trust. So thanks, everyone!

We’ve already got five companies in our portfolio (including Lijit, Memeo, Oblong and Zynga) and will be blogging about them and the thematic investing approach we use to guide our thinking as we look for new investment opportunities going forward.

So stay tuned on our Foundry Group blog feed for ongoing commentary on our view of the world, news about our portfolio companies and anything else we see fit to write about.

I’ve now owned one HD-DVD player and two Blu-Ray players across three major brands, Toshiba, Sony and Sharp, including entry level, mid range and top-of-the-line models. One thing that is common across all of them is that they are just excruciatingly slow. It takes forever to load a disc and start playing a movie. What is even more annoying, you cannot open the disc tray or eject a disc without waiting for the damn machine to boot up, which takes at least 30 – 60 seconds. What? I have to wait for the machine to boot before I can take out or remove a disc? I’ve accidentally turned off my player with the disc still in it half a dozen times, then had to wait for it to restart before I eject it. Infuriating.

While the enhanced HD image quality is a boon, these machines have taken a serious step backwards in user convenience. Would it have been that hard to make the machine able to open and close the tray without waiting for it to boot? I realize that these players actually have much more serious OS/software layers than yesterday’s DVD players, but the sluggish interface is really annoying. Of course, the major CE vendors have never been great with software, so it is not surprising, but it doesn’t bode well for them or their customers in the future as digital home equipment becomes progressively more software/UI centric.

But it does open the door for innovative startups who do understand how to marry great software and hardware into a single system — think Sonos, Vudu or Sling Media, for example.

Here’s another one from the old analog media (VHS) archives I recently uncovered at home. Katherine and I did a two-week bike trip through New Zealand back in 1998 with Backroads from Nelson to Queenstown. On one of the last days of the trip, we stopped at AJ Hackett’s operation to do some bridge-jumping. My jump is documented here. It was exhilarating, and I probably won’t do it again. I’m glad I made it through unscathed — clearly jumping off a bridge is safer than indoor skydiving. (Sorry Josh, I couldn’t resist.)

I was digging through my old-school media collection (analog artifacts like VHS and cassette tapes) this weekend and discovered a VHS tape that contained the television commercials that Excite aired back in 1996. I believe we started airing the commercials for the first time during a Saturday Night Live broadcast and we saw some serious traffic spikes afterwards. I’ve always liked these commercials, featuring Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? as the soundtrack, which were put together by Excite’s first director of marketing, the very talented Scott Epstein. I thought they had been lost forever, so was (pardon me) excited to rediscover them. I’ve put them up on YouTube. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Commercial, Excite, Hendrix, TV, TV

In my previous post, I offered to mail my HD-DVD player and my (small) library of HD-DVDs to the author of the best Haiku about the high-definition format wars, provided the recipient cover shipping costs. First, here are the Haikus that were submitted (some via comments, some via email, a couple I authored just because I like Haiku).

From my friend Carl Rosendahl:

HD-DVD

Takes a whole line of Haiku

Not so with Blu-Ray

From me:

Blu-Ray Victory

Good Bye HD-DVD

We hardly knew thee

Blu’s two syllables

Trump HD-DVD’s five

Simple always wins

From my brother-in-law Eric Budin:

Sony, lost Beta

Did not want the “Blus” again

So bribed Warner Bros

From reader Brian Hart:

Blu-Ray wins the war?

So long, region-free HD.

Pass me a Guinness…

HD-DVD:

Uses blue laser, as well.

Where’s the ‘e’ in Blu?

Given that Carl said he didn’t want the player and I don’t want to be accused of nepotism by giving the player to my brother-in-law, the award goes to Brian Hart, who also was the first to reply with a Haiku. And for the record, his second one is the one I happen to think is best too. Congrats Brian — send me your mailing address and I’ll get the player shipped out to you.

Technorati Tags: Blu-Ray, Format Wars, HD-DVD, Haiku

First came Netflix’s announcement, and now that Wal-Mart has announced they’ll be dropping HD-DVD in June, Blu-Ray can unequivocally be declared the winner of this most recent round of format wars, and perhaps the last physical media format war.

I actually own an HD-DVD player (some early Toshiba model) which I won as a prize for swiping my card somewhere on the floor of CES in 2007. I’ve got a lot of extra electronic junk taking up space in my house, so this player is on the way out. If anybody wants it, I’m willing to give it away free, along with the five or six HD-DVD titles that shipped with the box, including the excellent BBC Series, Planet Earth. Just pay for shipping and I’ll send this soon-to-be-relic to your door.

In the unlikely event that there is more than one taker, I will decide who gets it based on who can leave the best haiku about Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD in the comments of this post.

Technorati Tags: Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, Format Wars

After months of examining my own twitter use as well as the ways all my twitter friends use it, I’ve determined that by far the most common subject matter among the tweets I see is people bitching about their bad travel experiences. Therefore, I’ve decided that TWITTER is really an acronym that stands for:

“Travel Woes In Terse Text Endlessly Reported”.

Update: decided to improve the acronym by replacing Tiny with Terse. Much better.

Technorati Tags: Acronyms, Twitter

While I’ve never claimed to be a product naming or branding expert, I still wonder how this one got green-lighted by the folks at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters: a coffee named National Wildlife Blend? To me, this conjures up images of cute woodland creatures ground in with my coffee beans. Never mind hazelnut or chicory coffee blends when you can enjoy the lovely taste of squirrels, acorns and fox in your coffee. Yum!

Technorati Tags: Random

When I moved my blog to a new host a couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to spruce up the design a bit. Our IT guru Ross suggested I come up with a graphic for my header, which he just put in place for me yesterday. I believe my new header graphic is suitably nerdy to fit my personality — I’ve chosen a Penrose tiling as the pattern you see at the top of this page (assuming you are viewing this as a web page). Credit goes to Wikipedia for each of the images you see in this blog post.

Penrose tilings are cool because they are totally aperiodic over an infinite plane. I’m not sure I could understand the the mathematical proof of this at this point, but back when I was a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford taking the dreaded Logic 160 A&B Series, we had to once prove the four-color map theorem and Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, and I would assume similar techniques would apply to proving the aperiodicity of the known Penrose tilings.

While poking around the Wikipedia entry for Penrose tilings I not only found a photo of Penrose tiles covering the MCS building floor at the University of Western Australia, but I also discovered that Penrose actually licensed the Penrose tilings to Pentaplex Ltd, a company in Yorkshire, England controlled by Sir Roger Penrose. Pentaplex actually sued Kimberly-Clark for using Penrose tilings on quilted Kleenex toilet paper. Apparently some licensing agreement was reached. Who knew that arcane mathematics and toilet paper would intersect in the commercial marketplace? Given my partner Brad’s well-reported fondness for bathrooms, I’m sure he will find this fascinating.

Technorati Tags: Nerdy, Penrose Tiling, Toilet Paper