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.

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.

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.

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.

After a few weeks of use, I thought I’d share my thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle is my second electronic book reader, my first was the Sony Reader, which I previously touted as my new favorite gadget. Now I must apologize to Sony and my lovely wife Katherine, who gave me the reader for Father’s Day last year, only to see me cast it aside just a few months later, but the Kindle pretty much kicks the Sony Reader’s ass into the dustbin of obsolescence.

The Sony Reader’s failings basically amounted to an inadequate content library (only about 15k titles when I first got it) and the clunky PC-only (bad for a Mac guy like me) client software that was necessary to browse and purchase titles and then download to the reader via a USB connection.

Amazon addressed all of Sony’s issues: Amazon’s library of titles is 110k+ and growing, and the tight integration of the device (and on the web via browser) with the Amazon.com Kindle store is seamless. Add to that the fact that there is no subscription fee for data access via Amazon’s Whispernet (of course, I know I’m really paying for the EVDO access with each book purchase), and you have a product that is in a class unto itself. The ability to browse and purchase directly from the device is a game-changer, though I have to say that I get an equal amount of pleasure buying via my web browser and watching the e-book I’ve just purchased magically appear moments later on my Kindle.

The Kindle’s display-driver for their electronic ink display is also a generation better than Sony’s — page turns happen much more quickly, and the ability of the Kindle to selectively refresh small portions of the screen also make the reading and browsing experience far better than it was on the Sony Reader.

I’ve got a few complaints about the Kindle, which unfortunately software upgrades will not address, since my critiques are with the industrial design. While I get that the idea behind the sloped right-hand side of the Kindle was to make it look and feel like the unread pages of an open book, the lack of symmetry in the device is something I have yet to get used to: the thing just doesn’t feel as comfortable in my hands as the Sony Reader did.

Second, the page-turning buttons on the Kindle may be a little bit too big and too easy to press, so I find myself accidentally changing pages or hitting the back button, which gets a little tiresome.

Finally, the device also feels a little bit junky and it tends to pop out of the leather cover it comes with on a regular basis, particularly because the power and network switches are inexplicably on the back of the device. I prefer to read my Kindle when it is in the cover because it feels more like a book to me, but I’m about to give up on that because I pop it out of the cover nearly every time I power it on or toggle the network connection. Sort of feels like the leather cover was a bit of an afterthought.

So while I think Amazon stumbled a bit on the industrial design side of the house, overall the Kindle is an amazing device and a fantasy product for a gadget freak and avid reader like myself. I’ve not had any issues with network coverage (though I’ve not taken it out of the US) and the seamless integration between the device, the wireless access, the simple setup process and the ability to browse and purchase from the device itself and from Amazon.com on the web, without ever requiring me to plug the Kindle into a PC, is just great. Way to go Amazon!

As a side note, I’m excited to see more devices like the Kindle that are invisibly integrated with a WAN data network and back-end service and/or website and offers the buyer a one-time payment at time of purchase such that there is no ongoing subscription fee associated with the network access component. Hiding that cost from the purchaser (even if the network cost is actually buried in other ongoing transactions related to the device/service) will enable entirely new categories of devices to proliferate.

I’m happy to announce that Sling Media has shipped their first product, the Slingbox Personal Broadcaster, and that Walt Mossberg’s review of the Slingbox appears in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. I’ve posted about Sling briefly in the past, here and here, and have been actively involved with the company as a board member since Mobius VC invested in them last October.

Since that time, the team managed to garner several awards at January’s CES and build some buzz, all while keeping their heads down in product development mode to meet an aggressive goal of shipping the product in the first half of 2005, which they did with a day or two to spare. You can buy a Slingbox online at CompUSA right now, or you can walk over to your local CompUSA store and pick one up off the shelves on Friday, with more retailers to be announced shortly. Congrats to everyone over at SlingMedia for a job very well done!

I may be biased, but I’ve been a beta tester for the past couple months and wouldn’t want to part with my Slingbox, which I’ve got hooked up to my DirecTiVo. Just yesterday, while at the office (hey, I’m a multi-tasker, what can I say), I managed to watch the last 15 minutes of Six Feet Under and also reactivate my Sopranos season pass using my laptop. And a month or so ago while in Pittsburgh, I watched the most recent episode of Entourage (which was sitting on my Tivo) from the comfort of my broadband-enabled hotel room. Pretty damn cool.

Technorati Tags: Gadgets, Slingbox

This was my first CES, and it was quite an experience. It also seemed like it was Las Vegas’ first CES given the mass confusion that existed at the airport, the monorail, and all around the conference center. I thought Vegas was supposed to know how to handle conventions! Ah well, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and assume that CES is just so big that all infrastructure is stretched so far beyond capacity that the whole event can’t help but be a clown show.

Given the consumer-electronics industry’s affinity for acronyms, I’ll create a few of my own to describe what I saw on the hectares of floor space at the convention center: the floor was replete with HEFTs, YADMPs, HORPTs, YACPs and TFBVCs (sorry, but I couldn’t find a vowel for that one). Now I’ll decode the acronyms: Huge Enormous Flatscreen Televisions, Yet Another Digital Music Player, Hundreds Of Rear Projection Televisions, Yet Another Cellular Phone and Tiny Flash-Based Video Cameras.

Samsung’s 102 inch plasma TV was quite impressive, though it was actually four 50 inch panels fused together — I could not see the seams between each panel. The picture was beautiful and this TV was the talk of the show. However, given that it must weigh at least 400 pounds, an eight and a half foot piece of glass begs the question of whether one should opt for a projector and a screen instead. I’ve got a 50 inch plasma at home and that thing is a space heater when it is running, so this thing could transform you living room into that sauna you’ve always wanted.

Overall, the scale of the show is overwhelming and one becomes numb after seeing hundreds of MP3 players, cellphones, video cameras, USB flash drives, televisions projectors, and so on. I didn’t see much that I would describe as disruptive technology. For the most part it was incremental, more storage capacity, bigger screens, smaller form-factors, etc. Once a new device category is created and becomes established, one can witness the Cambrian explosion in action at CES with established companies (and dozens you’ve never heard of) creating hundreds of variations on the same basic concept. It has been going on for years with MP3 players, and if I had to choose a recent example of a newish category, I suppose it would be personal media players, though there’s not enough data to say these are a success yet.

I ended my Friday with the keynote from Texas Instrument’s CEO Rich Templeton, which featured Howie Long, Jeffrey Katzenberg, several movie trailers (including the new Star Wars Episode III) and a live demo of Sling Media’s SlingBox Personal Broadcaster from Sling’s CEO/co-founder Blake Krikorian. Blake introduced the audience to the concept of place-shifting: using a SlingBox attached to his cable TV at his home in San Mateo, he was able to watch his own television over the internet on his laptop and on a new EVDO cellphone. Pretty cool. Of course, being a demo, it was not without glitches, and no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to show the SlingBox connected to his TiVo. Blame the demo demons for that one. Nonetheless, it was a great show for Sling, and the company had heavy foot traffic at their booth and got some nice mentions in the press, including a nice mention in Thursday’s WSJ.

Finally, the last of the nine photos I posted in this entry made me laugh and illustrates nicely why CES is no place for babies (to say nothing of the AVN Awards show that goes on at the same time as CES).

I’m heading out to Vegas early tomorrow morning to attend CES, The Hajj for the consumer electronics industry and the gadget-obsessed among us. This year I’ve got two of my portfolio companies who will have a presence at the show: Microdisplay and Sling Media.

I’ll be sure to check out all the new LCoS, Plasma, DMD, LCD and OLED displays while I’m there, though I’m secretly lusting after a nanotube flatscreen, which is likely several years from commercialization. I also plan to visit Sonos and SlimDevices (I own four Slimp3 players) and want to check out the cool UTStarcom Vonage WiFi VOIP phone.

I’ll also be tracking the activity in the blogosphere to plan my path through the exhibit halls and find cool gadgets to check out. Naturally, I’ll be using Technorati’s new keyword search watchlist feature to find CES blog posts as they occur.