Archives / January, 2008

My Favorite Vegetable (Intellectually)

I blogged about this long ago, but when ranked by self-similarity, fractality (is that a word?) or as an exemplar of logarithmic spirality in nature, Romanesco Broccoli is my favorite vegetable by far. I was at Boulette’s Larder at the Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco last week and they had this particularly fine specimen…

A New Home for McInblog

If you are seeing this post, you have landed at the new home for McInblog, now hosted on the same box as the upcoming Foundry Group blog, Feld Thoughts, Ask The VC and Seth’s Blog, and it is now running on Moveable Type. Please let me know if you find anything amiss. Foundry’s own very…

Experiencing Technical Difficulties…

Please pardon the dust — if you are a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed broken images, broken links, a broken feed and all sorts of craziness on McInblog. I’ll explain why later, but recent problems have convinced me to migrate my blog to a new location and with any luck, that will happen in the…

Guitar Hero and Rock Band at NAMM

This week I made my annual pilgrimage to the NAMM show with my good friends Carl and Jason. For the uninitiated, NAMM stands for the International Music Products Association. Leave it to musicians to create an acronym that doesn’t match the formal name of the organization. How Spinal Tap can you get? But at least…

Stupid Airline Trick #342

Today I had a lovely flight above the California coastline from Santa Ana to San Francisco. As we began our descent, I was dozing off when the stewardess woke me up to ask that I put my headrest back down. I had been about to enjoy a nice nap. And furthermore, the seat is actually…

Robot-Simian Unity!

From the New York Times: Monkey’s Thoughts Propel Robot. This is a pretty astounding feat. A monkey in North Carolina with electrodes implanted in its brain walked on a treadmill watching a video feed of a walking robot in Kyoto, Japan. A real-time output from the Monkey’s brain was sent to the robot and enabled…

Mercury Rising

Sending spacecraft to another planet is a pretty neat trick.  The number of disciplines that must work together perfectly to get a camera out to Mercury that can send back pictures to us is astounding and makes most of the technologies we invest in at Foundry Group look like child’s play.  This shot of Mercury…

CES 2008: The Experience

In many ways, this year’s CES was a repeat of last year’s:  bigger and flatter TVs, flatter and lighter PCs, and, of course, more of the clusterf**k that is Las Vegas when 140,000 techies show up to attend the show, resulting in half-hour cab lines, booked-solid restaurants and the longest airport security line I have…

Foundry Group Invests in Memeo

Today, Memeo announced that they’ve raised an $8.1m Series B round of financing, led by Foundry Group. I’ve joined the board of Memeo and am excited to be working with Hong, Steve, Chris and the rest of the Memeo team, as well as Series A investor Rudy Garza (G51) and outside director Scott Petry, with…

Terabyte Hard Drives, Golly!

OK, so I’ve posted many times in the past about the magic of Moore’s Law (and the increase in storage density which is an even steeper curve), and after working 15 years in the technology industry, you’d think I’d be used to exponential growth. But the fact that Samsung recently announced a 3-platter, one terabyte…