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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…