I love my new MacBook Air, but yesterday I discovered a design flaw: it is just too small. I left it in the seat-back pocket on the plane I took from Denver to San Francisco. Brad blogged about this yesterday and kindly kept my identity (and absentmindedness) out of his post, but I felt compelled…
I’ve always enjoyed word games of all sorts and compulsively rearrange most words and phrases I encounter to see if there are any amusing acronyms to be found within them. In college, I even wrote a Boggle-playing program in LISP with my friend Martin Reinfried. Naturally, I’ve spent time on the internet anagram server (which,…
Check out the post I just authored on the Foundry Group blog about our interest in the evolution of the man-machine interface beyond the somewhat long-in-the-tooth mouse/keyboard/windows-GUI paradigm. We call this thematic area of interest human computer interaction, or HCI for short. This is an area we’re watching closely as we look for new investment…
I was in Vegas for a couple days last week at Microsoft’s MIX08 conference, with lots of interesting people and tech on display. I also had the good fortune to participate in a panel moderated by Don Dodge which included me, Kimball Musk, Dave McClure, Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble. It wound up being a…
As I sit here in my office listening to a car alarm go off for well over a minute, I am highly annoyed. But the alarm also caused me to reflect on just how useless car alarms are — perhaps when they were first on the market and only a very small fraction of cars…
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…