My wife Katherine recently pointed me to a very cool website that produces a historical graph showing the popularity of a name through time. The interactive graphing feature, the NameVoyager, is really well done and fun to play with. “What should we name our child?” is a common conversation today among our peers, many of…
As I mentioned in my previous post about WAG, after our Saturday night feast up in Napa, we felt we had turned out a meal that would stand up well next to the efforts of the kitchen on Sunday evening at The French Laundry. Allow me to state for the record that upon tasting the…
A few weeks ago, Katherine and I spent the weekend up in Napa Valley at our friends Dan and Stephanie’s place along with four other couples for a long weekend to enjoy our quarterly gathering of our wine and gourmet club, known fondly as WAG. WAG has been gathering since we all met while Katherine…
Dave Sifry of Technorati has done a great three-part (1, 2, 3) series of posts on the size and shape of the blogosphere where he provides some fun charts and graphs on the development of the world of weblogs over the past several months since he last posted on this topic after his presentation at…
Yahoo is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which led me to reflect on the fact that a decade is a very long time in Silicon Valley, particularly when viewed through the lens of Moore’s Law. As Ray Kurzweil and others have observed, when humans contemplate exponential progress, we tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in…
Last weekend, Rex and Jason and I went down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Rex was the instigator of the trip and wanted to have a “boy’s weekend” to blow off some steam. The three of us play in a cover band together called Full Ratchet (bad VC humor, if you get the joke). Unbeknownst…
Time for another pet peeve: the feedback loop in the last mile of the cookie supply chain is fundamentally broken. As a VC, I attend numerous conferences, catered board meetings, company gatherings and such. I don’t understand why the food service industry has never figured out that people enjoy chocolate chip cookies a hell of…
Today Technorati launched a very cool new feature, Technorati Tags. Inspired by the communal categorization features of flikr and del.icio.us, Technorati now indexes tags embedded in blog posts (you get this for free when you choose to categorize your blog post on most popular publishing tools), and now they are first-class entities within Technorati that…
In general I’m pretty comfortable with flying, though the pre-flight queues and security rituals now sometimes elevate my blood pressure. However, I flew from Vegas to San Jose mid-day yesterday on America West and had one of the more nerve-wracking flights I can remember. About halfway through the flight, we sustained some of the most…
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…