A tip of the hat to my friend Dennise for sending this one to me, and another tip of the hat to the folks at Topatoco.com who created this fine technology / science cheat sheet, which would be quite useful in rebuilding modern science and technology if one were suddenly thrown back in time or…
My partners and I at Foundry Group have been involved with Eric Norlin for the past few years, and he has put on two great Defrag Conferences in Denver over the past two years (the inspiration for which came out of our work on our Implicit Web investment theme), and now we’ve decided to add…
Today Netflix announced that they delivered their two billionth DVD, an impressive milestone. This brought to mind something we learned in the early days of Excite, which was to never underestimate the bandwidth of physical storage media sent via UPS, the USPS or FedEx. When we opened our second datacenter circa 1996 (on the east…
So, the best corporate April Fool’s joke I’ve seen today comes from Antares Audio Technologies, makers of the ubiquitous Auto-Tune pitch correcting audio plugin, which is used extensively throughout the recording industry, though some producers and vocalists will deny it. There’s a great article in the New Yorker about the impact Auto-Tune has had on…
I’ve written in the past about our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) investment theme at Foundry Group and have mentioned our portfolio companies that fit into that theme: EmSense, Oblong and Smith & Tinker. Well, pictured above is a delightful faux-advertisement I discovered via Thomas Dolby’s blog. I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas years ago…
I’ve been playing around with the face recognition feature in the newest version of iPhoto, and I’m pretty impressed with how well it works. And with how well it fails. I went through the process of confirming/teaching iPhoto to recognize me on photos where it had assigned a high probability that a photo was me,…
Today, the Beastie Boys released the 20th anniversary remastered edition of one of their classic albums, Paul’s Boutique. And they released it direct-to-fan on their own website, using technology created by Foundry Group portfolio company Topspin Media. Even better, in addition to making high quality mp3s available for download, the Beastie Boys are offering several…
While normally I avoid participating in chain-letter type things, for some reason this one caught my imagination when it showed up in my Facebook news feed this morning. It is spreading like an extremely infectious disease on Facebook, and I’ve been amused and surprised about the things I’m learning about friends of mine, so I…
File the newly enacted FAS 157 under “stupid accounting tricks”. In addition to making investments and representing Foundry Group on the boards of companies we’ve invested in, my partner Jason Mendelson also runs our back office and is responsible for overseeing our audits and financial reporting to our investors. Jason is knee-deep in audit season…
I made my annual pilgrimage to Vegas last week for CES 2009. While the CEA claimed only an 8% decrease in attendance this year at the opening of the show, I’m thinking they came up with a non-obvious means of measurement to whitewash what must have been a much bigger drop in attendance — perhaps…