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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Following up on my post pointing to David Byrne’s excellent article about music distribution options for musicians, from the biggest acts to the smallest indies, I thought I’d offer a real world data point. My (very indie) record label, Toothless Monkey Music, distributes CDs through CDBaby, which I have to say is one of the…
Armed with icicles hanging from my front porch roof, a green and a red laser pointer, a plush-toy velour pumpkin and a Canon EOS 10-D set for 30 second exposure, I set out to experiment with light painting. I was inspired by my friend Carl Rosendahl’s excellent APAD (A Picture A Day) photoblog, and his…