With a tip of the hat to Marc Andreessen (whose excellent blog is a part of my daily regimen), check out this video of a robot that gets kicked apart and then reassembles itself without human intervention. This is a (very) early alpha version of the T-1000. Cool today, scary tomorrow.
My partner Jason Mendelson and I did a podcast last week with Larry Nelson of W3W3 and our conversation covered both the intellectual property and patent issues we’ve faced as investors in high-technology companies. We definitely have a love/hate (ok, mostly hate) relationship with patents, so if you are interested in hearing (or reading) more, check it out here. Note the excellent intro and outro music, or the “bumper music” as Larry refers to it — it is from Soul Patch’s latest album and is therefore straight from Jason’s and my personal intellectual property collection.
My friend Jeremy Toeman turned me on to a site called Cuturegraph a few weeks ago, and I’ve been laughing on a regular basis ever since. Basically, they publish charts and graphs that make amusing pop-culture references. And they crowd-source their content. I was inspired and submitted one of my own, shown above. You’ve got to be a Sting fan and own the Ten Summoner’s Tales album to get the joke. So go ahead and subscribe to culturegraphs’s feed or submit an idea of your own.
Every January, my friends Jason and Carl and I go to the NAMM Conference in Anaheim, which is, more or less, the CES for music gear. While I’ve been tempted by cool gadgets and incredible guitars every year, this is the first year I actually bought something I saw at NAMM — a walnut solid body electric guitar made by Taylor in their Builder’s Reserve line that is one of the most beautiful electric guitars I had ever seen. I’ve played a wonderful Taylor koa wood acoustic guitar for years, and love the instrument, so when Taylor unveiled their SolidBody electric line, I had to have one.
There were only 50 of these Builder’s Reserve guitars made, all from the same hunk of walnut tree that fell in the property next door to Taylor’s lutherie. I’ve been waiting months for it to arrive, after I ordered it immediately after NAMM through the fine folks at Wildwood Guitars in Louisville, CO, who also happen to be one of the biggest (and best) high-end guitar dealers in the country. If you are interested in seeing more, you can check out the rest of my photos of the guitar on my Flickr set, and you can watch this video about the guitars shot at Taylor’s suite at the NAMM show. Thanks for Taylor for making this incredible instrument, and thanks to Wildwood for helping me buy one!
Yesterday afternoon there was some excitement in my neighborhood. There was a two-acre brushfire in Settler’s Park, located in the hills just above my house, several hundred yards away. We even got a reverse-911 call from Boulder Emergency Services “recommending but not requiring evacuation”, which was a bit unsettling. I had a good vantage point from our rooftop deck outside our master bedroom and shot this video of one of the two airplanes that came by to drop fire retardant on the burn site to help control the flames. Happily, the planes and the firefighters (120 of them!) were able to quickly bring it under control. Today I am feeling very thankful that Boulder seems to have a great set of emergency services. Go hug a fireman!
After giving credit where credit was due last week when United recovered my MacBook Air, I’m afraid I must now lodge yet another complaint against United AIrlines. The food. Of course, complaining about airline food is an easy and unoriginal target, but the last couple of meals I’ve had have struck me as particularly odd. I’m not commenting on the quality of the food, but rather the naming of the items, which does not seem to have much in common with the ingredients in said items. Here are two recent examples:
Item 1: The Tuscan Wrap. Smoked turkey, sun-dried tomatoes, canned and sliced black olives and spicy monterey jack cheese wrapped in a tomato tortilla and served hot with a side of decidedly Mexican salsa. Admittedly, the wrap-as-food-category is a bit of a jackalope itself, but how is exactly is this Tuscan? I think they’re hanging their hat on the sun-dried tomatoes and the black olives here, but in my book, pairing it with Pace Picante Sauce takes the Tuscany right out of this item.
Item 2: A Cobb Salad. Chili-lime grilled shrimp, bacon, sun-dried tomatoes, canned and sliced black olives (notice a trend here?) and cubes of Swiss cheese paired with Asian Sesame-Ginger dressing. What?!? I’ve certainly never had shellfish or a non-bleu cheese on a Cobb salad before, but pairing it with Asian Sesame-Ginger dressing takes this into the culinary twilight zone.
It seems like the menu “planners” (I cannot call them chefs or even cooks with a clear conscience) at United are simply selecting words and ingredients in a random, MadLib-inspired fashion to come up with the meals they are serving in business class and first class — which I am flying regularly these days thanks to all the upgrades I get as a consolation prize for become a United 1K flyer last year. And don’t get me started on the snack-boxes they offer (for a fee) in the economy section, for those are little better than Lunchables engineered for adults.
OK, rant over. I feel much better now. I think I’ll go grab a Lithuanian smoothie.
With a tip of the hat to Steve Jurvetson’s ongoing “What’s That?” photo puzzle series on flickr, here’s four shots I took of the same object (from various levels of zoom) while sightseeing with my family in Northern California last week. Fame and public recognition go to the person who can identify what this is.
After a few weeks of use, I thought I’d share my thoughts on Amazon’s Kindle. The Kindle is my second electronic book reader, my first was the Sony Reader, which I previously touted as my new favorite gadget. Now I must apologize to Sony and my lovely wife Katherine, who gave me the reader for Father’s Day last year, only to see me cast it aside just a few months later, but the Kindle pretty much kicks the Sony Reader’s ass into the dustbin of obsolescence.
The Sony Reader’s failings basically amounted to an inadequate content library (only about 15k titles when I first got it) and the clunky PC-only (bad for a Mac guy like me) client software that was necessary to browse and purchase titles and then download to the reader via a USB connection.
Amazon addressed all of Sony’s issues: Amazon’s library of titles is 110k+ and growing, and the tight integration of the device (and on the web via browser) with the Amazon.com Kindle store is seamless. Add to that the fact that there is no subscription fee for data access via Amazon’s Whispernet (of course, I know I’m really paying for the EVDO access with each book purchase), and you have a product that is in a class unto itself. The ability to browse and purchase directly from the device is a game-changer, though I have to say that I get an equal amount of pleasure buying via my web browser and watching the e-book I’ve just purchased magically appear moments later on my Kindle.
The Kindle’s display-driver for their electronic ink display is also a generation better than Sony’s — page turns happen much more quickly, and the ability of the Kindle to selectively refresh small portions of the screen also make the reading and browsing experience far better than it was on the Sony Reader.
I’ve got a few complaints about the Kindle, which unfortunately software upgrades will not address, since my critiques are with the industrial design. While I get that the idea behind the sloped right-hand side of the Kindle was to make it look and feel like the unread pages of an open book, the lack of symmetry in the device is something I have yet to get used to: the thing just doesn’t feel as comfortable in my hands as the Sony Reader did.
Second, the page-turning buttons on the Kindle may be a little bit too big and too easy to press, so I find myself accidentally changing pages or hitting the back button, which gets a little tiresome.
Finally, the device also feels a little bit junky and it tends to pop out of the leather cover it comes with on a regular basis, particularly because the power and network switches are inexplicably on the back of the device. I prefer to read my Kindle when it is in the cover because it feels more like a book to me, but I’m about to give up on that because I pop it out of the cover nearly every time I power it on or toggle the network connection. Sort of feels like the leather cover was a bit of an afterthought.
So while I think Amazon stumbled a bit on the industrial design side of the house, overall the Kindle is an amazing device and a fantasy product for a gadget freak and avid reader like myself. I’ve not had any issues with network coverage (though I’ve not taken it out of the US) and the seamless integration between the device, the wireless access, the simple setup process and the ability to browse and purchase from the device itself and from Amazon.com on the web, without ever requiring me to plug the Kindle into a PC, is just great. Way to go Amazon!
As a side note, I’m excited to see more devices like the Kindle that are invisibly integrated with a WAN data network and back-end service and/or website and offers the buyer a one-time payment at time of purchase such that there is no ongoing subscription fee associated with the network access component. Hiding that cost from the purchaser (even if the network cost is actually buried in other ongoing transactions related to the device/service) will enable entirely new categories of devices to proliferate.
A tip of the hat to Scott Epstein for digging this one out of the archives. Scott and I had lunch a few weeks ago and he brought this along for me after seeing my post of the old Excite TV commercials. Sun ran this ad promoting their server and our search engine after Excite’s multi-million dollar purchases of Sun hardware to power the launch of Excite.com in October 1995.
If memory serves, the server we purchased from Sun to handle the search traffic during the launch of Excite was an eight-CPU box with a gig or two of RAM, which cost around $250k, of which $50k – $70k was the price for the RAM alone! Happily, Mr. Moore has been hard at work since then, bringing the price of a gig of RAM down to around $30.
And, better late(r) than never. Between our compulsion to relentlessly polish the songs and tweak the mix, our day jobs, getting married and having children, half the band moving to Colorado and starting up a new venture fund, sometimes I feared we’d never get the thing done.
But we did. I’m excited to announce that my band, Soul Patch, has finally released our second album, aptly titled Sooner or Later, over six years after the release of our first album in 2001, Summers in Rangoon. We’re extremely proud of how it turned out, and it brings together our eclectic influences into a cohesive sound that is reminiscent of Beck, Steely Dan and Phish, yet is also uniquely our own. We actually got the CD back from the duplication house a couple months ago, but waited to publicly announce it while it worked its way through the tubes of the internet commerce system until it was widely available. You can now find it on CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon and many other spots online.
In addition to yours truly on lead guitar, my partner at Foundry Group, Jason Mendelson, plays drums on the album, Nick Peters is my partner in guitar-crime, and a guy I’ve worked with (at Excite, back in the day) and been friends with and played in bands with since seventh grade, Scott Derringer, is the bassist. We were also lucky to have one of the most incredible players I know, my longtime guitar guru Chris Rossbach appear on a song, and, finally, the very talented Kevin McCourt (the one guy whose day job is actually being a musician and who plays with the likes of Stevie Wonder) on keyboards. Each of us share vocal duties and songwriting credits. This album is a true product of the digital age, with different instrumental tracks recorded in my old studio in Portola Valley, CA, my new studio in Boulder, Nick’s studio in Palo Alto, and Kevin’s studio in Los Angeles, and with final mastering done in Austin, TX. Finally, I should also give props to the talented Lawrence Hamashima for his excellent cover art.
If you are so inclined, please become a fan on our Facebook page or iLike, where you can sample the music, or come visit the Soul Patch website for even more background on our band, including lyrics, our first album, our blog, and the requisite paraphernalia like t-shirts and coffee mugs. If you like what you hear, buy a physical or digital copy of the album, and if you are a blogger and dig the tunes, please post about it, like our friend and Big Time VC Fred Wilson did a couple of weeks ago.