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, beautifully, is an acronym for I, rearrangement servant) in order to find acronyms for words and phrases that are too long for me to do easily in my head. Just as ego-searching is popular on Google, I’ve used the server to find my favorite anagram for my name. Previously, the best anagram I’d encountered for Ryan McIntyre was My inner Tracy. Today, thanks to Pete Warden, I have a new favorite anagram for my name: Tyranny Crime. Should I ever release a solo album, I now know the title.

And while I’m on the subject of fun word sites online, I should point out Wordie.org, sort of a Digg or Flickr for word enthusiasts. My word-feed of favorite words can be found here. Thanks go to Ben Casnocha for pointing out Wordie to me a year or two ago.

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 opportunities at Foundry Group.

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 good discussion. Don’s blog post on the panel covers some highlights pretty well, so check it out if you are interested. An audio recording of the panel is also now up on the MIX website, if you are interested in listening to it.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, MIX08, Panel

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 had them, they were effective. But now that they are near ubiquitous and clearly prone to false positives, everyone ignores them, so they no longer are useful; they just disturb the peace.

I think the utility of car alarms are an example of an inverse Metcalfe’s Law, which basically states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes/devices/users in the system. Telephones and fax machines are a good example of this, as is the internet — one fax machine or telephone is useless, but when there are billions of them, things get really interesting.

But car alarms are just the opposite — the more widely deployed they are, the less valuable they become. Does anyone else have examples of things that become less useful the more widespread they are?

Technorati Tags: Bad Design, Metcalfe’s Law, Car Alarms

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 this nanomaterial could range from making stealth aircraft even stealthier to improving the efficiency of solar panels by helping them absorb more light.

Of course, my main motivation behind posting this story was that I could write about nanotechnology and Spinal Tap in the same blog post. After reading this story, all I could think of was Nigel Tufnel’s remark upon seeing the cover of his new album:

It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.

Technorati Tags: Nanotechnology, Spinal Tap

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 closed our fund this past Fall.

I couldn’t be more excited to continue my professional association with my four partners, whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with since I joined Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000, and I am deeply grateful to our new limited partners and all the fantastic entrepreneurs, executives, companies and fellow board members I’ve worked with over the years — we would not be in the position to do what we do without their support and trust. So thanks, everyone!

We’ve already got five companies in our portfolio (including Lijit, Memeo, Oblong and Zynga) and will be blogging about them and the thematic investing approach we use to guide our thinking as we look for new investment opportunities going forward.

So stay tuned on our Foundry Group blog feed for ongoing commentary on our view of the world, news about our portfolio companies and anything else we see fit to write about.

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 is even more annoying, you cannot open the disc tray or eject a disc without waiting for the damn machine to boot up, which takes at least 30 – 60 seconds. What? I have to wait for the machine to boot before I can take out or remove a disc? I’ve accidentally turned off my player with the disc still in it half a dozen times, then had to wait for it to restart before I eject it. Infuriating.

While the enhanced HD image quality is a boon, these machines have taken a serious step backwards in user convenience. Would it have been that hard to make the machine able to open and close the tray without waiting for it to boot? I realize that these players actually have much more serious OS/software layers than yesterday’s DVD players, but the sluggish interface is really annoying. Of course, the major CE vendors have never been great with software, so it is not surprising, but it doesn’t bode well for them or their customers in the future as digital home equipment becomes progressively more software/UI centric.

But it does open the door for innovative startups who do understand how to marry great software and hardware into a single system — think Sonos, Vudu or Sling Media, for example.

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 jump is documented here. It was exhilarating, and I probably won’t do it again. I’m glad I made it through unscathed — clearly jumping off a bridge is safer than indoor skydiving. (Sorry Josh, I couldn’t resist.)

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 traffic spikes afterwards. I’ve always liked these commercials, featuring Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? as the soundtrack, which were put together by Excite’s first director of marketing, the very talented Scott Epstein. I thought they had been lost forever, so was (pardon me) excited to rediscover them. I’ve put them up on YouTube. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Commercial, Excite, Hendrix, TV, TV