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We had a really fun Spark Capital summer party earlier this week at my partner Paul's house. It was nice get everyone out of a work environment and have a good time with family members.
Perfect weather, great food and plenty of games (basketball, pingpong, pool water volleyball). Few photos from the day.
It's been about a month since Peter and the team at Bug Labs revealed their vision and plans to build community electronics.
This week they released much more product information on their website (product specs here)
Engadget also picked up the news.
And best of all, Peter has a video that shows early days of the Bug development effort :)
(ps: hey peter: you gotta get this video on veoh. it will look so much better!)
Today at OpenCoffee in Cambridge, I met Mark - the founder of MarksGuide.
MarksGuide a comprehensive listing of all the professional networking events & meetups happening in the boston area. And it's very well done.
Check it out if you happen to live in Boston/Cambridge or visiting anytime soon.
I'm in the market for a new car. I think I'm picking it up today actually.
I did a fair amount of research. Many thanks to my friend Emil for the various pointers.
And fortunately except for our actual test drive, everything else was online.
But along the way, I was reminded how much I hate the standard pre-roll ad unit. I know ad agencies & advertisers love the pre-roll. It's the status quo. And they get to recycle tv ads spots.
The worst offender in my book is Cnet. Yes, they have pretty cool video clips. But the clips are 1 minute long. And the ad is technically 15 seconds but it feels so much longer since there is noticeable delay before and after the pre-roll. Blech.
Lots of folks are trying to find an alternative to the standard pre-roll. I'm going to take a wait and see attitude but they really still feel like banners moved from the header and stuck into the video stream.
I had breakfast with my friend Will Richmond today. We were talking about the challenges of the standard pre-roll and the obvious problems when you force people to watch an ad like TWC is trying to do. In my view, forcing your consumers to do something is a bad idea.
I asked Will about my simple idea. How about a 15 second preroll but after 2-3 seconds the user has the ability to fast forward or close/skip the ad. If the ad intrigues me I'll watch it. If not I'm gone anyway. I'm never going to buy a pickup truck so why show it to me over and over again.
Will wasn't crazy about my idea. But I'm hoping someone gives it a try.
Another great post by you know who.
This time marc takes on the critical issues of hiring, managing, promoting and the hardest of them all....firing.
Good read.
The death toll in Iraq continues. Three thousand, seven hundred and thirty two American lives have been lost in Iraq to date.
And we are spending about $12B per month financing this war. Imagine where this money should be going.
And our president is now comparing Iraq to Vietnam. Only he is making the case that the problem with Vietnam is that the US left that war too early.
I was telling Lauren tonight that if we had a child in the armed forces in Iraq right now I probably would be go insane. Support our troops. Bring them home.
I'm spending too much time talking about the iPhone on this blog. I will stop that for awhile as I'm sure you either have an iPhone and love it already or hate the iPhone and will never buy it (per my recent poll).
But allow me to share some pretty cool KickApps news. KickApps is one of our first investments at Spark. My partner Santo leads this investment for us. The company provides a hosted platform that allows webmasters to quickly and easily deploy user generated content and social networking functionality directly on their websites. They have announced a lot of cool stuff recently (new funding, new software, new partners).
And today, KickApps affiliates (websites using KickApps software) will be able to offer video to iPhone users. That's awesome. Read more here.
I've been a Flickr addict for awhile. I have over 5k pictures on flickr. And those are just the ones that I've uploaded.
Uploading to flickr is a piece of cake with a cameraphone. Email the photo right from the phone and presto. Everything works just fine.
I always wanted to sync up my twitter updates with my flickr activity. This twitter in May is a classic twitter update from me.
Sometimes I would add the url, sometimes I wouldn't. Flickr and Twitter were living parallel lives in the past. And if they connected up, it was awkward and clunky at best.
But thanks to Dave Winer, I'm now using the coolest solution. Dave has been blogging his progress with his Flickr-to-Twitter creation. This is my favorite post of his on the subject.
I simply take a photo and email it to Flickr from my iPhone or Curve to Flickr. Dave's software grabs it and updates my twitter feed with the name of the photo and a link to it. The software evens converts it to tinyurl.
I've got it set up so it grabs pix from my phone (vs all the photos I upload to flickr). Now when I upload a photo to flickr from phone, my twitter update looks like this. And it just works.
So sweet. Thanks Dave.
Last night we watched Walk the Line. The story of Johnny Cash.
I had pretty low expectations for some reason.
But Lauren and I both really enjoyed it. And I liked the music way more than I would have guessed.
The best song from the movie was when he played at Folsom prison.
this is really funny.
I was a few minutes early for my meeting this morning near the Embarcadero.
So I pulled out my iPhone and looked around for an open wifi access point.
A whole bunch of access points showed up. And some looked open.
But they weren't. They were all locked. Quite sad.
We need software that makes it super easy to make your WiFi access point available when the owner isn't using it. Available by hours in the day. Or available with bandwidth limits. Or just available.
Same inspiration as the SETI@home project. Donate your resources. But for WiFi.
I'm going to give FON a try.
JETSET is one cool internet show.
The show covers internet and pop culture. And the host Zadi Diaz is funny, bright and so great in front of the camera.
I was catching up on my JETSET shows on my flight to SF yesterday. Here's one from earlier in the week.
My favorite part of this episode was learning about the 2007 US Air Guitar Championship which took place August 16th in NYC. Looked like a blast.
Summer isn't over yet but I was looking at photos I've taken since the beginning of summer.
We've had a fun summer. And a busy one. Lots of getaways. A few vacation trips. Beach house. Seeing relatives. Friends. Parties. Golf. Tennis. Camping. Biking.
But the family walk on a warm summer evening is the best.
This morning I met a really smart guy who is trying to hack the iPhone and add flash and flash widgets to the iPhone.
god-speed.
Yesterday I was feeling lousy and left the office earlier than usual. And then our little James was up from 1:30am-3am this morning. Ugh.
I don't know if he is getting new teeth or if he's getting sick.
But I'm feeling wiped out.
Time to get another espresso and play some rocking tunes. I've got too much stuff to do today.
Here's the single from the latest from the Shout Out Louds latest album called Our Ill Wills.
I'm loving this album.
Bug Labs (one of our portfolio companies) is looking for beta testers.
We are looking for software developers interested in participating in the vision of an open world of consumer community electronics.
Check out their blog for more info on the beta program.
A friend of mine recently successfully sold his company to a large company.
Everyone was happy at the time. Founders were happy. Customers (end users) were happy. Everyone truly believed the product was going to be even better with a fat wallet and corporate muscle behind it.
But my friend told me he just quit. After a few months he couldn't take it anymore. He couldn't breathe in the larger environment. He couldn't innovate. He couldn't take the corporate politics. He couldn't handle the red tape.
So he quit. Left a significant amount of money on the table, probably toasted some business relationships along the way. And while he is financially okay in the grand scheme of things - he's not happy. He believes that his product and vision would have been much bigger if he held out. At least for another year. No regret. Just a little pissed. Maybe more than a little actually.
Unfortunately this happens all the time. And it's not surprising. When entrepreneurs start a company they are in "damn the torpedoes" mode. They are going for it all. Once inside a big company it's really hard to do. No one else at the big company feels the same way about the product as the founders. Even worse there are folks at the big company that probably were against the acquisition in the first place. Or maybe there is a competing product.
It's more than just money at stake. Its purpose. And desire. Giving someone liquidity and nothing else isn't enough.
The best examples I've seen where the big company does a good job keeping the founders is when they really support the startup post acquisition. Or when they give the founders significant autonomy. Or when they give the founders big roles well beyond the the startup they acquired.
Anything else and this happens.
this thing looks sweet.
Yesterday we went Letterboxing with our friends, Luke & Reiko and their kids. We had never done this before but it was a ton of fun. (photos from the day here)
It turns out Letterboxing is a worldwide activity. Here's a quick description from wikipedia:
"Letterboxing is an outdoor hobby that combines elements of orienteering, art and puzzle solving. Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and distribute clues to finding the box in printed catalogs, on one of several web sites, or by word of mouth. Individual letterboxes usually contain a logbook and a rubber stamp. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox's stamp on their personal logbook, and leave an impression of their personal stamp on the letterbox's logbook — as proof of having found the box. Many letterboxers keep careful track of their "find count"."
We love going on family hikes so this was a new type of hike. And the kids thought it was super cool. I'm sure we'll do it again. If you want to give it a try then goto Atlas Quest to learn how to get started.
I first discovered Wonderbeings one day at Bug Labs. Peter showed them to me several months ago.
The next day I ordered a few for my office. They are so excellent.
These toys are cubes that have digital characters inside of them. The cubes have magnets so you can connect the cubes to one another. And when you connect the cubes the characters interact in many different ways. For example, one character can "walk" and move from one cube into the other. They also have buttons so you can play games or interact with your character.
There are even motion sensors in the cube so if you shake them up they do stuff.
They are great toys for the office. And I like the idea of toys that are connected. Online or offline.
Maybe someone will build a CubeWorld-like module for Bug Labs one day.
The girls finished camp today. They had an absolute blast.
This camp was a big hit with the kids. It was beautiful place.
The horses were their favorite part by far. They went riding every day. And they also learned how to take care of horses too.
This week we have seen two killer iPhone web apps introduced.
Meebo today and Facebook earlier in the week.
They look gorgeous on the iPhone. And they work very well. Even over EDGE. Not only are the beautiful looking - they are fast & responsive.
PocketTweets hasn't received as much attention but this iPhone app for Twitter is amazing as well. David showed it to me earlier this week and I love it.
On my iPhone i get MS Exchange email via IMAP. Email syncs just fine. But calender and contacts sync locally via USB (really) or I goto Outlook Web Access (OWA). But you can't do contact or calender search on the iPhone or OWA. And OWA looks ugly on the iPhone. I even use the mobile version of it which is better than the full version. Still ugly.
Someone needs to create a beautiful version of OWA for the iPhone. And please add company and calender search too.
iphone.exchange.com
That's would be so cool.
Update: looks like this post triggered a rematch with Fred. Beating him twice will be awkward :)
I've always been a huge Echo & the Bunnymen fan.
My friend Jason makes fun of me for being stuck in the new wave stage longer than I'm supposed to.
Maybe it's part of the reason why I like Arcade Fire.
Anyway, here is a rocking cover of a Doors classic. Soul Kitchen by Echo & the Bunnymen (live).
Turn up your speakers.
The Bug meetup tonight was a lot of fun.
There was a really nice turnout. I think about 100 people showed up. Lots of great energy and interesting discussions about the opportunity in front of Bug Labs. Peter and Jeremy answered about a zillion questions and showed off a first look at the hardware. Thanks to everyone that participated.
I climbed up on a bar chair to take this photo with my iPhone. If you look closely you can see Peter Semmelhack (founder/ceo of Bug Labs), Jeremy, David Karp and Brad Burnham (let me know if you recognize anyone else).
After the event, a bunch of us grabbed dinner and Peter showed me this Accenture blog post, "Will there be a long tail for devices?". Great read.
(disclosure: we are investors in Bug Labs)
The Yankees won their 4th straight tonight. Jeter brought in the game winning run.
Maybe our little prayer at Babe Ruth's house helped because a few months ago we were 10.5 games back.
And now we are only 4 games back.
Let's-go-Yankees !
(photo from the NYT)
If you are interested in the notion of hardware mashups, open source, consumer community electronics and meeting Peter and the Bug Labs folks then please join us at Bug+(bar)+NYC.
Everyone is welcome. Details here.
I'll be there too.
It's not kind to mother earth and I know we used up way too much water.
But today the kids wanted to wash the cars. I filled up a few buckets, connected the hose and then watched them have the time of their lives.
This morning I did the Wildcat Triathlon.
I haven't done one of these for 10 years. It felt great to train and then participate in this event.
The swim was the hardest for me. I stayed back so I wouldn't be kicked in the nose but made up some time on the bike and run.
Finished in 1hr 22minutes. 1/4 mile swim, 10 mile bike, 3 mile run.
I gotta do another one.
I always enjoy reading Josh Kopelman's blog.
Great insight and also great humor. It's one of my favorite VC blogs.
Josh has a number of posts that talk about his "Woulda Coulda Shoulda" deals. Companies that he could have invested in but didn't. Most VCs (not all) I know only brag about the deals they do. So I love the idea of a Woulda Coulda Shoulda list.
Voicestar is not on this list for Josh. He was an investor in the company and it was a successful exit for Josh and the founders - Ari Jacoby & Todd Lieberman. Marchex acquired the Voicestar this week.
I'm extremely happy for Ari, Todd and the investors in the company. They did a fantastic job executing on their business. And best of all they are great people.
So in the spirit of the "Woulda Coulda Shoulda" club, here is an email from Ari asking me to invest in his company last year.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ari Jacoby
Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 9:31 AM
To: Bijan Sabet
Subject: RE: Checking inI am in town--let's spend some time. We want to work with YOU :)
Best
Ari--
Ari Jacoby
President, VoiceStar
http://voicestar.com <http://voicestar.com/>
mailto:****@voicestar.com
(212) ***-**** direct
(800) ***-**** fax
(650) ***-**** Voicestar West
020-****-**** London
I had a strong hunch even before I saw Tim's first product that his new company Zing was going to be something special. Tim is a star and he assembled an extraordinary team with many of the technical rock stars we worked with at Moxi, WebTV Networks and Apple.
After I saw their 2nd product I knew some big company was going to need Tim's expertise & vision.
So I'm really not surprised that Dell wanted Zing all to themselves.
Congrats Tim. I'm very happy for you and the entire Zing family.
Unfortunately I'm going to miss another OpenCoffee Boston event today.
Our flight was canceled and I'm still in Denver.
And I missed last week's OpenCoffee because we were on vacation. But I'll be there next week.
I had a nice chat with Bruno from Intruders.tv about OpenCoffee earlier this week. Nabeel was supposed to join me but he backed out at the last second. Now he owes me a smoothie over at Andala Coffee :)
Anyway, here is the video (sorry, no embed code, just a link).
I'm playing around with Quibblo.
Quibblo is an easy way to create custom polls, surveys or a quiz for your blog or social network.
My friend Steve Kane is an angel investor.
Here is my first poll.
Santo and I are sitting in the Denver airport now. Our flight back home is delayed for 3 hours which means we won't get back until 3am EST. The plane is here but we don't have a crew yet.
I guess I'm pretty annoyed because this is a photo Santo took of me when I wasn't looking.
Not pretty.
Dave Winer and Vidya Lakshmipathy have taken opposite sides in the discussion about the mobile web experience.
The question is whether the iPhone experience of the "full internet" is better for mobile devices or do we need an optimized version of the web for mobile devices.
Dave thinks we will always need a well designed mobile web sites because the screen will always be the limiting factor. Even with a gorgeous iPhone screen he thinks it's too much work to zoom in & out, scrolling up/down/left/right.
Vidya disagrees. She is a fan of the iPhone view of the world.
I agree with Dave but for a different reason.
The problem is the network - not the screen/resolution anymore. The user experience depends on whether you are browsing on a fast/WiFi network or on a slow network like AT&T's EDGE network.
The full internet is awesome on the iPhone if you are on a Wifi network. However, surfing the full internet is unusable if you are using EDGE. That's when I point my iPhone browser to mobile websites like m.twitter.com, m.facebook.com, flickr's mobile site or the mobile version of Outlook Web Access.
I have two sets of bookmarks on my iPhone. Full websites when I'm on WiFi. And stripped down, mobile websites when i'm on Edge.
Once we have faster cellular data networks and/or open WiFi in more places I'm going to be in Vidya's camp.
And I'm hoping that day happens soon.
I've been in a Ben Folds groove lately.
Listening to his music on my iPhone and Sonos a ton.
The album Speed Graphic is simply wonderful. The first song is a cover of The Cure's In Between Days.
Fantastic cover. His piano and originality are all over this track.
Here are a few more Ben Folds tunes from a playlist I created on Project Playlist. Enjoy.
My friends at Wallstrip do a much better review of the Garmin Forerunner than my previous review on the product. Howard blogs about Garmin as well and why it's the stock to own. I'm glad I own the product and the stock.
It's another great Wallstrip show. I love Lindsay's "punch in the face" question at the end. So funny.
I've blogged about Me.dium before. We are investors in the company.
Me.dium is a fun way to keep up with your friends in real time as you and they surf the web. You can see their browsing location on the Me.dium map and you where they are surfing inside Me.dium chat. All in real time.
In the past you needed the Me.dium Firefox extension installed to join the service.
Today Me.dium launched two new products. Internet Explorer is now supported. You can get the IE add-on at Download.com here.
I'm super excited about their second new product. Me.dium's widget for blogs and social networks. It's on my right sidebar.
The Me.dium widget is cool and gives a bunch of powerful information:
-you can see where I am online in real time while I'm logged into Me.dium on my browser
-you can see other me.dium users if they happen to be visiting my blog while you are here
-you can see other websites that me.dium users visit before and after reading my blog
And best of all, you don't need the Firefox extension or IE to use this widget.
Give Me.dium a try. And add me as a friend. My userID is bsabet
I'm adding a new widget to my blog on Monday. It's from one of our portfolio companies and it's very cool.
It encouraged me to think about my blog's layout given all of my various widgets and sidebar items & links.
I moved both sidebars to the right side. I think it's easier to read. At least it is for me.
What do you think?
Peter describes the vision behind Bug Labs on their blog.
Jeff Barr's comment to the post makes me smile:
www.flickr.com
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