BijanBlog

Happy Halloween

Halloween spirit
Originally uploaded by TriLauraTri.

Enjoy this holiday tune from the Evangelicals. Halloween

Another perspective to the VC/entreprenuer marketplace

Sevin Rosen made a lot of news about their recent decision to hold off raising their next fund.

This article shows some numbers that would offer a different opinion.

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Me.dium

One of our portfolio companies that is now coming out of stealth mode is Me.dium. They just launched a closed beta but let me know if you want to try it out and I can send you an invite.

The company is in Boulder. It's an amazing team and we are excited to be working with them. They decided to share some of their plans to the local DailyCamera.

I agree with Brad. It's a lot of fun. I've turned on "visible to all" as well.

Update: here's another article on Me.dium. This one is from GigaOm. Much more detail.

Storing & Backing Up Personal Media

I've been thinking a lot about storage lately - specifically storage for digital media in the home.

I'm less concerned with storing/backing up tv shows that are on tivo. It's a bummer to lose those content if your dvr dies or simply doesn't do the right thing but it's really bad if you lose your personal music collection, photos or home videos.

So in my case I got a bunch of music. My collection is at about 70 gigs and growing at about 120 megs a month. (The latest iPod from Apple is 80 gigs so I suspect there are millions of people with larger collections).

My digital photo library in iPhoto is now up to 30 gigs and growing at 300 megs per month.

I now store all of my home movies on disk. It's very convenient that way. My home videos are at about 50 gigs and growing fast - even though I convert everything from DV to mpeg4.

i've been using a firewire 300 gig drive connected to a Mac in my house that acts as a server which is accessed from other PCs/Macs in the house and Front Row/mini. I have another firewire 300 gig drive that backs up my primary drive. The software to keep these drives in sync are pretty bad and this set up is inefficient.

It looks like I need a terabyte server that does RAID 5. That will give me maximum data reliability and hot swap flexibility.

My friend Jason tells me I should just get this and I probably will.

But is there a better way? For example Flickr charges $25/year for unlimited storage of digital pix. It would be great if there was an equivalent service for personal music or personal home videos (high resolution network storage, not youtube-esque).

Blogged with Flock

Todd Dagres Podcast

My partner Todd did a podcast with Business Week yesterday talking about why we started Spark, our focus, our portfolio and the landscape. You can download it from iTunes here.

We aren't there yet....

Lauren and I love Lost. We are very big fans. Last week for some odd reason our dvr didn't record Lost and I was lost. The next night I thought I would just download from iTunes. The trouble is that Apple doesn't get the new episode for a week.

Ok, I thought I would just go to ABC.com where they stream the show for free the day after the episode airs. It was really lame. The commercials are in your face, the player kept crashing, the video quality was pretty bad and the resolution running from our Mac mini on our HD monitor was so lame.

So after a few attempts of trying to do the right thing I had to go to old faithful.

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Cool Your MacBook Pro

Lots of people including me have been dealing with Apple's MacBook Pro getting very hot. Too hot to actually use on your lap.

This little app does the trick. Give it a try. Thanks to my friend Jason for this tip.

Update: this app is really amazing. my macbook was at 62 degrees C and with this app it's now running at 41 degrees C. what a difference!

Slashdot | smcFanControl — Cool Your MacBook Pro

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Prince

When Lauren and I first starting dating - I discovered a few Prince cd's in her collection. I was into 80's/new wave stuff at the time (still am) and really never gave Prince a fair shot.

Boy, was I wrong. He's amazing. I found this clip on Veoh (disclaimer: we are investors in the company).

West coast this week

I'm at Digital Hollywood today in Santa Monica. I have a bunch of meetings and hopefully catching up with some old friends too. On Wed I'm in SF for all day meetings and then red eye back to Boston.

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More good news from webtv alumni

Earlier today I blogged about my friend Tim Bucher's  new company/consumer product. Tim and I worked together years ago at webtv.

I forgot to mention other webtv alumni good news. Dean Blackletter who was also at webtv is a co founder of Slim Devices.

They were acquired by Logitech this week. Congrats Dean !

Logitech Acquires Slim Devices, Pioneer In Network-Based Music Systems

Slim Devices : Press Information : Logitech Acquires Slim Devices