BijanBlog

Photos from the Spark family summer party

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.

Bug Labs product specs

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!)

MarksGuide

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.

Pre-roll ads

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.

Hiring, managing a startup team

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 cost of the war in Iraq

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.

KickApps supports iPhone

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.

Flickr-to-Twitter

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.

Walk the Line

  Johnny Cash 
  Originally uploaded by Bella Of Bacardi.

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.

zunephone ad by microsoft

this is really funny.