Archive for September, 2004
On Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at Science World, the Vancouver Enterprise Forum held its first session of the new school-year. The first session is always about early stage capital and this year was no exception. While the general topic was the same as usual, there were some interesting highlights which I have noted here: Aileen [...]
If you have a love of architecture, green homes, virtual reality, and Dilbert, and you have a good half hour to waste spend, I recommend that you visit Scott Adam’s new Virtual home tour at http://www.dilbert.com/duh and be prepared to be blown away. The house design was the result of thousands of Dilbert readers collaborating [...]
What a nightmare this year’s election is going to be in Florida. For any of you who are interested, I HIGHLY recommend reading this very long article at the Independent.co.uk website on the state of the Florida election systems. It’s absurd.
To those of us in the Vancouver tech community, it will come as no surprise when Ludicorp hits the big-time with their amazing web-based photo-sharing application Flickr that allows its users to: • upload from Macs, PCs, and cameras • create albums for their friends to view • blog their photos to any blogging application [...]
I saw one of these Smart cars down at the Concord Festival on the weekend and had the chance to sit in it. It was incredibly roomy up front for the two passengers. I totally fell in love with this car. There is not much room in the back. Less in fact than I had [...]
Sure it would be nice to have a googlebajillion MIP processor or some nano-opto-electronics to speed up your internet connection or a petabyte of storage on your keychain fob but these people are working on something that REALLY matters: odor-killing socks.
Cable company NTL subscribers who called for tech support finally heard the unequivocal truth that is universally understood but never explicitly stated about tech support lines the world over: “You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a (expletive) about you. We are never here. We just (expletive) you about, basically, and we [...]
I thought that corn being turned into bio-diesel was cool but Toyota is experimenting with using sweet-potato-derived materials for some parts of new cars. The biomaterial is strong, light, and totally biodegradable. Maybe when we’re done with our cars, we’ll be able to break them into parts and toss them into the farmer’s fields…
I like this blog post titled “Take a cookie when they’re passed” from my new favourite blog at Joe Krause’s Bnoopy Blog. He discusses the serendipitous chain of events that started with a book that his girlfriend gave him and eventually led to Vinod Khosla funding Excite 18 months later. Fun read and I’m sure [...]
I love this article from the Age news in Australia that discusses the unilateral nature of the Bush administration and the global impact that his Presidency has had over these past four years. The author raises a great question — if the world is going to have to pay the consequences of an all powerful [...]
Thanks to Fred Wilson for pointing out this NYT article that documents the direct mail campaign that the Republicans used in Arkansas and West Virginia – traditionally religious states. QUOTE mailings include images of the Bible labeled “banned” and of a gay marriage proposal labeled “allowed.” A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: “This will be [...]
I believe that Vancouver can become a global center for technology excellence. Because of that, my goal is to do everything I can to contribute to that community, including learning how to build technology companies, developing our technology community, and working with the greater non-tech community to ensure that the entire fabric of the community [...]
I keep seeing my numbers going up and up on my blog but because of the
anonymous nature of the …
Thanks Jon for pointing out this incredible article by Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
An …
Bruce Schneier comments on the new “Trusted Traveller” program. Also, who’s creating all of the Orwellian program names in the U.S. government?
Here is another great article about some research going on by various researchers who are patterning their robotic creatures after snakes, lobsters, and other animals. One of the interesting parts to me is…
Ouch. This article from Wired Magazine confirms that the 50 year old barrel lock design used in all Krypto bike locks and in many other applications, can be opened with a Bic Pen. The funny part is that this has been known for at least twelve years. This story illustrates so many things. • It [...]
Heath Row takes a look at a few different examples of free-agent clubhouses here. His question is a good one: Why hasn’t somebody succeeded in a franchise model here? My answer: They have. It’s called Kinko’s but unfortunately it’s staid, boring, white, featureless, and soulless but hey, they have great copiers.
I highly recommend reading this open letter from Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International, on the results of their first ever racial profiling report on the U.S. Mr. Goering powerfully states that the results of racial profiling are not helping and indeed are hindering the war on terrorism, and that like so [...]
Here is a Reuters article on the National Cancer Institute’s new $145M USD nano-medicine funding plan.
This fall is shaping up to be a busy one for those technology companies seeking opportunities to learn about or acquire some funding. Here is an incomplete list of events sorted by date. I will update this list as dates firm up. September 21, 2004: VIATeC (Victoria): Strategies for Succesfully Raising Money Financing a company [...]
Internet News and Ronald Gruia (Technology Futurist Blog) both cover the release of a multi-vendor UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) specification that will allow future cell phones to operate on both cellular and Wi-Fi networks, always using the mode which has the best connection. It’s fascinating to watch us humans build out the global mobile communications [...]
Rocketbuilders is a Vancouver, BC, Canada based management consulting firm specializing in helping technology firms identify and capitalize on market opportunities. They were commissioned to do a study on commercialization best practices by the NRC and ASI in Spring of 2004. Dave Thomas, Reg Nordman, and Geoff Hansen were the key authors of the study, [...]
Cheney is trying to weasel out of his comments the other day where he said that if Americans vote for Bush, they will be safe, but if they vote for Kerry, they will likely get attacked again. Now he is saying that what he meant to say was the Bush and Kerry would RESPOND differently [...]
How cool is this? Metin Sitti, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Nano-Robotics lab has built a robot patterned on water striders, that can walk – not float – on water and that can propel itself forward the same way that water striders do. The “bug” contains about $10 worth of material. Mike Crissey, writer for [...]
You have got to love the ability of spammers to adopt new measures to get their mail read. Microsoft has been pushing SenderID, but now spammers are using SenderID headers to get through the filters. When I attended a Privacy conference about four years ago in Quebec, a Microsoft rep was there talking about how [...]
I am thrilled to see Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the premier Valley VC firms, has launched his own blog. One of his recent posts discusses the very ideas that I mentioned in my blog-defining first post – namely that the next 20 years (2005-2025) will bring the same amount of change [...]
The American government’s penchance for secrecy above all continues unabated. Defense Tech news reports that a bill has now passed, which puts all remote sensing data into the hands solely of the U.S. Government and its allies, where allies is defined in the law itself. So, the data is not classified and it is not [...]
This interesting new addition to the Smart phone eco-system comes from Blackberry. Yes, they have finally ditched the thumb keyboard – not across their whole lineup, just for this model. The review on MSNBC is here and is quite favourable. The keyboard looks brilliant.
VCs are frequently compared to lemmings or sheep, both metaphors describing their tendency to operate in herds and to all run towards one type of business or another relatively in sync. SiliconValley.com is covering this season’s popular fundees – social software companies. More here. For those who don’t know, we have our very own home-grown [...]
