gdp's Comments

Jasbone's Thoughts : Apple why do you think we’re stupid? – iPhone OS 4.0

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 21:53:24 +0000

What is multitasking?

VC Adventure : Stealth mode is back. Long live stealth mode!

Thu, 8 Apr 2010 21:22:43 +0000

Seth -- just wanted to tell you that I've funded a new company in the Foundry Group portfolio. But it is so stealthy, I can't even tell *you* about it. I'll tell you more about in a couple years when we are ready to launch. Trust me, it is great!

Foundry Group : Foundry Group Moves to Twitter Platform for Deal Evaluation

Fri, 2 Apr 2010 22:53:03 +0000

Dear Mr. "A Guy" / Anonymous Coward, April Fools!

McInblog : Bay Area Food Log

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:54:42 +0000

thanks Jeremy. Golden Flower has been added to the list.

McInblog : Bay Area Food Log

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 03:10:44 +0000

Jeremy, if you can find the name and address of the pho place, I'll totally link to it and add it to the list!

McInblog : Bay Area Food Log

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:27:01 +0000

We've been to Zinnia (and Myth, RIP). Great place! Made it there in March on our way back from spring break in Hawaii.

McInblog : Feature Request: Compress My Tweets

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:57:56 +0000

OK, the best comment to this came via a comment on facebook from my friend Dave Jilk: Rather than compress, the tweet should just reference a URL that contains the "full" tweet, e.g., "#uncompress http://bit.ly/asdf". The "writer" side would generate this, the "reader" side would just display the contents of the URL (which would presumably be a blog post or similar). This would have the advantage of allowing a tweet of unlimited size and mixed media types, and it is also more human readable. Good idea Dave. Of course, part of the inherent beauty of twitter is the 140 character limit, and this would destroy that. And, ultimately, people passing URL-shortened links via twitter pretty much accomplishes this goal anyway.

McInblog : Feature Request: Compress My Tweets

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:53:51 +0000

i too enjoy whittling a message down to 140 characters. while folks complain about the inanity of twitter (and some of it surely is), twitter has also enhanced the pithiness of messaging, which is great. my compression idea was really more of a joke. but one of the cool things about twitter is how user conventions have evolved (RT, OH, #hashtags) without any guidance from twitter. and so the idea of completely bastardizing it by sending compressed non-human readable text through twitter made me laugh.

Foundry Group : Pogoplug: Make your hard drive a cloud drive

Wed, 13 May 2009 16:22:06 +0000

Dave, clearly there are folks who would rather approach the remote access / sync / backup challenge via software/services rather than a device, and each solution has its advantages. As I point out in the blog post, a service like Soonr can be had for free, but you wind up limited to 2GB of storage based on my reading of the Soonr's offerings. Just for fun, I looked at the pricing for Soonr Pro for one terabyte of cloud storage and 5 user access, roughly similar to the scenario I describe in my post. That would cost $6,000 PER YEAR on Soonr, as opposed to a one time cost of $99 for a pogoplug and ~$100 for a terabyte hard drive. Second, while you point out the green angle of wanting to avoid burdening the earth by not buying another piece of hardware, I'd point out that the pogoplug (really just a tiny linux server based on Marvell's Sheevaplug technology) only draws 5-10 watts of power, which is a greener option than using a third party's spinning disk farms in a datacenter or leaving all your home/office computers on 24x7 so you can have remote access. Finally, the other reason I'm an investor (and satisfied customer) is that sometimes a special purpose appliance-based approach enables an ease of installation and use that software approaches do not. We saw this when we invested in Sling Media, the makers of the Slingbox -- while there were software-based solutions available that in theory allowed one to placeshift their TV signal and offered remote media access beyond what was on your DVR/STB, the Sling solution was the winner in the marketplace, despite many early skeptics dismissing it as an overpriced toy that offered no "new" functionality. I think the pogoplug shares these characteristics with the slingbox, and at $99, it is coming in at a pretty reasonable price point for many people, not to mention the fact that we think pogoplugs will find their way into the enterprise (particularly soho and SMB) over time too.

Feld Thoughts : My May Foodzie Care Package

Mon, 11 May 2009 19:47:58 +0000

Brad, you are right, the Effie's Oatcakes rock. You nailed it on the salt/sweet angle, but they also are chock full of buttery goodness. Never forget the butter.

McInblog : Netflix's 10 Year Sustained Bandwidth is 200 Gigabits Per Second!

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 15:42:39 +0000

Thanks for all the comments, and for pointing out the dual-layer issue as well as the fact that if served online, they'd be compressed using a more efficient codec, which probably means the average size of a video in a real-world streaming situation is probably closer to 1GB. Even if you drop my 4GB per disc estimate by a factor of four, and then increase to what Netflix's actuall daily volume is *today* (as opposed to a 10 year average), those two factors probably cancel each other out, and you probably wind up with something in the neighborhood of my original estimate of 200 Gbps if Netflix were actually serving all of their videos on demand today. And I don't think there's many (maybe YouTube?) sites out there today that could claim that kind of throughput.

Feld Thoughts : Authorization Code Scheme

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 17:49:55 +0000

Todd, right you are about the iLok, the USB dongle that stores your authorizations for ProTools and other audio software. Now that pretty much all plugin vendors (it took a while for AutoTune and Waves to get with the program) support iLok, it is very handy since you can take your authorizations to another machine in another recording studio and be able to use your plugins there too. But, several of the plugins that support iLok still use a code-based authorization scheme to generate your iLok authorization and place it in your account at iLok.com before you can load the iLok auth onto your iLok USB key.

McInblog : FAS 157 Blows

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:16:00 +0000

James, thanks for your comment. No, I am not saying that FAS157 is nothing more than a vehicle to boost accounting firms' revenues. But I am saying that while it might make more sense in the context of liquid public securities (though I have little personal experience to make a definitive claim here), it is being force-fit to the early stage VC world and doesn't really achieve the goal of increased transparency -- it just trades one set of potential problems for another, and likely will lead to less consistency in early valuations. even for the same company that might be in multiple VC funds portfolios that have different accounting firms, and it does so at an increase in costs, both in accounting fees and an internal management time within my own firm. And don't get me started on something like Sarbox, which has created an annual ~$3m cost in accounting fees for compliance for public companies. This has been a definite contributor to the lack of IPOs in recent years, particularly for small growth companies, since being able to burn $3m of net income and remain a profitable company implies/requires a certain scale of revenues that has caused many companies that might have previously been IPO candidates to exit via M&A due to the very real perception that it is just not worth the cost and liability to be a public company. This is a certainly a long-term issue for the VC business.

McInblog : Beer: My Favorite Product of Biotechnology

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:34:34 +0000

thanks Ben -- hope you are doing well. I had followed James Fallows in the past, but had forgotten about him, so I appreciate the reminder.

McInblog : Beer: My Favorite Product of Biotechnology

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 04:00:27 +0000

thanks for the link to BeerMenus.com -- I'm in NYC a few times a year -- I'll check it out!

McInblog : Beer: My Favorite Product of Biotechnology

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 03:52:13 +0000

Cool, thanks for all the tips. I do like Great Divide's Yeti. I was lucky enough to hit Toronado in SF last night and had Speakeasy's Big Daddy after discovering (sadly) that they had run out of Dogfish's Palo Santo Marron.

McInblog : Beer: My Favorite Product of Biotechnology

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:23:03 +0000

Thanks for the tip. Will definitely try Refuge. And I love pastrami - the Reuben is my all time favorite sandwich.

Sent from my iPhone

McInblog : USB Ethernet Problems With New MacBook Air?

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:54:52 +0000

John, it is a software bug, they said a new system update should address it sooner or later, but in the the meantime, the workaround is to open network preferences, create a new network location and then switch to it. that will "reset" so that the adapter can detect whether it is plugged in or not. After you've created a new location, simply switching between them should do the trick, but if not, just create yet another one. Not elegant, but it does work.

Kimbal's Blog : Obama and White Backlash

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:55:18 +0000

Amen to that.

Kimbal's Blog : Damn, I've got to hand it to humanity...

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:51:28 +0000

wow. my favorite line from one of the news stories about the pasta jar incident: "A search of his car uncovered pornography, a homemade sex aid, women's stockings and a Jack Russell terrier." A Jack Russell terrier. Indeed.