"vc" entries

Four short links: 12 February 2015

Four short links: 12 February 2015

Finance Instrument, Retro Predictions, Trust Engineering, and Haptics

  1. Update on indie.vcWe’ve worked with the team at Cooley to create an investment instrument that has elements of both debt and equity. Debt in that we will not be purchasing equity initially, but, unlike debt, there is no maturity date, no collateralization of assets and no recourse if it’s never paid back. The equity element will only become a factor if the participating company chooses to raise a round of financing or sell out to an acquiring company. We don’t have a clever acronym or name for this instrument yet, but I’m sure we’ll come up with something great.
  2. How Nathan Barley Came True (Guardian) — if you haven’t already seen Nathan Barley, you should. It’s by the guy who did Black Mirror, and it’s both awful and authentic and predictive and retro and … painfully accurate about the horrors of our Internet/New Media industry. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Trust Engineers (Radio Lab) — Facebook has a created a laboratory of human behavior the likes of which we’ve never seen. We peek into the work of Arturo Bejar and a team of researchers who are tweaking our online experience, bit by bit, to try to make the world a better place. Radio show of goodness. (via Flowing Data)
  4. DARPA’S Haptix ProjectThe goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Today it’s prosthetic limbs for amputees, but within five years it’ll be augmented ad-driven realities for virtual currency ambient social recommendations.
Four short links: 23 January 2015

Four short links: 23 January 2015

Investment Themes, Python Web Mining, Code Review, and Sexist Brilliance

  1. 16 Andreessen-Horowitz Investment Areas — I’m struck by how they’re connected: there’s a cluster around cloud development, there are two maybe three on sensors …
  2. Patterna web mining module for the Python programming language. It has tools for data mining (Google, Twitter and Wikipedia API, a web crawler, a HTML DOM parser), natural language processing (part-of-speech taggers, n-gram search, sentiment analysis, WordNet), machine learning (vector space model, clustering, SVM), network analysis and <canvas> visualization.
  3. Code Review — FogCreek’s code review checklist.
  4. Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions Across Academic Disciplines (Science) — Surveys revealed that some fields are believed to require attributes such as brilliance and genius, whereas other fields are believed to require more empathy or hard work. In fields where people thought that raw talent was required, academic departments had lower percentages of women. (via WaPo)

Top Stories: December 12-16, 2011

Five data predictions for 2012, a Kindle Single and long-form journalism, and the frustrations of the mobile experience.

This week on O'Reilly: Edd Dumbill offered five big data predictions for the year to come, Marc Herman discussed his new Kindle Single and how that platform could help long-form journalism, and Joshua Bixby examined mobile frustrations and expectations.

An angel who bets on women-led companies

Joanne Wilson on startup diversity and supporting local economic engines.

In this interview, Joanne Wilson discusses becoming an angel investor, how investors can help change the ratio of women CEOs, and the Mars versus Venus approach to entrepreneurialism.

Improving the landscape for organic startups

A congressional committee will hear a "crowdfunding exemption" proposal next week.

Next week, Sherwood Neiss will testify in favor of a small offerings exemption for investments, which could spark a revolution in grassroots entrepreneurship.

Four short links: 2 June 2010

Four short links: 2 June 2010

WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO

  1. Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) — Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to (“exit node”) and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first: YouTube turning a blind eye to copyright infringement, Facebook games and spam, etc.
  2. VC Investments in EducationCleantech investors are chasing a 3x larger market than Education and yet are putting 50-60x the money to work chasing those returns.
  3. Cells: A Massively Multi-Agent Python Programming Game — a sweet-looking update on the old Core War game.
  4. Google IO 2010 Session Videos Online — I’m keen to learn more about BigData and Prediction APIs, which seem to me an eminently sensible move by Google to play to their strengths.