Friday, November 19, 2004

USB audio output adapter

HarmonyExpress - Portable Sound Card

This would be much more interesting if it had a digital output. Odd device about the size of a thumb drive, plugs into USB port.

Altec Lansing USB Powered portable speakers: XT1

Altec Lansing Products: XT1

They don't fold as nicely as SONY travel speakers, but they're quite elegant and compact. $130. USB powered.

Blogger is in miserable shape

Status.Blogger.Com

Blogger is in fine shape about 1/3 of the time, iffy another 1/3, and dead for the last 1/3. It's reallly in awful shape. If it were this bad early on I'd not have committed to it. Now, however, I can only wait and hope they're able to fix it. I haven't bothered sending them nasty letters -- it's clear they're working frantically. They grew too fast, without enough infrastructure. Their CEO left just in time ...

Travel and other iPod speaker systems

Speaker Systems

Very nice review with great pointers.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Their pixels are bigger than your pixels

Reflecting Pool

The astounding volume of information captured in a single gigapixel image.

Juxtapose this with the reality that our optic nerves can only handle a surprisingly small flow of information, and information flow to the prefrontal cortex is even more constrained.

What we perceive is a peculiar reconstruction of a vastly denser external world ...

A VC's guide to entrepreneurial success

VC Institute Bookstore -- Beste
3. They have a sound knowledge of the financial dynamics of their companies. By this I most decidedly do not mean that entrepreneurs need an accounting degree, or even an intimate knowledge of financial analysis. What I do mean is that they focus on key results areas, such as: gross margins, monthly fixed costs, sales/employee, sales to budget, dollar production/day - whatever factors drive cash flow and profitability in that particular type of business. Entrepreneurs exhibiting this characteristic can tell you (without looking it up) what the trend in gross margins has been over the past few months, or what the cash flow impact of a 20% shortfall in revenues would be next month.


Ten reasons to avoid venture capital

AVC Venture Capital

Recommended by Joel on Software. It's on a web site devoted to non-venture funded startups.