Archive for April, 2011

What’s New? : Mass High Tech : Bill Joy Interview

Whats New? covering whats new in tech, this week visits a Mass High Tech news editor Rodney Brown interview with Bill Joy, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer about cleantech investing, the New England science scene, and the Kurzweil-Joy debate.

Q: A number of VC firms seem to have backed out of cleantech investing. What is Kleiner Perkins’ view on investing in cleantech?

A: We have a lot of partners working in it and I think our approach is different. Historically, the best returns have been in IT and waves of the Internet and semiconductors. We don’t have Moores Law and we don’t have Metcalfe’s Law - we don’t the positive return economics like we have in the friction-free world of the Internet, of social media. But could there be some sort of economic phenomenon we could find that would let us have the kinds of legendary venture class returns in greentech? We have a thesis - it’s not proven yet in that we haven’t had enough liquidity to justify the approach - but we feel pretty good about the way were doing at least the portion of our greentech portfolio that is trying to hit these grand slams.

.:masshightech.com->

Cat vs. Rabbit

The Death of the Book

An excerpt from the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Most talk of the death of the book in that era was enthusiastically in favor.  In 1962, Marshall McLuhan had published an almost spookily prescient book titled The Gutenberg Galaxy.  It was, among other things, an extended critique of the culture of print.  Technology shapes our consciousness, McLuhan argued, and the development of the printed book in the mid-fifteenth century had inaugurated a reorientation of human experience towards the visual, the regimented, the uniform and instrumental.  Language, which had once been a wild, uncontainable affair between the oral and aural (think whisper, shout, and song, the playful market-square dynamism of dialect and argot) was silenced, flattened, squeezed into lines evenly arrayed across the rectilinear space between the margins.  Spellings were standardized, vernaculars frozen into national languages policed by strict academies.  Print, for McLuhan, was the driver behind all that we now recognize as modern.  Through it nationalisms arose, and other horrors: capitalism, individualism, alienation.  Time itself was emptied out—reduced, like the words on each page, to a linear sequence of homogeneous moments.  Print had stolen something.  Books had shrunk us.  They had "denuded" conscious life.  "All experience is segmented and must be processed sequentially," McLuhan mourned.  "Rich experience eludes the wretched mesh or sieve of our attention."

: Continue reading :

My Ninja, Please! 4.22.11 : Open Source Hardware

Starting off as a Wiki, Marcin Jakubowski is transforming maker culture….for the better! My NINJA, Please! Oh, and happy Earth Day 2011!

How Parmesan Cheese Is Made

The most shoplifted item in Italy…

Do You Drink The Kool-Aid?

Image source

On how to start a business, there are…

3 core principles when it comes to launching a project, a) vision, b) passion, and c) execution.  All three have to fall in line…two out of three just won’t cut it.  If you start to compromise your vision, it’s likely that your passion will follow suit.  Since there’s no guarantee that your idea will turn out to be a success, it’s imperative that you believe in it wholeheartedly before you begin the journey.

.:kevinpruett.com->

3D Highrise Documentary

This is really sick, my ninjas… a 3D interactive documentary of different highrises all around the world. Okay… I was impressed, anyway.  Click here to take the ride and decide for yourself.

Losing Ground

Protecting soil…

Soil, it comes to pass is the key component of a healthy biosphere; it can easily store up to 5 times as much carbon as the plants and animals on top of it and it is home to a great many beneficial organisms which facilitate the nutrient cycle necessary for plant growth. A better understanding of soil is the key to a successful relationship with Gaia. Soil is not there just to feed plants, it helps regulate and moderate the atmosphere and climate, stores nutrients and water and more importantly houses the microbes and fungi essential for maintaining life. Soil is what connects it all together. (Source)

RIP Tim Hetherington : Diary (2010)

Farewell to an inspiration…here is one of his more recent works:

‘Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.