Happy Holidays

We had a wonderful Christmas and are enjoying the time together away from work. I hope to make a couple of posts this week but I am not promising anything. :-)

I posted a ton of pictures on Flickr but here are some of all the kids in case you are lazy.

Triplet's 3rd Birthday

Last Friday our triplets turned 3. It has been an amazing three years and it has gotten more easy and more fun by the day. I will post some new pictures on Flickr later this week.

EG07

As I mentioned in my last post I was given the opportunity to attend The Entertainment Gathering or EG in Los Angeles earlier this week. When asked if I wanted to attend I hesitated because I had a board meeting, a very important business development meeting and was generally way behind at work at the time.

In retrospect, if I had missed it, it would have been a tragedy that I would have never understood.

One of my former colleagues at MP3.com, Brian Dear the current founder of Eventful is a frequent attendee at certain conferences that I never truly understood. Where I understood trade shows or conferences like the CTIA or Digital Hollywood, I wasn't clear on the value of a multidisciplinary gathering of smart people where there isn't an obvious thread or theme. One of my investors, Steve Tomlin, when reflecting on the conference and my obvious enthusiasm at having attended described it as a mental spa, which I think is an apt description.

So before I talk about the amazing speakers, I think one other thing needs to be mentioned, the amazing attendees. In the first session I was seated a row behind Jeff Bezos, who was showing some friends his kindle. Robert Metcalfe the inventor of Ethernet and Metcalfe's law was there along with Steve Wozniak and Matt Groening. Seeing this early on, and realizing that this conference was something that these people were spending three days of their time wading through gave me a strong respect for the expected quality of the event. It certainly didn't disappoint.

There is a blog on the EG2007 website that you can see a good slice of the speakers and the program. My condensed bullet point of the conference follows:

Rob Glaser from Real Networks spoke about his non profit activities around branding Progressive as a positive message to potential voters.

Jim Citrin from Spencer Stuart spoke about his new book and parallels of excellence between people in business and sports and the difference between amateurs and professionals as a function of disciplined practice and time.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of Amateur, railed about the erosion of quality and the tension between the religion of technology and it's impact on media.

Brewster Kahle spoke about the efforts around the Internet Archive and archive.org to create a library of everything on the Internet.

Don Katz spoke about his time as a journalist and as an executive of Audible, the audio book file company. I know Don from a previous life and it was great catching up with him.

Brian Greene gave the audience a 20 minute primer on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

Paul Horowitz spoke about some of the math and timelines involved that underlie some of the assumptions that drive the efforts behind things like Seti which he is involved with.

Keith Schwab hit some of the same highlights as Brian Greene but also talked about the implications of quatum mechanics for code breaking and the development of objects at a larger than quantum scale.

Marvin Minsky spoke about his new book on Artifical intelligence and his position that emotions primarily manifest themselves as a switching of of certain rational components of our mind. (Which was meant to be a positive as I understood it).

Pablos Holman showed some of his amazing hacker techniques and tricks.

Caleb Chung, the inventor of the Furby, showed off his newest toy/robot the Pleo. I can guarantee you will both hear about and want one of these little lifelike robot dinosaurs in the next month or two.

Frnas Lantig, the famous naturalist photographer gave a mind bending presentation of his recent collection of photos from around the world of nature accompanied by a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and a poetic narrative from his partner.

Yves Behar talked about design as a concept and walked through some of the examples created by his firm including the Jawbone headset, The Herman Miller Leaf lamp and the design for the One Laptop Per Child project.

Nicholas Negroponte followed with an overview of the One Laptop Per Child project which I have to say was among my favorites both in terms of what the endeavor to accomplish and in how amazing the device is that they have come up with.

Tim Kring the Executive Producer and Creator of Heros spoke about how the show came to pass which was a compelling personal story.

That was the first day for me and I omitted the segments I unfortunately missed. I will hit my second day in a brief follow up post later.

The Entertainment Gathering

For the next two days I am in Los Angeles for the Entertainment Gathering. I like to take the opportunity at least once a year to step outside my normal point of reference and work the mind. The year before last it was Gnomedex and this year it is this conference. Can't wait to report on some of the fascinating sessions scheduled.

Techstars Revisited

Over the last two months or so I have been at great risk of becoming an occasional blogger. Actually I have also toyed with blogging about cooking which has been something I have been spending a lot of time doing around the holidays. In any event, I miss posting and now that I have finally taken a VACATION, I endeavor to get back on track. One of the items that came up while I have been blog absent involves the company my friends started called Social Thing. I had posted before about Tech Stars, which I can't say enough good about. Link to my previous post here.

While I was busy, Matt, Brian and company raised an angel round! Their blog post here. (It's been a month already!). Congrats to them and I wish them the utmost success.

While revisiting my reminders to make this post, I went back to the Techstars site to see how the other teams have fared so far and I was excited to see that so far 4 of the companies I saw that day had raised money. Link to the most recent funding and list of other companies here. I can't wait to see how things play out for them and am very interested to see what the Tech Stars folks do in 2008.

Cool New iChat Features

Here are some cool background effects and the recording capability.

Another Year

I am 41 today. It seems like I turned 40 just yesterday. Sigh. What a great year last year was and I am sure next year will be as good as the last. A big thanks to my wonderful wife, kids and friends for making each day that much more special.

Digital Hollywood Podcast Interview

While at Digital Hollywood the week after CTIA I was interviewed by website Digital Podcast which can be found here. It is a longer version of what I said on the video interview posted previously. Link can be found here.

Intercasting/Rabble in USA Today

While I was in Rome we had a bunch of news. I will recap links later today as I catch up on email. Here is a link to the USA Today story which mentioned both Rabble and Intercasting.

Rome

This las week I realized a life long dream and got to take a trip to Rome with my wife. As a student of history, Latin and the history of Christianity it was everything I dreamed of. Not much else to say other than it was amazing. Pictures can be seen on my Flickr page which you can reach from here or you can click on the badge on the side.

Video from CTIA

I am way behind on posting but expect to catch up soon. Right. In any case here is a video of me rambling on about what we do from bnetTV at CTIA. Link is here.

Fire Epilogue

Thanks to all my friends and associates who inquired about us during the fire. We never were in any danger and in fact were either in Los Angeles, San Francisco or Palm Springs during the whole thing. Cleanup was a pain but were certainly were thankful that we fared as well as we did. Our thoughts go out to all those who lost their homes.

San Diego Fire

Yes I live in San Diego.

This last weekend I took my son Tate out to his first Indian Guide camp out on the beach at Camp Pendelton. It was great. On Sunday my wife Jessica took some time off after having had the little ones solo for a good stretch of time. Sunday afternon she was out running some errands and she called me t ask me what was wrong. I was engrossed in a little football and told her nothing was going on or they would have interrupted the game. About an hour later they did.

Fires are pretty common in Southern California and this fire, or rather fires were out in the eastern portion of the county. At least they were at that point.

That evening I headed to the airport to fly up to San Francisco for CTIA. The smoke was unreal on the drive and was bothering me a ton as I went dowtown to catch the last flight up.

The flight was delayed forever but ultimately I rolled into my hotel at around 2 AM. I passed out.

That morning my wife called me to ask me what was going on and to find out if I knew why the power was out of the house. I said I didn't know but to check the neighbors to see if it was just us or the entire area. Shorly thereafter I started getting a bunch of emails from my staff saying that they werte being evacuated, or were helping their families evacuate etc.

My wife was really anxious when we talked and quickly made the decision to take the kids and go up to Los Angeles to stay with friends. This was around 9 AM. She got out quickly and avoided any big traffic nightmare. I went about my merry way having meetings all day and monitored the progress of the fires by calling friends living near the fire and near my house. By the late afternoon, both Del Mar and Solana Beach had been evacuated. I was shocked. This is the beach!

In any event we are fine. I don't believe we are at significant risk to our home as of last night. I guess I will find out later this AM. Thanks to all our friends and families who reached out to see how we are. Hopefully we get back home later today and tomorrow.

How I Learned To Love The Cult

It has been a long time now that I have been working on the Mac as my main computer. In fact, both my work and home computer have been Mac now. For the longest time the one last item that has really made me nuts is the inability for me to synchronize my laptop with my smartphone. I have found a business card scanner for my Mac and have been adding all my new contacts but until just recently my phone wasn't staying current with my business card collection.

I have been using Location Free again sporadically and one evening I was wondering around the Sony Ericsson site in hopes of finding a new client for my phone. This was a fruitless exercise but what I did find was a new iSync download for my device. Woot!

In order to use the new synch I also had to upgrade the firmware on my phone in addition to installing the library on my Mac. While this is a bit of a pain I have to say that I am generally pleased with the results and I think thus far have done 4 firmware upgrades on my phone, each with better performance after the upgrade. I do like this service and would be disappointed if I had a phone that didn't have periodic upgrades. Now if we could just do it OTA like the iPhone...

So I downloaded the iSync piece for the Mac and updated the firmware. Next step was to do the Sync. The Sync seemed to take a long time and was sort of buggy. Ultimately it barfed before it coordinated my calendar. This kind of sucked but I had my new updated contacts on the phone which was the primary issue I was trying to address.

The next week while traveling I noticed that my Sprint EVDO phone that I use for a modem was barfing and not connecting. I was not happy. It dawned on me that maybe there was some bluetooth weirdness on the Mac as a result of the sync upgrade. I went in and deleted all my devices and restored them. Bam, everything is working stellar now. Contacts, calendar, etc. This reminds me of a post about how I both love and hate bluetooth but for now I am good to go.

Being able to deal with the last productivity hurdle on the Mac has been really powerful for me and I don't think I am going back to Windows anytime soon. it bums me out as that is my heritage but for now I can say I am happy with being in the cult and all things are good.

Anthem named a Top 10 Application

Fierce Wireless named Anthem as a top 10 mobile application for 2007. Blush. Link can be found here.

Best Buy Carphone Warehouse

While in NYC last week I was walking past the Best Buy Mobile store near 45th. I had seen one on my last trip and made a mental note to stop in the next time I got a chance. So this time I did. I was glad I had seen a Car Phone Warehouse when I was in London last which provided me a good understanding of what Best Buy is trying to bring here. The store in NYC (I believe there are 8 pilot stores in Manhattan) was very similar in look and feel to the stores in the UK. The selections were divided into unlocked, carrier specific, prepaid and accessories. Accessories were certainly a huge part.

For someone who wants to shop across carriers I think the store is pretty good. For someone who is looking for unlocked phones the selection was pretty light and certainly that is primarily driven by the subsidy model in the US. In general I hope that they succeed and help bring more selection to the market but if I were a betting man I am guessing that it's going to be a tough haul.

My Friends House - Casa Moderna Take 2

My friend John Diaz and his wife Nancy built the most amazing house in Mar Vista last year. It was featured in the Los Angeles Times in an article I posted about a while ago. This month their house was featured on the cover and in an excellent article in the magazine Azure. Home page pics here. Article here.

Spook Country

This last trip to NYC I finished reading Spook Country by William Gibson. I loved it. It was slightly off from Pattern Recognition but not by much. I hope Gibson keeps writing the contemporary meets the future stuff. While he is the king of cyberpunk, I think there last two books are just remarkable and hopefully inspire more writers to cover similar ground, i.e. when the future collides with the now. No review or spoilers here, you are going to have to read it yourself. :-)

NYC, Urban Daddy and Williamsburg

I was in NYC all this week for meetings. Cross country trips are both good and bad. Good because roughly 12 hours trapped in a plane allows you to catch up on email, write some blog posts, contemplate strategic business stuff and get your Nintendo DS game on. Bad because you go into a time warp and in some cases arrive home beat and sick (this trip especially).

Three non work tidbits from this trip. Scott Wolf, who ran sales for me at Vivendi, was throwing a big agency party on behalf of his new company Waterfront Media at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was great seeing Scott and meeting the founders of that company and swapping some war stories. Scott is doing a bang up job there. At the same time I also saw Ed Koller who is one of the top media recruiters in the country and was the guy who helped me to get Scott.

Two, at the same party I ran into Rob Petrausch, who worked with us at Vivendi under Scott. After my previous post about Urban Daddy, Rob had emailed me to let me know that he was one of the early guys there and he thanked me for the post. Small world.

Three. I got to take my first trip to Brooklyn to visit my friend Tom Ryan in Williamsburg. I had always wanted to visit the home of the New York hipster set and it didn't disappoint. We had a great dinner and got to check out his place. Williamsburg reminded me a lot of Melrose in LA or Haight in SF. I definitely plan on hanging out there with Tom again soon.

Anthem Launches On Boost

We issued a press release this morning announcing our launch on Anthem on Boost. The release is here. We have been working with the folks at Boost for a long time and are extremely excited to launch with them. They are one of the most successful MVNOs and are some of the most savvy marketing people in wireless. More announcements coming soon.