Tag Archives: startup

Visual overlay will be very cool

Posted on July 25, 2011 | 2 comments

I’m not making any forecasts about when this is going to happen, but visual overlay will be very cool.

We will still see the world as it is, of course.  But we will be able to add layers.  Layers can give us information like the ratings of a restaurant we see or night vision or heat vision, or little flying arrows showing the direction and speed of the wind.  Layers can also give us controls like interacting with vending machines or unlocking your car, or saving a good bottle of wine.

It will be very cool.

Things have changed since I wrote about this in 2002, but I wasn’t completely wrong: The Etherface

Wikipedia anything you see.  Add people you meet to your contact list with context.  Users generate content.  API lets developers add controls.

2 Comments

Posted in Brain in a jar, Early Stage, Just for fun, Media, Science, Stocks, Tech, The Future, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Feeling down on Angel Investing?

Posted on June 13, 2009 | Leave a comment

Feeling down on angel investing? I am. But maybe we shouldn’t.

An interesting new study, “The Economic Future Just Happened,” found that more than half of the companies on the 2009 Fortune 500 list were launched during a recession or bear market, along with nearly half of the firms on the 2008 Inc. list of America’s fastest-growing companies.

A link to the study:
http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/the-economic-future-just-happened.pdf

Leave a comment

Posted in Early Stage, Economics, Investment

Tagged ,

CD Repair Shop

Posted on July 16, 2000 | Leave a comment

The CDDB provides the identification of CD content based on track set characteristics. This is how your Winamp program can provide you with the CD track titles when you put a CD in your computer and are connected to the internet. CDs get scratched and damaged, and are cumbersom to travel with. With a large single centralized database of CDDB data and the associated MP3 files, a CD could act as a key to gain access to a set of MP3 files – available from anywhere. A user account could store a list of authorized CDs for any user. Each account would not require additional storage of MP3s – rather, simply a list of unique keys. Even damaged CDs could be converted to high quality (undamaged) MP3 files in less than a few seconds with this system. Barrier to entry is high, but marginal costs for volume users is low. User accounts would provide users with access to their CD libraries from any networked device.

Leave a comment

Posted in Early Stage, Just for fun, Media, Tech

Tagged , , , ,

Competition Matrix

Posted on March 14, 1999 | Leave a comment

An interactive competition matrix for buyers and sellers of any good or service would improve efficiencies for both. Traditional search engines are weak for goods and services. With a competition matrix, sellers could list their goods or services with unlimited flexible descriptive fields. Standard field sets would form for popular goods and services. Buyers could indicate their prefernces for characteristics of goods or services and see a competitive table of available goods or services matching their criteria. Links to – or direct – commerce would enable simplified access to the selected good or service. With user driven fielding, the system would naturally and organically follow supply and demand into any number of increasingly specific goods and services. System maintenance would be minimal, if any.

Leave a comment

Posted in Early Stage, Economics, Freakonomics, Tech, The Future

Tagged , , , , , ,