tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-366192802012-01-15T14:34:25.923-08:00Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.comBlogger351100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-5964427195136482062007-09-08T09:24:00.001-07:002007-09-08T09:44:14.603-07:00

A few months ago, I was talking to my friend Brad about a Google Earth-based wiki that would be organized around buildings. I thought it would be perfect for the real estate business, and maybe even disintermediate commercial brokers from property. A few discussions with my commercial broker friend Bob dissuaded me of that notion, and after Brad started working on his new horror film, Brad and

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-9719101019494272082007-08-14T06:59:00.001-07:002007-08-14T07:03:07.317-07:00

I've wondered when we would be able to program web services. Teqlo is a service that allows you to create scripts that automate workflow between web services. All the programming is done graphically, so there is no code. There's a good video intro to the service here. I haven't tried this yet, but I'll let you know how it goes.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-6133031795708713832007-08-11T10:42:00.000-07:002007-08-11T10:54:32.011-07:00

I have been too busy to blog recently, but enjoying twitter. It looks like Google has a service similar to twitter, but in the form of shared notebooks.I ran across this blog post about Amazon's new FPS service. The post looks at the API for the service, and also discusses the broader implications for the service.Other than those two issues, FPS is extremely robust. It allows you to create what

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-56017313950190193232007-06-09T11:03:00.001-07:002007-06-09T12:06:17.904-07:00

Lux fiat may become LED fiat.From a total cost of ownership (TCO) measure, LEDs have beat other lighting technologies for a while. Not surprising since solid state devices almost always win economically over time. Now LED prices are dropping to the point that they can compete with the purchase price of other lighting technologies.An emerging idea is to use LED in streetlights and street signs.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-10597739345125307962007-05-22T15:08:00.000-07:002007-05-22T15:18:39.893-07:00

Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough." -- Noah Cross to Jake Gittes in Chinatown.Is this the future of politics?

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-77176249406531253962007-04-17T08:05:00.000-07:002007-04-17T08:37:54.144-07:00

I had dinner a few years ago with the founders of Woven Systems, Dan and Bert, to help them with their business plan. It's nice to see their press release today. The analysts are excited about Woven's Ethernet Fabric Switch, and now the bloggers are weighing in, too.If it all works, Woven's innovative ethernet switch implementation will replace Fibre Channel. While innovation within a standard

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-33109598027784183812007-04-16T12:55:00.000-07:002007-04-16T13:02:20.734-07:00

OLEDs have been emerging for decades, but Sony showed some stunning (and thin) OLED screens at the 2007 CES show.Lots more videos of Sony's OLED technology at youtube. Too bad there are no high def videos to reveal the detail of these displays.Small OLEDs are showing up on cell phones products already. Large OLEDs will not only replace traditional screen technology with cheaper, more efficient

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-42334151300194219582007-03-31T22:19:00.000-07:002007-03-31T23:16:08.408-07:00

I heard a radio program today on global warming.Global Warming is Not a Crisis -- An Oxford-style debate that is provocative, intellectually rich, humorous, and dramatic. For each debate, three panelists argue for a motion and three argue against it, with a moderator controlling the proceedings. After the formal arguments, the debate is thrown open to the floor for questions. Each side attempts

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-8913552464411772752007-03-24T09:40:00.000-07:002007-04-13T15:17:41.906-07:00

I ran into my friend Keith Schaefer a month ago. A serial entrepreneur, Keith told me about his most recent company, BPL Global. BPL's premise devices shed electric load during peak demand and provide demand response tools so its customers can automatically shift load in response to dynamic pricing programs. Economically, BPL enables electricity markets to shift investment from generation to

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-63306597559656503132007-03-19T10:57:00.000-07:002007-03-24T09:39:01.272-07:00

When you start companies, you often run into naming problems. First is the name of the company itself. Then the name of the products and product features. Think of the plethora of terms that didn't exist ten years back for Internet services: "pop-up", "spam", "AJAX", "Google", "web-enabled email client", "IMAP", "mash-up", "podcast", "Blackberry", and on and on.As more and more media moves to

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-91579020812909054782007-03-04T12:17:00.000-08:002007-03-04T19:48:08.138-08:00

If you're feeling like car travel takes longer than ever, this chart from a U.S. Department of Transportation study on traffic congestion should validate your feelings. Growth of motor vehicles has far outstripped growth of roads, and traffic jams are the inevitable result. Lots of studies have measured the losses in terms of time, money, and pollution. So, aside from getting out of our cars,

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-62234201155460301602007-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:002008-11-13T07:28:04.662-08:00

I took a walk around the new Federal building with my friend Jim, an architectural critic. If you walk around San Francisco, you can't miss the enormity of the City's most recent edifice.However, you might miss some of the environmental features of the building. Most prominent of the features: no air conditioning. What may be most notable about the absence of air conditioning at the new

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-75119377364907169322007-02-15T19:52:00.000-08:002007-02-28T12:20:10.359-08:00

Not so long ago, I bought a Canon Powershot A620 digital camera. I love the camera (another story, another time), but now I'm trying to figure out what to do with all the pictures.The only problem with the camera is cataloging all the great pictures. An emerging idea is geotagging (a.k.a. geocoding), or including latitude and longitude information in a photo's metadata. Since most digital

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-7271089992501809142007-02-10T18:07:00.000-08:002007-02-06T12:14:38.449-08:00

KQED radio has been playing a recording of the Joint Venture: 2007 State of the Valley Conference program this week. If you can get the audio, I highly recommend Eric Schmidt's talk. Move the pointer about 1/2 through the playback to hear Schmidt's talk (although the 1st half of the broadcast is worth a listen, too).Of course, Schmidt puts search at the center of solving all the problems of

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-76500330565875554082007-02-05T17:26:00.000-08:002007-04-13T15:22:12.431-07:00

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, has an article in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town section this week covering reaction to the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Some new lines are being drawn in the sand. The I.P.C.C. is more adamant about climate change and mankind's contribution to said change. The newly

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1169793920827130462007-01-25T22:04:00.000-08:002007-01-25T23:08:16.926-08:00

I love it when I think of a good business idea and someone has done it already.I always carry my bags with me on the plane, mostly because I can't stand arriving early to check bags and then waiting after a long flight for my bags to arrive after I do. Besides, the airlines have a terrible reputation for losing bags. Or for sending them the wrong place.I used to fly from Boston to London and I

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1168845073758247992007-01-14T21:42:00.000-08:002007-01-14T23:55:42.810-08:00

In my recent Internet meanderings, I ran across some intriguing organizational behavior research.The objective of research in this cluster area is to develop concepts, frameworks, simulation models, tools and techniques that enterprise management can use to design and evolve efficient, adaptive, flexible, agile and reconfigurable enterprises for a new network-centric age (i.e., analogous to a

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1168388225587530142007-01-09T15:24:00.000-08:002007-01-09T16:24:53.870-08:00

I have a friend who owns a 100 year old house in San Francisco. As with many other 100 year old homes in San Francisco, the sewer line at my friend's house started to have problems. In this case, heavy rains caused my friend's sewer line to pool water and create a waterfall in his neighbor's garage.The plumber who fixed the sewer performed a trenchless repair. This is like having a "

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1167527545986338432006-12-30T17:12:00.000-08:002007-02-28T12:28:19.605-08:00

On a recent trip to my friend Norm's house, I enjoyed espresso from the super-duper espresso machine at his house. I sold my Jura espresso machine when I moved into an apartment and didn't have enough counter space. At Norm's, I was reminded how much I liked a well brewed cup of coffee at home. My inexpensive Braun drip coffee maker was fine as far as drip coffee goes. With some Peet's house

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1166409177109122132006-12-17T18:32:00.000-08:002006-12-17T22:49:45.680-08:00

Why are optics at the front of emerging new medical technology? Because optical techniques foster minimally-invasive health care. Minimally-invasive optical procedures started in the first half of the nineteenth century with the endoscope. The endoscope provides physicians with diagnostic information, usually by snaking an optical scope and light through a natural cavity. If you've turned 50,

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1165199721133266422006-12-03T18:07:00.000-08:002006-12-17T22:56:55.096-08:00

If you were born after 1976, you have never known a time without relational databases, a time when you couldn't build outside joins or conditional queries across multiple tables.Last week I went to the 30th anniversary party for INGRES, the relational database invented at U.C. Berkeley. I went because I was the very first support engineer at Sun Microsystems to support INGRES. The event was

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1164574107835644792006-11-26T12:48:00.000-08:002006-11-26T12:54:33.956-08:00

What's going on with relationships? Recently reported: 37% of U.S. births are out of wedlock. Not to be outdone, in France 59% of women have their first baby out of wedlock. This is not due to an increase in teenage pregnancy rates, but due to women choosing to have babies in cohabitation with the father rather than in marriage. Is cohabitation preferred because divorce is so likely? Divorce

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1164303127973505002006-11-23T09:30:00.000-08:002006-11-23T09:52:33.850-08:00

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act , more efficiently referred to as "SOX", was written to make publicly traded companies more transparent to investors.Turns out SOX created a case-study for the trades-offs between transparency, regulation, and the cost of information.  Looking at how market dynamics have changed since SOX was implemented, it should come as no surprise that the U.S. Securities and Exchange

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1164084615418904172006-11-20T20:50:00.000-08:002006-11-23T09:55:25.676-08:00

Emerging display technology and smaller consumer electronics form factors will create sea changes in the way we interact with computers and networks. The brightest new display technologies? Most of us have heard about OLEDs, or Organic Light Emitting Diodes. Cheaper, lighter, more flexible, and more energy efficient than back-lit LEDs, OLEDs will enable new man-machine interactions. OLED

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1163137966212323702006-11-09T21:01:00.000-08:002006-11-09T21:58:45.576-08:00

Dr. William Dement was an early sleep scientist. He set up a sleep lab at Stanford in 1970 and did experiments on sleepers. Building on earlier work on REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep by Aserinsky and Kleitmann at the Chicago University sleep labs, Dement showed that dreams occur during REM sleep, and that sleepers have many dreams throughout the night, with later dreams lasting longer than

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162878889104692742006-11-06T21:54:00.000-08:002006-11-24T08:55:53.543-08:00

It's not something you give much thought to. I was driving an Audi A3 in the rain last week. It was an annoying rain that ranged from drizzle to downpour every five or ten minutes. And suddenly I was noticing the windshield wipers. Prior to the manufacture of Henry Ford's Model A, Mary Anderson was granted her first patent for a window cleaning device in November of 1903. Her invention could

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162761029137172732006-11-05T12:50:00.000-08:002006-11-05T13:58:30.753-08:00

We hardly think about having electronic connections with the rest of the world these days. 150 years ago, though, connecting America to Europe instantaneously was an emerging idea. PBS has an informative documentary on Cyrus Field's trans-Atlantic commercialization of Samuel Morse's invention of the telegraph.As a study in commercialization, the formation of the New York, Newfoundland, and

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162571387928461152006-11-03T08:19:00.000-08:002006-11-03T08:29:47.966-08:00

Prices for GPS circuitry are falling, so more and more devices can integrate GPS functionality. Typically, GPS devices have been standalone devices designed to slap on a dashboard or fit in a hand, and they have some map technology to help you get to your destination.Here's a video that shows a Nokia N95 with integrated GPS. Since your phone knows where it is, you can send your coordinates to

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162447270467787762006-11-01T21:53:00.000-08:002006-11-03T07:43:11.403-08:00

Many U.S. voters have wondered about how fair voting is since the voting debacles in 2000 (Florida) and 2004 (Ohio). Here are examples of new technology that help both the voting process and the monitoring of the voting process.Sites like Can I Vote help you find out if you're registered to vote, something you might want to do a few days or weeks before an election. Other sites like Election

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162263863237502552006-10-30T18:49:00.000-08:002006-10-30T19:07:54.906-08:00

Most of us are familiar by now with the concept of hybrid cars. Hybrids usually have two power sources and one power sink. The popular Prius, for instance, has a small efficient gasoline engine which is one source of power, and an electric motor which stores power into a battery (an energy sink) and then generates energy from the battery (an energy source). The power sink acts like a flywheel,

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162142892648780962006-10-29T09:18:00.000-08:002006-10-29T09:28:12.673-08:00

War has always driven technology, especially computing technology. The first calculating machines and computers calculated better weapon trajectories. Then weapons systems started to incorporate computers. Meanwhile, computing and computer aided design have improved enough to create low cost robots. Where does it lead? Check out this robot match-up at Robogames 2006.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1162088172701906362006-10-28T19:15:00.000-07:002006-10-28T19:16:12.710-07:00

Check out Desktop Factory for a 3D printer for you home or office.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1161917655817205092006-10-26T19:49:00.000-07:002006-10-26T19:54:15.823-07:00

If you didn't make it to Web 2.0 Kongress in Frankfurt last month, Brad has a good round-up here of new web apps. Mostly AJAX-y apps that make it easy for users to integrate and manipulate web apps.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1161824126524403962006-10-25T17:54:00.000-07:002006-10-26T21:55:44.160-07:00

Here's a demonstration given at the 2006 TED conference on new user interfaces possible with an inexpensive touch sensitive high-resolution display.

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36619280.post-1161823999388337472006-10-25T17:51:00.000-07:002006-10-25T17:53:19.400-07:00

I like new ideas, so I started this blog.I work on new companies, so I like commercialization and new technology. I also enjoy the arts and creative activities.If you know about a new idea, share it!

Steven Damronnoreply@blogger.com0