My dad just wrote a great review of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. We were both reading it at about the same time and had a couple of interesting conversations about it.  When Rumsfeld got fired, I moved on to another book (I had about 100 pages left) – I figure Woodward had accomplished his mission.  But – I never wrote a review of the book.  Now that my dad has done it, I don’t have to.

I’m playing around with “extreme sync” these days – exercising as many platforms as I can simultaneously just for fun.  My central mail / calendar / contacts / tasks live on our Exchange server.  I’ve got sync working well across all my Windows devices (Office 2003 and Office 2007) along with my new Dash Windows Mobile PDA.  My Macs “mostly work” – everything is doing great (via Entourage) except “tasks.”  I’m a heavy Outlook / Exchange Task user so this is a critical one for me.  Anyone out there solve this?

Amy and I love to sit around and make up names for bands.  Etiquette of Suicide was tonight’s band name.  It’s not our all time best, but I expect it to show up as a band name on MySpace any day now.

My partner Ryan pointed me to Mark Morford’s incredible review of the new MacBook Pro on SFGate.  Actually – in Mark’s words – it’s not really a MacBook Pro – it’s a “brand new lick-ready smooth-as-love Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Super Orgasm Deluxe Ultrahard Modern Computing Device Designed by God Herself Somewhere in the Deep Moist Vulva of Cupertino Yes Yes Don’t Stop Oh My God Yes.”  Um, yeah – that’s not exactly how I felt when I got my new Levono T60 with Vista on it the other day.  At least mine works, compared to Ryan’s.

On Tuesday night, I hung out in LA with my long time friends and frat brothers John Underkoffler and Kevin Parent, co-founders of Oblong along with Kwin Kramer and Tom Wiley.  I hadn’t seen John and Kevin in a while, so it was fun to catch up with them.  More fun, however, was seeing and playing with the amazing stuff they are creating.

In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton is shown interacting with a computer on a wall using a futuristic user interface in which he uses hand gestures to manipulate images and video.  Underkoffler created that – including the beginnings of a new UI paradigm and a language for describing it.

Wind the clock forward four years.  John, Kevin, Kwin, and Tom are hard at work commercializing this next generation user interface.  It’s magical to watch John control a set of complex applications projected on the screen with his hands.  No mouse, no keyboard – just gestures.  All that’s missing was speech – and – for someone who has spent some time working on speech related companies – it’s pretty clear where that could fit in.

Pause.  Ponder.  After a few minutes, John gave the gloves to me and taught me the UI.  It took about five minutes for me to get comfortable (probably less time that it takes a windows / mouse novice to deal with the Windows / Mac UI.) While I had some trouble with my non-dominant hand (right hand), I could feel the “brain wiring” taking place as I got more and more comfortable working with the applications.

These weren’t trivial applications.  A few of them were set up just to demonstrate the UI characteristics.  But – there were deeper ones that included a 3–D view of LA (think pan and zoom, along with annotate objects.)  Or – a time sequenced example of traffic moving down the street (time forward, time back, pan, zoom).  Or – a time sequenced map of the world showing all flight patterns over an elapsed period of time, including selecting specific origins and destinations to filter the data. 

All of this was running on top of a Mac G5.

We went out for sushi afterwards and talked about it for several more hours.  I’m 40 years old.  In my life, there have been only two major UI paradigms that I’ve interacted with.  The first was character-based ASCII terminals and keyboard (circa 1979).  The second was WIMP (ironically, I saw a Xerox Alto around 1980 – so while the Mac was the first popular WIMP UI, I actually saw a WIMP UI before that.)  Of course, you have punch cards and toggle switches – but let’s start in 1977 when the Apple II – which was arguably the first mainstream personal computer – came out.

So – 1977 – character-based becomes mainstream.  1984 – WIMP appears but probably doesn’t really become mainstream until Windows 3.0 – around 1990.  Speech – which has been stumble-fucking around since I was a kid – is still not mainstream (HAL – “I feel much better now, I really do.”)  I supposed you could argue that there is a new paradigm for handheld devices, but it’s so poor that it’s hard to consider it an innovation.  20 years and we’ve got nothing that is a discontinuous UI paradigm.

John, Kevin, Kwin, and Tom are inventing it right now.  Awesome.

David Cohen (who I have done a few angel deals with – including ClickCaster and Solidware) recently spent a couple of weeks building a cool new tool called earFeeder. earFeeder scans your music collection and automatically creates a single RSS newsfeed containing news about your favorite artists including new releases on iTunes, concert dates and ticket availability, Rolling Stone articles, etc. He got a graphics designer (Brad Searle) to do the look and feel in exchange for a share of the company. Then David introduced earFeeder for the first time in public at the New Tech Meetup on October 3rd and opened it up to a public beta on that day. He told me that he really built it for himself but since some of his friends (including me) had given him good feedback on it, he decided to throw it out there and see what people thought and then improve it from there.

Two weeks later, TechCrunch covered earFeeder, followed shortly by LifeHacker. David estimates that about a million people have now seen a story about earFeeder, and many thousands of feeds have been created.

Here’s what’s really interesting: A Silicon Valley company called SonicSwap acquired earFeeder this past Friday and David is now an investor in that company. This happened just 39 days after he first showed it in public, and David says he spent a total of about three weeks and $600 on the project. That’s a pretty neat way to get some real value out of some experimental technology.

Many companies strive to be TechCrunched (I got an email this morning asking me to introduce someone to TechCrunch and GigaOm – as if that would have any real impact.)  If you’re a nerd, however, you want to be Ajaxianed.  Ajaxian – who’s goal is to “generate more hype than Rails” has a nice showcase article up on Me.dium along with some invite codes.  It’s a very good explanation of what Me.dium is trying to do and why it matters, along with some techy stuff.

Fred Wilson has a superb post up today titled How To Build A Good Board.  If you run a company and have a board, or sit on a board, go read it now.

I’m personally going to boycott the phrase “Web 3.0” since “Web 2.0” makes me tired enough.  There have been some great quips going around the system about this, including Gordon Weakliem’s “I haven’t even gotten around to upgrading to Web 1.0 Service Pack 2”, Michael Parekh’s “Web 2007 versions”, Peter Rip’s “Web 2.0 + 1”, and Nick Bradbury’s “Web 3.0 Does Not Validate.”  While I recognize the inevitability of the newest increment of the Web x.0 label, I don’t have to like it.