Over the holidays I read a magnificent book titled Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge.  It’s an incredible collection of history combined with interviews from many of the great computer interface designers and entrepreneurs from the past 30+ years.  The stories are superb, the interviews well done, and the pictures are incredible.  It’s a must read for anyone serious about designing computer software of any sort.  It’s a big book – I petered out about two thirds of the way through it as Moggridge shifted from storytelling to predicting the future – but I fault myself for trying to consume it at one time (and expect I’ll go back and try some of the later chapters again.)

The other day, as I pounded away on my keyboard and moved my mouse around the screen clicking away feverishly, my mind started wandering on the “there must be a better way theme.”  My mind wandered to an afternoon that I spent playing Guitar Hero with my friend Dave Jilk and it occurred to me that there have been three companies that came out of my fraternity at MIT (ADP) that have built companies commercializing unique models of human computer interaction.

Guitar Hero from Harmonix Music Systems is the first and one that Dave and I were both involved in early in their life.  While the first person shooter video game metaphor has been around forever (think Asteriods and Space Invaders – the category was NOT created by Doom – just made more fun and bloodier), I eventually wore out on video games because I got bored of killing things.  When Harmonix came out with Guitar Hero, I got a copy but didn’t do anything with it.  A few months ago I finally started playing with it and immediately became addicted.  So have a bunch of other people as it became one of the top ten games of 2006.  Interestingly, much of the buzz around the Nintendo Wii has been similar – rather than using a joystick to move a killing machine around a fantasy world, we get to interact with games much more physically – through a different interaction metaphor. 

The Roomba from iRobot is another example of this.  Colin Angle and his partners ultimately created a consumer based robot that does one thing extremely well – vacuum your floor.  Metaphorically, they’ve simply wrapped a bunch of software in a consumer device that enables a radically different and fascinating human computer interaction model.  If you’ve got a Roomba and a dog, you’ve also learned that the animal computer interaction model is a blast to observe.

Oblong is another company that came out of someone’s brain that resided at 351 Mass Ave in Cambridge (yup – it must have been something in the water.)  The best way to describe Oblong is to ask the question “do you remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report?  Remember the wall sized computer he controlled with his hands.  That’s what John Underkoffler and his partners at Oblong have created.

It didn’t dawn on me how important this was until I started putting the pieces together that our current UI metaphor – which started at Xerox, was popularized by Apple, and mainstreamed by Microsoft – is starting to grow long in the tooth.  I’ve been using a T-mobile Dash for the past few months and while I love the device, the Microsoft UI is immensely frustrating.  I’ve trained myself to be incredibly efficient with in (and largely control the phone functions with speech), but the iPhone bashed me over the head with the current level of fatigue that I (and I expect others) have with their current UI metaphors.

While Amy likes to ask me – when she gets frustrated with Windows – “what was wrong with DOS and the command line anyway?” it prompts me to wonder why I’m sitting at my desk pounding away at a keyboard.  There are – and will be – better ways.  It’ll be fun to look back N years from now and say “boy – that WIMP UI sure was quaint” kind of the way we think of “C:\>” today. 

Update: This morning, as I was reading the Wall Street Journal Online, I saw Walt Mossberg’s review of Enso from Humanized.  Excellent retro stuff – now I get to type “Run Firefox” to run Firefox.

A few weeks ago, Ben Casnocha showed up in Boulder to spend three months with us.  I’ve gotten to know Ben over the past four years after having been introduced to him by Greg Prow as “hey Brad – you’ve got to meet this guy Ben – I bet he’ll remind you of you when you were his age.”  Having known Ben for four years, all I can say is that I fantasize about having been as together at 18 as Ben is today. 

Ben’s working on a number of projects for us in Boulder during Q1 including TechStars and NCWIT.  He’s also spending lots of time getting to know the entrepreneurs in many of our Boulder-based companies, plug into the entrepreneurial scene, spend time finishing up getting his book out the door, learning how to really live alone in and apartment, enjoying snow for the first time in his life (ok – that was a stretch), and generally continuing to have amazingly unique experiences for an 18 year old as he gets ready to head off to college in the fall.

If you are in Boulder and don’t know Ben, but are part of the entrepreneurial scene and want to get connected with him, just drop me a note and I’ll make an introduction.

One of the really cool things about entrepreneurship (and life in general) is being open to new people and new ideas.  I’ve written about my random days policy in the past.  Today I got the following note from Ed Sullivan, CEO of Aria.

Hello Brad, According to your blog you’re on the East Coast.  If by chance you’re in Philly, I’d love to buy you lunch, dinner or coffee.  I’ve gotten amazing value from your blog:  YEO, tools to negotiate my financing, corporate mission statement, life review etc. and I’d love to meet you face to face and shake your hand.  I promise not bore you with my business plan (I’m funded).

It turns out that I am in Philly for the night.  I arranged to meet with Ed before dinner and then decided to blow off my traveling companions (I was tired of them anyway) to go have a random dinner with Ed.  We grabbed a quick meal around the corner of the hotel and talked for ninety minutes like old friends.  As a faithful blog reader, he knew a spooky amount about me but I still managed to dig up a few new pieces of information for him.  We covered a lot of ground, especially since we both have had way too much experience with ISP billing systems in the 1990’s (Portal and RODAPI anyone?)

Among other things, we covered the entrepreneurial scene in Philly (and respective challenges post Internet bubble and the struggles of Safeguard Scientific and Internet Capital Group), my friend George Jankovic from NutriSystem, the ubiquitous Josh Kopelman, Lasik’s (I’m still a chicken), and Ed’s three companies (yes – we did end up talking about Aria – and it wasn’t boring.)  We also covered plenty of life stuff and each said nice things about our respective wives (hi Ed’s wife – yes – he met with me – just a normal guy – definitely not someone named Gloria the voluptuous.)

While I have no idea if anything ever comes of a dinner like this, I very much enjoyed spending time with my new friend Ed.  The randomness of the universe has nice karmic twists.  Plus – it’s way more fun than sitting in a hotel eating room service.  Ed – thanks for reaching out!

Another day, another city.  At least I saw a really cool sculpture today.

Ryan just posted Reason #73 He Hates Airports.  Hint – “Caution, the moving walkway is nearing its end, please watch your step. Thank you.”

Yet another Hackathon at FeedBurner (#4).  Guys – you really need to cut back on the sugar and caffeine.  Eh – never mind – keep consuming!  Eric (one of FeedBurner’s founders and CTO) dissects the hack he did (an “Event Feed” service.)  It’s kind of like “Being Eric Lunt” in the spirit of “Being John Malkovich.”  Plus we get a cool new FeedBurner service (on the Optimize Tab under Event Feed for those of you following along at home.)

Jack Bauer was very busy last night.  I didn’t realize his family was so large, or so evil.  I expect his reunion with his dad won’t be as enjoyable as mine was.  I’m on the east coast somewhere today enjoying real cold but little snow (unlike Ben who is merely enjoying the unreality of snow in Boulder) plowing through my email and feeds before my day starts.  My friends at NewsGator have given me yet another way to read RSS feeds with their new NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (NGEOD – or NGOD for those of you that are atheists) product.  If you want to try out enterprise RSS for free for 30 days and like Software as a Service (or On-Demand, or – if you are old school – ASP), now is your chance.

Air travel generally sucks these days.  It starts when TSA tells you that you cannot have your toothbrush in the same ziplock bag as your toothpaste (liquids only in the quart bag Mr. Traveler), continues on the filthy plane (thanks for the nice smelling oder killer thing in the bathroom, but did you notice that the sink doesn’t look like it has been washed in a year), and finishes as you sit in the airport during yet another weather or mechanical delay.

Really – I’m just trying to get to Harrisburg (originally from Las Vegas this morning.)  There’s nothing quiet like a four hour weather delay.  Thankfully, I found an amazing spot at O’Hare to hang out at.  The Terminal C Red Carpet Club has a “Quiet Room.”  It’s a huge comfortable room with a cell phone ban.  I’m the only person here – since I have several more hours before my flight, I just counted the seats (about 80 of them) – and I’m the only dude here.  Delightful – better than a library.

I’ve written plenty about patents in the past, including a provocative post titled Abolish Software Patents.  I was having a conversation with John Funk, a partner in Evergreen Innovation Partners, at the end of last year after a catch up lunch.  We got into a serious conversation about the fact that so much of the software patent good vs. bad rhetoric seems like it’s more about opinions, anecdotal experience, and agendas – rather than a comprehensive review of the facts.  So – we decided to take it up a level and see where the conversation went.

Now – John and I have some interesting history around this.  We have been colleagues (I was an investor in Exactis (fka Mercury Mail / Infobeat – his first company), adversaries (Infobeat sued a company I co-founded – Email Publishing – for patent infringement – which was eventually settled for $1 and a cross-licensing agreement between Exactis and MessageMedia (the company that acquired Email Publishing)), and once again friends and colleagues (I’m an investor in John’s latest company, Evergreen IP.)  While we’ve both struggled personally with an emotionally charged issue, we’ve ended up friends. 

Interestingly, given the wide range of experiences we’ve each had around software patents, we have pretty similar views.  So – John fired off a long email to me which I’ve edited and broken up into several posts with the following premise: What if we attempted to craft a social policy hypothesis that would defend the existence of software patents, and then we went about creating an experiment that would attempt to disprove that hypothesis?  Hmm – social science – disproving a null hypothesis – how academic!

Let’s begin with this: Patents in general, and software patents in particular, are a government conferred monopoly that rewards the public disclosure of a software method or program. The rationale for patents is anchored in (1) public disclosure accelerates innovation because future invention rests on prior patent disclosures (e.g., innovation is a chain that builds on prior building blocks), and (2) conferring a patent monopoly will encourage innovation that otherwise would not occur due to perceived risk/return (e.g., in absence of patents, competitors will trounce new entrants by rapidly copying; therefore monopoly is needed to be able to raise capital and take the risks).

More coming in part 2 – same bat time, same bat blog.

Following is an exchange I had with a friend and someone I like to co-invest with.

Me: You’ve been awfully quiet lately.  Is everything ok?  Just checking in and saying hi.

Friend: Thanks for checking in. Yes, all is well. Just busy with an office move, some projects at home and work with my companies. I am expanding beyond web 2.0 as an investment strategy so spending time with peeps outside of our traditional network. Will tell all about it during our next dinner.

Me: Sounds cool.  Glad you are starting to fish in a new pond now that this one is starting to feel like a river at peak salmon season with everyone wall to wall doing some combat fishing,

Friend: I have been up river for almost 3 months, fishing with a shell launcher shotgun and an ice barbed spear.

When the river that you have been fishing in for a while becomes the popular place for everyone to hang out and fish, it’s often time to go find a new river (or at least a new spot on the river) that doesn’t have anyone around.