Investments

Do you like your Sphero ? How about getting one that is 2500x larger than the current Sphero? That’s the new Sphero product – Peacekeeper. Order it today on Indiegogo . Along with some other cool Sphero stuff.

One of the places new approaches to human-computer interaction plays out is with video games. One company – Harmonix – has been working on this for 18 years. Harmonix, which is best known for Rock Band, is also the developer of three massive video game franchises. The first, Guitar Hero, was the result of almost a decade of experimentation that resulted in the first enormous hit in the music genre in the US. Virtually everyone I know remembers the first time they picked up a plastic guitar and played their first licks on Guitar Hero. Two years later, Rock Band followed, taking the music genre up to a new level, and being a magnificent example of a game that suddenly absorbed everyone in the room into it. Their more recent hit, Dance Central, demonstrated how powerfully absorbing a human-based interface could be, especially when combined with music, and is the top-selling dance game franchise for the Microsoft Kinect. ...

Woof! We just announced Foundry Group’s investment in Rover.com this morning. We led a $7m financing in the leader in digital dog boarding that connects dog owners with approved, reviewed, and insured sitters. Rover.com is part of our marketplace theme , which now includes investments in SideTour and PivotDesk . I’m psyched to be joining the board, working with my good friend Greg Gottesman at Madrona on another Seattle-based company. ...

A bunch of the companies we’ve invested in were at CES 2013. Modular Robotics , the makers of Cubelets, were at the Eureka Village (where Startup America was). The first thing I had to do when I got to CES was a panel for Startup America so the Modular Robotics booth was literally one of the first places I stopped after getting to Las Vegas. It was mobbed. I came back around a few other times and it continued to be mobbed. They were showing Cubelets (which are for sale now) as well as a few new spicy connector things that they are about to release that let you connect Cubelets up to anything you can build with Legos. ...

So – I’ve apparently been hiding under a rock and had no idea about the Nyan Cat phenomenon . The original Youtube video has 89,604,608 views as of this moment. Insane. Ok – whatever. Wait, shit, five minutes just passed with me playing around with the Nyan Cat site . I’m especially digging Jamaican Nyan and Pirate Nyan . Damnit, another five minutes just disappeared. Time to download Sphero Nyan Cat Spaceparty . A perfect combination of a cat, a ball, and an iPad. ...

28 Spheros + 1 Boombox. + 4 Android phones = Mind Blown. Wow – have you bought a Sphero for Christmas yet?

Along with my partner Jason Mendelson and our friends Brad Bernthal (University of Colorado Law School) and Mike Platt (partner at Cooley LLP) we have launched a series of courses in conjunction with our portfolio company Sympoz on starting a company. This is a bidirectional experiment for us – we are helping Sympoz launch their new set of programs for startups and entrepreneurs while continuing to experiment with new forms of media around education on a topic we know well. ...

Update: Cards@fullcontact.com is no longer available as FullContact has integrated this into all of their consumer applications. The simplest approach to doing this is now FullContact CardReader. There are some things I wish would just go away forever. Business cards are one of those things. I stopped carrying them several years ago and simply give people my email address (brad@feld.com ) as my primary contact data. But at the end of every day I have a handful of cards to deal with. Sometimes it is one or two; often it is a big pile. ...

I’m super impressed with the progress MobileDay has made in the past six months. We are a seed investor in the company whose goal is to fix conferencing calling. Their approach is “one touch into any conference call from any conference call provider.” The current MobileDay iPhone app is excellent – I use it multiple times a day. If you make any conference calls, give it a try and tell me what you think and what we can do better. ...

Today, Return Path launched three new products and reframed its business as “email intelligence.” Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO has an excellent post up titled Email Intelligence and the new Return Path. Return Path is an extraordinary company that I’m proud to have been involved with for the past 12 years. At our board meeting last week, Matt gave me and Fred Wilson our 12 year anniversary gift – a pair of red Return Path-branded Adidas sneakers. I still vividly remember the phone call Fred and I had where we cut a deal to merge two nascent companies – Veripost and Return Path – in what became Return Path. We cut a deal in 10 minutes – I offered up a 50/50 merger and Fred suggested he wanted a little more since Return Path had raised 3x the money Veripost had. I responded with “how about 55/45” and Fred said “it’s a deal.” ...