Amy and I just underwrote the renovation of Wellesley College’s new Human-Computer Interaction Lab . The picture above is a screen capture of the Wellesley College home page today (called their “Daily Shot” – they change the home page photo every day) with a photo from yesterday when Amy did the ribbon cutting on the HCI Lab. ...
My partner Jason Mendelson sent me a five minute video from Wired that shows how a Telsa Model S is built. I watched from my condo in downtown Boulder as the sun was coming up and thought some of the images were as beautiful a dance as I’ve ever seen. The factory has 160 robots and 3000 humans and it’s just remarkable to watch the machines do their thing. As I watched a few of the robots near the end, I thought about the level of software that is required for them to do what they do. And it blew my mind. And then I thought about the interplay between the humans and machines. The humans built and programmed the machines which work side by side with the humans building machines that transport humans. ...
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. ...
Orbotix just released a new version of the Sphero firmware . This is a fundamental part of our thesis around “software wrapped in plastic ” – we love investing in physical products that have a huge, and ever improving, software layer. The first version of the Sphero hardware just got a brain transplant and the guys at Orbotix do a brilliant job of showing what the difference is. ...
As the endless stream of emails, tweets, and news comes at me, I find myself going deeper on some things while trying to shed others. I’ve been noticing an increasing amount of what I consider to be noise in the system – lots of drama that has nothing to do with innovation, creating great companies, or doing things that matter. I expect this noise will increase for a while as it always does whenever enthusiasm for startups and entrepreneurship increases. When that happens, I’ve learned that I need to go even deeper into the things I care about. ...
I believe that science fiction is reality catching up to the future. Others say that science fact is the science fiction of the past. Regardless, the gap between science fact and science fiction is fascinating to me, especially as it applies to computers. My partners and I spend time at CES each year along with a bunch of the founders from different companies we’ve invested in due to our human computer interaction theme. In addition to a great way to start the year together, it gives us a chance to observe how the broad technology industry, especially on the consumer electronics side, is trying to catch up to the future. ...
If you follow our investments, you know that one of our core themes is Human Computer Interaction. The premise behind this theme is that the way humans interact with computers 20 years from now will make the way we interact with them today look silly. We’ve made a number of investments in this area with recent ones including Fitbit , Sifteo , Orbotix , Occipital , and MakerBot . ...
Orbotix , one of our investments (and a TechStars Boulder 2010 company) is looking for an iOS and an Android developer. If you don’t know Orbotix, they make Sphero , the robotic ball you control with your smartphone. And if you you wonder why you should care, take a look at Sphero on his chariot being driven by Paul Berberian (Orbotix CEO) while running Facetime. I got the following note from Adam Wilson, the co-founder of Orbotix – if you fit this description email jobs@orbotix.com ...
If you are a VC and interested in human computer interaction and you aren’t going to Blur, you’re about to miss the most important and interesting HCI event of the year. If you are an entrepreneur working on something HCI related, you are also missing out if you don’t come to Blur. I’ll be there as will my three partners at Foundry Group . We will be fully engaged for two days in one of our favorite themes that has spawned investments like Oblong , Fitbit , Organic Motion , Sifteo and Orbotix . ...
Several of the companies we’ve invested in are launching products at CES this year. The first one up is Sifteo . Today, Sifteo launched and you can preorder Siftables as part of their early access program . You may be familiar with them from a well known TED Talk that co-founder David Merrill did in 2009. Or maybe the recent TEDxMonterey Talk that David did earlier this year with a more in-depth demo. ...