From my office in the Columbia Tower I have a great view of the startup community, both literally and in the work that I do. From Pioneer Square to Fremont and beyond, there are exciting things brewing in Seattle. The following is This Is Tech’s list of Seattle Startups to Watch in 2008. These emerging companies are bootstrapping some interesting stuff:
BuddyTV is a hub of all things television related. Users and the BuddyTV editorial staff comment and chat in real time about their favorite TV shows. The site has built an impressive amount of content. TV fans can congregate using live audio, video and text, which makes the site a compelling place to spend time. With its active community of users, BuddyTV is the type of community that the television networks and other traditional media companies wish they had for themselves.
Building on the groundwork forged by youtube and the recent onslaught of video sharing services, Fyreball has created a social networking site designed for sharing media online. Instead of sending your friends links to your favorite clips and photos online, Fyreball users create a unique webpage (a fyreball) and select which friends they want to invite. Invitees can view and comment on posted videos, and can add their own videos and content in response. Friends invite friends, and the result is a dynamic media rich message board on the topic of your choosing. I have been participating in Fyreball’s beta launch and the site is a great way to kill some time and catch up with friends. Fyreball was founded by a handful of ex-Bungie Studios folks, which reflects well on the company. Bungie is the company behind the Halo series of video games for Microsoft’s xbox and xbox 360 consoles. Halo 2 and Halo 3 are tied in my opinion for the title of greatest video game ever made. Incidentally, Bungie has been recently spun out of Microsoft, and is a company to watch in its own right. They would have made this list, but once you have shipped a few hundred million dollars worth of product, you just don’t qualify as a startup anymore.
Check out this video of Dean Kamen’s design for a Luke Skywalker inspired prosthetic arm. Kamen, known for inventing the Segway, is an amazing designer and has a history of creating innovative medical devices.
As a follow up to my post about the fan remake of Back to the Future, here is another short Tron remake. These videos have been coming from all directions in response to the movie Be Kind Rewind. Do a search on youtube for “Sweeded” if you have some time to kill. In the Tron remake (link below), they did a nice job of capturing the light cycle scene with pretty low budge tools (including cardboard light cycles). What can I say, I am a sucker for Tron.
One step closer to nanotechnology in your garage. Biotech and nanotechnologies are like the early days of computing, when people had to compete for time on a university’s room sized computer. When nanotech and biotech tools become available to more people we can expect to see development accelerate proportionately.
Slashdot | Rent a Nanotechnology Lab: “‘If you’re an aspiring young nanotechnologist with an idea for a new product, you’ll be happy to hear that the DOE has created five facilities called Nanoscale Science Research Centers, that you can rent. These Research Centers are located in National Labs scattered around the country: Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois; Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York State; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California; Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.’”
The old saying that humans only use ten percent of their brains never seems to be all that useful, since we haven’t unlocked the secret to using the other ninety percent. An article today in the Daily Galaxy helps illustrate some recent clues that may help us tap in to that unused potential. The scientists featured in the article are working toward helping ordinary people unlock their mind’s latent super-abilities. Sounds a little like X-Men or the 4400.
The article highlights a handful of unique individuals that for a variety of reasons are able to achieve super human mental feats.
Stephen Wilshire is described as an autistic savant with the extraordinary ability to store and recall exact depictions of things that he sees. They call him the Human Camera, because Wilshire can draw exact replicas of intricate structures, buildings and landscapes after a short viewing (down to the number of windows on each of the buildings). Video Below.
Excellent lecture by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. Watch the video at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
He gives some great examples of how the Internet is revolutionizing society. In short, the Internet allows the formation and coordination of large groups in a way that was previously not possible. Before the Internet, groups would break down once they get to a certain size because communication between group members becomes too burdensome.
Shirky does an excellent job of dissecting what is so revolutionary about Internet technology, and how it has and will change society in an order of magnitude greater than the printing press, movable type, the telegraph, telephone, recorded media, and broadcast technology.
I am a big fan of science inspired art, so I was particularly interested in this neural network art project by Phil Stearns. Stearns has created an Artificial Neural Network using electronic components that produce sound and light in response to the stimulus in the sculpture’s environment. The piece is a complex mess of wires and components responding to nearby conversations and changes in lighting. The neurons also respond to each other, meaning that once it gets started, the sculpture converses with itself for a time.
This video from the Reason.tv website is a little harsh on the middle class, but it does do a nice job of demonstrating how advances in technology and the declining cost of goods is making everyone better off.
The premise of the video is that the middle class is not nearly as bad off as the news media depicts. Even if wages decline, the cost of goods are declining at a much greater rate, meaning that the standard of living overall is much higher for the lower and middle class than it was 10 year ago and beyond.
Grad Student Chris Chatam at the University of Colorado has written a comprehensive user’s guide for caffeine. Chatam’s article breaks down caffeine use from a scientific perspective, and is a must read for caffeine addicted techies like myself. Read on for an excerpt and link:
Here is a youtube clip from a BBC documentary highlighting some recent research relating to time dilation and the effect of adrenaline and drugs on the perception of the passage of time. In the first experiment depicted in the video, a researcher compares a subject’s ability to read rapidly flashing numbers during free fall and in a normal state. Under the influence of adrenaline, the subject was better able to read the numbers. This is touted as evidence that the brain is able to slow things down when in crisis mode.
In the second experiment, researchers tested the perception of time in rats under the influence of marijuana and cocaine. These rats had previously been trained to hit a button every 12 seconds to trigger release of a food pellet. Under the influence of cocaine, the rat hit the button too early. With Marijuana the rat was too late.
Monday, March 31, 2008
0 Comments