Voltage Security Inc. was mentioned in the WSJ yesterday, they seem really interesting as a way to use PKI without the hassle of key management. I have tried at least 10 times over the years to use PKI solutions and have always given up, key management is such a pain. This seems like a real usability breakthru.

Update: Other VCs are talking about too…

I am so far behind on halloween preps. I have all my gear to do some pneumatic effects this fall but i have yet to find the time to actually construct test circuits and props. It has been such a busy spring and summer. I am not going to really get to anything til september which is sad, it is going to be a mad dash.

I picked up a Sierra Designs Lightyear one man tent last week and used it last weekend. Very happy with the design and weight, tho the assembly instructions are wrong headed. They suggest laying out the tent fabric and staking first, then assembling the poles. It works MUCH better to assemble the poles and attach to the fabric first, and then stake it out.

Just finishing Kim – Good adventure yarn. I was motivated to chose it based on its inclusion in a list in Book magazine of great adventure stories. I was also influenced by Victor Niederhoffer’s observation that he only reads books that are least 100 years old, as they have stood the test of time if they are still in publication. So I am making it a point to dip into older literature. The amount of language and style drift in just 100 years or so is pretty amazing, you get a sense of how rapidly our language evolves.

We had an offsite yesterday to discuss follow-on financing rounds for our fund I companies. We have 7 active investments in this fund and all will need additional funding over their lifetime. Given the weak state of the b+ round and mezzanine round markets, it is likely we will be a significant participant in the future rounds for all these investments. These are tricky investment decisions – we have large financial and emotional commitments to these firms, some of us have fiduciary responsibilities, it is difficult to make objective decisions. It was a great session – I work with great people, we had some great bonding moments. Lots of different points of view, but a good consensus about the need to examine follow on rounds very carefully, in effect viewing them as new investments. Also a lot of consensus that we are wise to have a plan and budget for each company, so that we have sufficient funds for the companies we are most excited about, and that we don’t just let our funds drain to whoever shows up first.

Dana thinks that an MSFT dividend is a bearish, bad thing. As a stockholder I think it is a wonderful thing. I don’t want MSFT to buy ATT stock, to buy Nextel stock, to invest in a bunch of hare-brained startups, to try to start a VC fund, or to do any other non-software adventure. I’d even like to see them shut down some of their money-wasting non-PC adventures like their smartphones and xbox efforts. MSFT is really really good at PC software, and they run a really really profitable PC software business. Everything else is just a money-wasting adventure and is not their core competence. So please, give the money back to the shareholders, let us make our own decisions about what other ventures to invest in. This isn’t bearish at all, I will invest the money elsewhere, and I trust the market economy to efficiently direct that investment towards opportunities that are high growth and that may not be MSFT’s core competence.

Some great ideas at DUH BLOG :: 2003-07-08 about the evolution of digital cameras. Much discussion about how the digitization of photon capture lets you inject so much more processing and data capture – like why don’t we capture gps info, infrared info, etc at image capture time?

At the extreme I’ve often thought about a software-defined lens, where the entire lens and shutter construct is replaced by software, and at the front of the camera you have a photon capture service that records the incoming frequency and direction of all the photons. With this data, you could theoretically do all your focusing and other image manipulation as a post-capture process. I suspect there are some quantum mechanical issues with this, a physical lens does a lot of “computation”. But it is very interesting to consider how to evolve the camera.

We were up at the Salmon La Sac campground this weekend (see Cle Elum Campgrounds) and it was a wonderful area. A great wading and swimming river, one of the best swimming and diving holes we have seen – you jump from the bridge entering the campground into the river, it seems plenty deep. A beautiful place.

We’ve come to love Firenze at Crossroads – it is one of the best Italian restaurants in the Seattle area. Not the most glamorous location but the food has always been killer and the staff is wonderful. We’ve eaten at a lot of west side italian places and we still come back to Firenze every couple of weeks.

Not that I need more books to read – I have close to 100 stacked up next to the bed in the queue – but here are some sites which can recommend books, seen in the ny times this last week. whichbook.net let’s you pick the mood and style and makes recommendations. Allreaders.com is similar but has a cruddy interface.

Found in my referrer logs – The Underground Dialectic. They say nice things, are an interesting read, and pointed me towards some more interesting reads – CommonSenseWonder and Aortal.

Here’s what Don Bradford is up to – Horse Central – good luck Don!

A strong recommendation for ActiveSMART. I tried it a while back but need to do it again. A hard disk failure at home is just a catastrophe as no one is diligent about backup. And losing homework or photos == tears.

I was looking at the plans of yet another collaboration startup this week. Yet another interesting system to help people codify and automate collaboration. And yet another system that will die an unmourned death I suspect.

End users have voted over and over again in favor of ad-hoc collaboration tools – email, IM. We happily bounce messages back and forth to collaborate. But make us structure it just a little bit and we overwhelmingly reject the solution. We are just too impatient and short-term lazy to create a structured message, to use a more structured workflow tool, to do the upfront design work to create a collaboration app.

The same dynamic exists with spreadsheets and databases. The dominant use for spreadsheets is simple lists with some modest calculations. Databases would be perfect for this but we use spreadsheets because we can jump right in with no upfront design time, we don’t have the patience to do a little design upfront.

But I wonder if we can’t do a little better in email, perhaps drawing some inspiration from spreadsheets. When I collaborate in email, I am often making a list – a meeting agenda, a list of tasks we need to do, a list of questions we need answers to, a list of assignments. And then I’d love it if I could easily see status against that list. It would be nice if my email editting app would auto-recognize lists, and then track responses and status to list items, letting me see a summarized view of the list of items being discussed in a thread.

It has to be really lightweight, any list should be autorecognized and formatted, as Word does today if you try to create a list of items.

Just early thinking. I’d like to see some lightweight collaboration grow up from simple email, rather than continue to see heavyweight groupware software.

I used to think that your PC sucked if you didn’t have a water cooler. Well that is now for wimps, now you need to freeze your processer with a Chip-Con freezer if you are any kind of a stud at all.