Broadband to the home

We are thinking about some business opportunities in the home networking space. I’d love to hear from you all about your needs and problems. Some questions I have:

- Do you have a cablemodem or dsl connection to the internet now? Are you thinking of getting one? - Do you have multiple PCs in your house that you want to connect up to the cablemodem or dsl connection? How are you going to do that? - Are you worried about security of your PCs once you put them on this cablemodem or dsl connection? What are you willing to spend to prevent virus attacks each month? Do you spend money today on virus checking software, or a virus checking service, or on a firewall? - Are you worried about your family’s use of the internet? What will you spend to filter out objectionable content for your kids? Do you spend anything today on this? - Are you worried about backup of all the files on your PCs? Would you pay for a service to backup your files over your cablemodem or dsl connection so that they were safely stored up on the network? Do you spend money today on backup software or a backup service? - Do you share photos today with your extended family? Why or why not? What is preventing you?

Thanks!

Gaming PCs.

I am getting ready to start spec’ing out and building my next PC. I am starting to collect inspiration – the alienware site has some cool machines but I fear I want more.

Tech Junkie also seems like a great source of inspiration. Quit a few articles on overclocking the GeForce 4.

CD Sharing Software

One great use for a cheap NAS that Rich has been talking about creating is to create a virtual CD Jukebox. I wonder how well this software works.

Update – a better list of potential software up on download.com when you search for virtual cd. Virtualdrive seems like an interesting commercial software option.

Salmon

One of my pet environmental peeves. We live here in the great Pacific Northwest, we have access to wonderful wild salmon stock for our tables. Wild salmon is an incredibly good food for you nutritionally, high in omega-3 acids.

Sadly tho we are seeing the widescale introduction of atlantic salmon farming here in the northwest. There is little good about this in my mind. Farmed atlantic salmon are not as nutrionally good for you due to the feedstock they consume; they are dyed pink so that they look attractive; they escape from their pens and compete with the local wild stock; they attract sea lions and seals which are then killed by farmers to protect their fish stock.

Farm raised salmon is cheaper for restaurants than wild salmon, so we are slowly seeing it creep into menus, even here in the Pacific Northwest. The restaurants are not particularly upfront about it – you have to ask very precise questions to make sure you are consuming wild troll-caught Pacific salmon, and not farmed Atlantic salmon.

Blogskins.

This is a great toy if you have a blog. Shows the power of the web services model.

Some current tech topics

My buddy Rich has a lot of great info up on his weblog about a variety of topics. Recently he and I have been captivated with low cost storage systems. He’s figured out the way to build a really low cost 120GB file server for your network, including full mirroring for disaster recovery purposes. Very cool, I will probably build one of these. With something like this on your home network, you don’t need to worry about buying big hard disks on your PCs in the future.

Another thing coming to your home network is wireless networking. This site is a great source of news and tech tips.

We’ve also noticed in compusa and other computer stores recently that routers and wireless routers for the home are flying off the shelves. For instance look at the top sellers at Amazon in this category right now. Everyone who has a dsl or cable modem connection is wiring up their house to get all their PCs on that connection – and wireless is often the way to go.

We’re excited about this. With all this networking getting deployed, there is the opportunity to provide the solutions and apps on top of this infrastructure that consumers really want. For instance, why is it so hard for me to share pictures with the rest of you? Why don’t new pictures that I take just show up on your home network for viewing?

More Idealabs

More press on the lawsuit we are a part of – MSNBC, internet.com, NY Times.

Fun

Try this out. http://www.wright.edu/~doelker.2/whatswrong.swf. if the link doesn’t work, try searching on google for “whatswrong.swf” to find a working version.

Ha.

Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

A great article on another recent attack. A sidebar – if you all have recent Windows machines (Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP), you should all be running windows update periodically to ensure that you have all the latest security fixes. The fixes marked “critical” are the ones you want at a minimum.

Wildseed

This is the coolest company I am working with. Eric Engstrom, the leader, is a brilliant guy I have known for years and he has assembled a killer team. And they have the most innovative phone product I have seen. We are very optimistic…

Tucson Trip

We had a great trip down to Tucson and Scottsdale last week. It is our so-called “Mid Winter Break” or “Ski Week” – a week off from school in mid February. We get spring break later in April.

We had beautiful weather – approaching 80 each day, but cool at night. C and Liz stayed at Canyon Ranch, John and John at Loew’s Ventana Canyon Resort. Canyon Ranch is awesome, “camp for grownups”, but they have an age limit of 14 so we can’t all go there yet.

While the girls were spa-ing, John and John hit all the tourist attractions in Tucson including Old Tucson Studios -- fun old west stunt shows, a real hoot.

Everyone is back in school and or work today, 6 weeks to spring break!

Idealab

We are an investor in Idealab, and boy have we learned hard lessons here. Our one really bad dotcom mistake. Bill Gross the founder is brilliant but things have not turned out well. Business Week had an article on. And our lawsuit against the company is mentioned in Fortune and in Forbes (sorry you have to register at Forbes to read the article).

This was the quickest investment decision I ever made and the worst. The connection is obvious….

Baruch Lev’s testimony to Congress

A worthwhile read about corporate accounting and auditing, presented to Congress recently as part of Enron hearings. Per Baruch, our financial reporting is too narrow, our auditing is too cozy, and our enforcement is too late and opaque. And we have the best systems in the world.

Alterna Blog

So I am playing around with a new toy, Radio, created by Userland Software. I don’t grok it fully yet but it has some interesting features. For those of you who are really into blogs and web services and RSS and XML, you can visit my sandbox site and follow all the links there to learn more about.

This Modern World

This comic cracks me up.