As someone else mentioned, VC do not invest in ideas. The also don't invest in companies. VC invest in management teams.
The best thing you can do is try to raise some private money first from local sources (look for cashed out high-tech execs and local angel investment groups). Then build your team. Find a CEO who has CEO and proven fundraising experience, and will work for stock for the first few months. If you are a geek, don't expect to be best friends with this person, they should be a very slick suit with contacts in the VC and investment banking world. As a geek, wear the CTO hat, at least on your first company. Later, with experience in fast talking the suits, you can be CEO.
Second, begin the patent process. It will take a long time to actually get it. Some patent lawyers will work for equity or a mix of equity and cash to keep your initial costs low. VC slobber over patentable technology. It sets up a barrier to entry.
Finally, look to institutional investments as well. Intel, Microsoft, and Dell make huge investments in companies, and it is "chump change" to them.
I'd like to say one thing - avoid venture conferences. They are a useless waste of money, and usually aren't even good for press. Maybe do one, just to have proof that you can get in one. Real VC deals are done over lunch, not at a conference. Get to know lawyers. Get to know investment bankers. Get to know people who work at the big name consulting houses. These are your inside track into VC. An inside contact is your best hope of getting noticed. The vast majority of business plans that go to VC end up rapidly in the trash without an inside contact.
If this is your first entrepreneurial experience, take the VC money. After your first success, you can worry the next time about getting a better deal. There is no way to know going in your first time how to structure everything the best way. Just be happy you are getting enough money to create a real company.
Once you have this experience, your next money raising effort will be far easier. You'll know the VC community, and be known.
We have video of microwave over ball lightning on an episode of the/etc show titled "Fun with High Voltage Electrical Discharges" (RealVideo format;) You can read more about doing it yourself at here, look down on the page for the collection of microwave oven ball lightning recipes.
You can watch video of the MAE East from the first episode of/etc.
Anyone who lives next to the MAE East and has a 9 to 5 job is a nut. Rush hour begins at 6AM, is impassible until 10AM, lunch hour makes the area impassible from 11AM-2PM, then impassible again from 4PM-7PM. That whole part of Northern Virginia is one large traffic jam.
I encourage Northern Virginians to move to Laurel, MD, the "Silicon Trailer Park."
If you expect competition, tell your local government not to grant monopoly cable franchises. After all, your local government officials are the ones being "paid off" to keep cable monopolies.
What no one seems to understand is that elephant dung is symbolic of rebirth in Africa. It's not supposed to be a defiling statement. Or maybe it is supposed to target culturally naive Americans... In London, it was the image of a child murderer done using the handprints of children that upset the locals about this exhibit. In the US, that's no biggie.
BTW, you can check out the occasionally mobile/wireless CarlaZone web cam. It uses the Nogatech mobile video kit with microcam, and a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, on a laptop stuffed in a messenger bag.
I was told tonight by an HMD maker that shall remain anonymous (for a while anyway) that if he can put together a run of 1000 800x600 SVGA full color LCD based monocular HMDs, that he could get a price point of $500 per unit.
We're having some network trouble with our MP3 server, so we've already moved Episode #9 to another server...go hit the site and reload the page and try again if you've had problems. Sorry!
RealNetworks is currently not doing advanced development for the RealServer (streaming audio/video/flash) in BSD. The new betas are in Linux, and some personal contacts I have at Real say that much of their server operations are Linux based.
I think there is something to be said about BSD for stable and simple stuff, but now and especially in the future, Linux will be where the bleeding-edge apps are developed. Moreover, the Kernel will keep getting better and better and better because it is open source and people can experiment and make it better.
There is the Libertarian Party (infact, I worked on their first web site). Despite electing a handful of people to local positions and getting nationwide ballot access for President, the party is in general of no influence in electoral politics. They have had a great influence on fighting ballot measures for bonds to build stadiums and such.
The LP also has a very extreme position on freedom, the theory being that everybody else talks about freedom, then votes for the CDA. However I do believe that there is a place for a more moderate and acceptable freedom-oriented party. But it would have to deal with the meme of extreme Libertarianism which has already been put out there.
The funny thing is that being part of the global marketplace depends on maximum freedom for citizens, combined with effective justice to avoid corruption and fraud. Up until now, the US has been the leaders in globalism because of our reasonable justice system and reasonable freedom. However other countries are catching up to us, and we will have to become more free in the future to stay ahead.
The problem is that science is a mechanism to seek an understanding of natural processes by seeking to categorize laws of nature.
Miracles are not laws of nature. Scientifically, Slashdot happened because Rob's happened to start a cool web site. Theologically, maybe God had a hand in it, maybe it wasn't chance.
We do not need a God-centric theory of atomic physics. We do not need a God-centric theory of how the lungs work. We do not need a God-centric theory of how airplanes fly. And we do not need a God-centric theory on how life began.
Beware anyone who talks about "impossibly large odds". The reality is that no matter how large the odds are, if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be here to speculate upon it.
Also despite the incredible complexity of modern bio-molecules, there is no reason to presuppose that DNA or RNA came out of nowhere randomly. There are plenty of possibilities of simple reproducing bio-molecules using clays as a catalysis agent. There isn't even a reason why the first reproducing molecules had to be any bio-molecule that we use today.
The truth is we don't yet have a good clue on how life began. But if we just say "God did it," we will definately never know!
On the other hand, speciation has been observed, so evolution is a fact.
I don't understand why you should have problems getting the 8.5 kbps RealAudio stream...we actually don't get that much traffic on that side of the operation. The MP3 server is actually located on a different network from the RealServer.
Feel free to send technical questions to info@thesync.com and we'll try to help you out.
MP3 can stream with WinAmp (and X11Amp I believe as well). The.m3u file gives a URL where the MP3 file is.
It streams using TCP over port 80 (HTTP), and if the MP3 player plays it faster than it comes it, it will "skip" (i.e. have a period of silence) every now and then.
"Real" streaming systems like RealAudio use UDP transmission, and if you lose a packet, it tries a couple of times to get a retransmission, but unlike TCP it will give up after just a few retransmission failures. The "holes" in the audio of RealAudio can be filled in with white noise or predicted audio, depending on the codec.
To tell the truth, most people with a 56k dial-up modem should have no trouble enjoying listening to Geeks in Space in MP3 because it is encoded at 24kbps. It is not CD-quality MP3, but good enough for voice.
I even tried listening over a Metricom Ricochet wireless connection (equivalent to a bad 28.8 kbps connection), and although it did stop to rebuffer with WinAmp a few times, it was listenable in spurts.
The truly bandwidth-deficient can listen to Geeks in Space in 8.5 kbps RealAudio. Even a 14.4kbps modem should be able to work at that speed. If packet loss is a problem with the RealAudio over UDP, go into the preferences and set it to TCP transport.
First a joke, now real... live video coverage of the recovery from CBS.com. All I got was a test pattern when I checked up on it, maybe there will be some more "action" later.
Since we moved the MP3 server to a new provider, things appear to be going much smoother this time. We're cruising along at a handfull of Mbps, no problem. Thanks though!
The vast majority of cable companies in the US have been granted monopoly status by local governments (often by making sweetheart deals with family members of local officials...) Had these local governments not done this in the first place, we wouldn't have the issue of open cable Net access today.
Here is the solution: Cable companies can maintain a monopoly access to their system ONLY where local governments allow cable competition.
I'm glad people liked the show! Tens of thousands of Slashdot fans hit the site today. Here's the premiere day FAQ:
1) We went with the lowest bitrate RealAudio and MP3 we could get away with and still have a reasonable sounding show, so that Slashdot fans in Zimbawe with 14.4 kbps modems could still enjoy it, and also so we wouldn't get too badly Slashdotted...
2) Our servers didn't get Slashdotted, nor our bandwidth, but a router of our provider did! It kept running out of memory and resetting. Theoretically we had nearly 10 Mbps allocated. It started dropping routes at 4 Mbps, and even reset BGP sessions...
3) This afternoon we were able to run the MP3 server across town to a building 100 feet from the MAE-EAST, and plug it in there...much better!
I'm a traitor to the Neuromorphic movement! OK, actually I just got out of it after spending six years building analog VLSI neuromorphic chips (including being a part of patent #5,331,222 Cochlear filter bank with switched-capacitor circuits).
Let's say there has been a lot of hype and not a lot of progress in making useful neuromorphic applications. And during that time, digital technology has speed up to the point where many slow old-school AI techniques are now actually useful.
That said, I support research into sensory and motor processing. We wouldn't have MP3 compression if we didn't do research concerning the auditory system.
The best part of the Telluride workshop was marching in the July 4 parade, chanting "2...4...6...8...our neurons can integrate!"
In a sense this is true, however computers are capable of doing things that their programmers cannot fully comprehend or expect...imagine the first person to plot out a Mandelbrot Set.
I worked in the connectionist AI field for a while and though I think it helped us think about the brain in new ways, very few real applications have come from neural nets. Expert systems are still the most used AI-type application, but it is tough to really call them AI.
Our biggest problem with AI is that the brain has had billions of years of evolution, and is much larger and more complex than any neural net we can design today. However I do believe that it is within our grasp now to artificially evolve neural nets that can mimick ants, spiders, or worms. Getting to vertebrates will take a while.
The funny thing is that network backbone bandwidth is doubling every 6 months, thus actually going faster than Moore's Law of transistor count doubling every 18 months. Of course eventually network speeds will catch up with processor speeds, since you need a processor to route packets. Thought - 32 bit CPU at 500 MHz moves data at (around) 16 Gbps on-chip, the network backbone speed that should be attained in 2001 (a couple of OC-192's).
Too bad that the author did not read "A Quarter Century of Unix" by Peter Salus, or watched my RealVideo show The Many Falvors of Unix to find out about the "Unix Wars" and why Microsoft had the chance to make Windows into the dominant OS.
And what gives the US the right to assasinate foreign leaders? Well, if we can send cruise missiles into Belgrade and kill innocent children, you think we'd have an even more valid right to kill someone who has actually ordered children to death in Kosovo.
What is the point of this post? US policy has FAILED to deal with the leadership in Iraq and Yugoslavia. "Cruise missile" diplomacy does not work.
Let's either stop wasting money (ob geek: which could be going into Internet 2, or could be going into our pockets to buy more Linux boxes), or cut off "the head."
You're right that dictatorship is never just the actions of an individual. But tyranical dictatorship is driven by worship and political power of an individual. Especially in situations like Yugoslavia, where I believe the average person is reasonable, but the military power is in the hands of very greedy people. The Yugoslavs I have chatted with for the most part hate Milosevic, but hate getting bombed even more.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone else mentioned, VC do not invest in ideas. The also don't invest in companies. VC invest in management teams.
The best thing you can do is try to raise some private money first from local sources (look for cashed out high-tech execs and local angel investment groups). Then build your team. Find a CEO who has CEO and proven fundraising experience, and will work for stock for the first few months. If you are a geek, don't expect to be best friends with this person, they should be a very slick suit with contacts in the VC and investment banking world. As a geek, wear the CTO hat, at least on your first company. Later, with experience in fast talking the suits, you can be CEO.
Second, begin the patent process. It will take a long time to actually get it. Some patent lawyers will work for equity or a mix of equity and cash to keep your initial costs low. VC slobber over patentable technology. It sets up a barrier to entry.
Finally, look to institutional investments as well. Intel, Microsoft, and Dell make huge investments in companies, and it is "chump change" to them.
I'd like to say one thing - avoid venture conferences. They are a useless waste of money, and usually aren't even good for press. Maybe do one, just to have proof that you can get in one. Real VC deals are done over lunch, not at a conference. Get to know lawyers. Get to know investment bankers. Get to know people who work at the big name consulting houses. These are your inside track into VC. An inside contact is your best hope of getting noticed. The vast majority of business plans that go to VC end up rapidly in the trash without an inside contact.
If this is your first entrepreneurial experience, take the VC money. After your first success, you can worry the next time about getting a better deal. There is no way to know going in your first time how to structure everything the best way. Just be happy you are getting enough money to create a real company.
Once you have this experience, your next money raising effort will be far easier. You'll know the VC community, and be known.
It's scary stuff the first time you try it!
Anyone who lives next to the MAE East and has a 9 to 5 job is a nut. Rush hour begins at 6AM, is impassible until 10AM, lunch hour makes the area impassible from 11AM-2PM, then impassible again from 4PM-7PM. That whole part of Northern Virginia is one large traffic jam.
I encourage Northern Virginians to move to Laurel, MD, the "Silicon Trailer Park."
If you expect competition, tell your local government not to grant monopoly cable franchises. After all, your local government officials are the ones being "paid off" to keep cable monopolies.
What no one seems to understand is that elephant dung is symbolic of rebirth in Africa. It's not supposed to be a defiling statement. Or maybe it is supposed to target culturally naive Americans... In London, it was the image of a child murderer done using the handprints of children that upset the locals about this exhibit. In the US, that's no biggie.
BTW, you can check out the occasionally mobile/wireless CarlaZone web cam. It uses the Nogatech mobile video kit with microcam, and a Metricom Ricochet wireless modem, on a laptop stuffed in a messenger bag.
I was told tonight by an HMD maker that shall remain anonymous (for a while anyway) that if he can put together a run of 1000 800x600 SVGA full color LCD based monocular HMDs, that he could get a price point of $500 per unit.
Would any of you buy this?
We're having some network trouble with our MP3 server, so we've already moved Episode #9 to another server...go hit the site and reload the page and try again if you've had problems. Sorry!
RealNetworks is currently not doing advanced development for the RealServer (streaming audio/video/flash) in BSD. The new betas are in Linux, and some personal contacts I have at Real say that much of their server operations are Linux based.
I think there is something to be said about BSD for stable and simple stuff, but now and especially in the future, Linux will be where the bleeding-edge apps are developed. Moreover, the Kernel will keep getting better and better and better because it is open source and people can experiment and make it better.
Unfortunately we don't really have the person-power to transcribe shows, however if someone wants to do it, we'd be glad to put them up!
There is the Libertarian Party (infact, I worked on their first web site). Despite electing a handful of people to local positions and getting nationwide ballot access for President, the party is in general of no influence in electoral politics. They have had a great influence on fighting ballot measures for bonds to build stadiums and such.
The LP also has a very extreme position on freedom, the theory being that everybody else talks about freedom, then votes for the CDA. However I do believe that there is a place for a more moderate and acceptable freedom-oriented party. But it would have to deal with the meme of extreme Libertarianism which has already been put out there.
The funny thing is that being part of the global marketplace depends on maximum freedom for citizens, combined with effective justice to avoid corruption and fraud. Up until now, the US has been the leaders in globalism because of our reasonable justice system and reasonable freedom. However other countries are catching up to us, and we will have to become more free in the future to stay ahead.
The problem is that science is a mechanism to seek an understanding of natural processes by seeking to categorize laws of nature.
Miracles are not laws of nature. Scientifically, Slashdot happened because Rob's happened to start a cool web site. Theologically, maybe God had a hand in it, maybe it wasn't chance.
We do not need a God-centric theory of atomic physics. We do not need a God-centric theory of how the lungs work. We do not need a God-centric theory of how airplanes fly. And we do not need a God-centric theory on how life began.
Beware anyone who talks about "impossibly large odds". The reality is that no matter how large the odds are, if it didn't happen, we wouldn't be here to speculate upon it.
Also despite the incredible complexity of modern bio-molecules, there is no reason to presuppose that DNA or RNA came out of nowhere randomly. There are plenty of possibilities of simple reproducing bio-molecules using clays as a catalysis agent. There isn't even a reason why the first reproducing molecules had to be any bio-molecule that we use today.
The truth is we don't yet have a good clue on how life began. But if we just say "God did it," we will definately never know!
On the other hand, speciation has been observed, so evolution is a fact.
I don't understand why you should have problems getting the 8.5 kbps RealAudio stream...we actually don't get that much traffic on that side of the operation. The MP3 server is actually located on a different network from the RealServer.
Feel free to send technical questions to info@thesync.com and we'll try to help you out.
MP3 can stream with WinAmp (and X11Amp I believe as well). The .m3u file gives a URL where the MP3 file is.
It streams using TCP over port 80 (HTTP), and if the MP3 player plays it faster than it comes it, it will "skip" (i.e. have a period of silence) every now and then.
"Real" streaming systems like RealAudio use UDP transmission, and if you lose a packet, it tries a couple of times to get a retransmission, but unlike TCP it will give up after just a few retransmission failures. The "holes" in the audio of RealAudio can be filled in with white noise or predicted audio, depending on the codec.
To tell the truth, most people with a 56k dial-up modem should have no trouble enjoying listening to Geeks in Space in MP3 because it is encoded at 24kbps. It is not CD-quality MP3, but good enough for voice.
I even tried listening over a Metricom Ricochet wireless connection (equivalent to a bad 28.8 kbps connection), and although it did stop to rebuffer with WinAmp a few times, it was listenable in spurts.
The truly bandwidth-deficient can listen to Geeks in Space in 8.5 kbps RealAudio. Even a 14.4kbps modem should be able to work at that speed. If packet loss is a problem with the RealAudio over UDP, go into the preferences and set it to TCP transport.
First a joke, now real... live video coverage of the recovery from CBS.com. All I got was a test pattern when I checked up on it, maybe there will be some more "action" later.
Since we moved the MP3 server to a new provider, things appear to be going much smoother this time. We're cruising along at a handfull of Mbps, no problem. Thanks though!
The vast majority of cable companies in the US have been granted monopoly status by local governments (often by making sweetheart deals with family members of local officials...) Had these local governments not done this in the first place, we wouldn't have the issue of open cable Net access today.
Here is the solution: Cable companies can maintain a monopoly access to their system ONLY where local governments allow cable competition.
I'm glad people liked the show! Tens of thousands of Slashdot fans hit the site today. Here's the premiere day FAQ:
1) We went with the lowest bitrate RealAudio and MP3 we could get away with and still have a reasonable sounding show, so that Slashdot fans in Zimbawe with 14.4 kbps modems could still enjoy it, and also so we wouldn't get too badly Slashdotted...
2) Our servers didn't get Slashdotted, nor our bandwidth, but a router of our provider did! It kept running out of memory and resetting. Theoretically we had nearly 10 Mbps allocated. It started dropping routes at 4 Mbps, and even reset BGP sessions...
3) This afternoon we were able to run the MP3 server across town to a building 100 feet from the MAE-EAST, and plug it in there...much better!
Thanks for listening to the show!
-Thomas
I'm a traitor to the Neuromorphic movement! OK, actually I just got out of it after spending six years building analog VLSI neuromorphic chips (including being a part of patent #5,331,222 Cochlear filter bank with switched-capacitor circuits).
Let's say there has been a lot of hype and not a lot of progress in making useful neuromorphic applications. And during that time, digital technology has speed up to the point where many slow old-school AI techniques are now actually useful.
That said, I support research into sensory and motor processing. We wouldn't have MP3 compression if we didn't do research concerning the auditory system.
The best part of the Telluride workshop was marching in the July 4 parade, chanting "2...4...6...8...our neurons can integrate!"
Computers do what humans tell them to do.
In a sense this is true, however computers are capable of doing things that their programmers cannot fully comprehend or expect...imagine the first person to plot out a Mandelbrot Set.
I worked in the connectionist AI field for a while and though I think it helped us think about the brain in new ways, very few real applications have come from neural nets. Expert systems are still the most used AI-type application, but it is tough to really call them AI.
Our biggest problem with AI is that the brain has had billions of years of evolution, and is much larger and more complex than any neural net we can design today. However I do believe that it is within our grasp now to artificially evolve neural nets that can mimick ants, spiders, or worms. Getting to vertebrates will take a while.
The funny thing is that network backbone bandwidth is doubling every 6 months, thus actually going faster than Moore's Law of transistor count doubling every 18 months. Of course eventually network speeds will catch up with processor speeds, since you need a processor to route packets. Thought - 32 bit CPU at 500 MHz moves data at (around) 16 Gbps on-chip, the network backbone speed that should be attained in 2001 (a couple of OC-192's).
Too bad that the author did not read "A Quarter Century of Unix" by Peter Salus, or watched my RealVideo show The Many Falvors of Unix to find out about the "Unix Wars" and why Microsoft had the chance to make Windows into the dominant OS.
Obi Wan: That's not a star, it's a space station.
Han: I have a bad feeling about this.
Obi Wan: Dang, that was my line.
And what gives the US the right to assasinate foreign leaders? Well, if we can send cruise missiles into Belgrade and kill innocent children, you think we'd have an even more valid right to kill someone who has actually ordered children to death in Kosovo.
What is the point of this post? US policy has FAILED to deal with the leadership in Iraq and Yugoslavia. "Cruise missile" diplomacy does not work.
Let's either stop wasting money (ob geek: which could be going into Internet 2, or could be going into our pockets to buy more Linux boxes), or cut off "the head."
You're right that dictatorship is never just the actions of an individual. But tyranical dictatorship is driven by worship and political power of an individual. Especially in situations like Yugoslavia, where I believe the average person is reasonable, but the military power is in the hands of very greedy people. The Yugoslavs I have chatted with for the most part hate Milosevic, but hate getting bombed even more.