The new face of venture capital

What to do when venture capital dries up? Crowdsource it, of course.

I guess you could call Kickstarter a micro-venture-capital-crowdsource platform. It provides a way for artists, musicians, designers, filmmakers, and people with just plain good ideas to get funding for their (sometimes) off-the-wall projects without promising their first born to a venture capitalist.

Here's how it works. If you have an idea and you need funding to bring that idea to fruition, you start a project on kickstarter.com. You then set a financial goal. Here's how the site describes the funding process:

How does funding work?

Every project has a funding goal (any dollar amount) and a time limit (from 1 - 90 days) set by the project creator. When the deadline is reached, there are either of two results:

1. Funding Successful: If a project has met or surpassed its funding goal, all backers' credit cards are instantly charged and funds go directly to the project creator. Project creators are then responsible for completing the project and delivering rewards as promised.

2. Funding Unsuccessful: If a project has NOT met its funding goal, all pledges are canceled. That's it.

Prospective funders/users can browse projects and make pledges instantly. Some projects promise a tangible item to the backers at the end of the project. It may be a T-shirt, a copy of a book, etc.

I think this site is pure genius. It allows creative people to pursue small projects that would never have been funded by larger patrons and it provides backers with a sense of contributing to something of value. These are the art patrons of the 21st century. The site also provides the intangible benefit of having a sense of community built around ideals. If you support something you like, you become a member of small community of like-minded people.

I love the idea...now, what to fund?

Life360 and the meaning of life

 

Life360 Offers Family Safety 2.0 | Epicenter | Wired.com

This service looks like an interesting one, where you can plan for all sorts of disasters.
What I though was more interesting, though, was this passage from the article quoting one of the company's founders, Chris Hull:

“Literally, I joked with my roommate, ‘what if one of us got cancer and died and had never been anything else but an investment banker?’” said Hulls. “A week later, they found a tumor in my neck.”

I found it interesting that he thought investment banking wasn't a "meaningful" thing to do with one's life. What makes one career more meaningful than another? If you create things, is that considered meaningful? If you provide a worthwhile service, is that meaningful? Are some services more worthy than others?
All these questions lie at the heart of existential philosophy. Heidegger said that the first question of philosophy must be "why am I here?" He talks about the "authentic" life being superior to the "unauthentic" life. The difference between the two being that the former consists of a life where one analyzes one's self and one's existence instead of just participating in life.

New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show

The NY Botanical Garden in the Bronx puts on a giant model train show (G scale) every holiday season that is supposed to be spectacular.  They have recreations of many NY landmarks made completely from natural materials, including a towering replica of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The show this year runs from November 21st through January 10th.

How to share a streaming video on your own website for free

Would you like to share a video with friends and family, but not share it with the world?  I’ll tell you how to do just that in this post.

This article is written assuming that you already have a site hosted by one of the many hosting services out there, like 1and1, go daddy, host monster, etc.  These hosting services usually give you many GB of storage space, but don’t usually make it easy to share your videos via a streaming server.

There are services out there that let you stream your videos without making them public, but you usually have to pay for these services.  For instance, MotionBox charges $24.99/month(!) for a Pro account, and the free account has too many limitations to be useful.

The best option for streaming video from any regular web server is probably FLV video.  This is the same format that the ‘big boys’ like YouTube use.  You can plunk down $620 for Adobe Flash CS4 so you can create a streaming video, or you can cobble one together using a couple of free tools.

If you have your video in one of several standard formats (avi, mp4, wmv, qt, etc.), you can use Free FLV Converter to convert your video to the FLV format.  This tool not only converts your video to FLV, but it produces accompanying SWF files and an html file you can put directly on your website.

The Free FLV Converter will create a video file with a name like VIDxxxxxx.flv (the xxxxxx is a date and timestamp).  It will also create FLVPlayer.swf and Skin.swf which are required for the client browser to play the video.  Also created is a VIDxxxxxxx.html file. This is a standard html file with all the code necessary to play the video.  You can just place all these files on your web server and create a link to that VIDxxxxxx.html file on another page.

If you are like me, though, you usually wind up forgetting your good video camera when going out and have to shoot video on your phone.  If this is the case, you probably have the video in 3GP format.  Unfortunately, Free FLV Converter does not convert from 3GP to FLV.  To convert a video from 3GP to one of the formats supported by Free FLV Converter, you can use the Free 3GP Video Converter to get the video into a more desirable format first.

Snow Leopard is still buggy.

So, I took the plunge and installed Snow Leopard on my brand new MacBook Pro. Big mistake!

First, let me say that I love the way Apple makes people pay for minor upgrades. Upgrade 10.5.8 to 10.6 for $30; come on, it should be free! They did the same thing with the iPod Touch from 2.2 to 3.0 for $10.

As soon as I installed the Snow Leopard upgrade, my WiFi (or Airport, in Apple parlance) began acting up. Every time I logged in, the Airport status would show an exclamation point, meaning it couldn’t get an IP address. If I turned Airport on then off, it would work just fine. It would work fine, that is, until it didn’t.

I would be browsing away, and all of a sudden I would get the “Your computer is not connected to the internet” message in Safari. The Airport status said everything was just fine, but I had no connectivity in any network applications. Again, turning Airport off then on fixed the problem, until it happened again.

I reinstalled the OS, no deal. I tried some things listed in the forums where many people say they had the same issue (just google snow leopard airport problem), no deal. I talked to Apple support three times and tried all of their suggestions, no deal.

So, I downgraded back to Leopard and kissed my $30 goodbye.

“It just works.” Yeah, right….