Inspirational Technology

Today I came across an article about a new 32GB solid state 2.5″ SATA disk from SanDisk. This could potentially be a quite extraordinary development. Compared to current hard drives, it’s faster, quieter, uses less power, has much faster random access times and doesn’t have any moving parts. All very positive sounding things, the down side is that it’s lower capacity and costs quite a bit more than current harddrives. I’ll be watching these drives closely and am definitely looking forward to seeing real world performance numbers. There’s no data on write performance and the limited write cycles of flash media could be an issue for really heavy write intensive applicaions.

I just got an email announcing that the ModBook Tablet Mac will be on display at the Wizard World Convention & Expo in Los Angeles from March 16th to 18th. It’s a little odd to get a press release for what’s nothing more than a demo, but this is such an interesting sounding product I decided I’d pass it along. I know I’d love to get my hands on one of these things to see how well they actually work. It’s still a very big question if this company can move beyond demo prototypes to a shipping product, but they’re happy to take your money if you want to order one. Here’s the full release.

Axiotron to Demonstrate ModBook, the One
& Only TabletMac at Wizard World Los Angeles

El Segundo, CA - March 13th, 2007 - Solution hardware
manufacturer Axiotron, Inc. today announced that it will be
showcasing the award winning ModBook™, the only Mac OS® X
tablet computer solution on the market, on the Axiotron
Booth #310 at the Wizard World Convention & Expo Los Angeles.
From March 16th to 18th, showfloor visitors will be able to take the
ModBook for a spin and on Saturday, March 17th, special guest and
Emmy award winning artist Shannon Tindle will be demonstrating
the ModBook's benefits.

On the latest Grid7 Entrepreneurship Podcast, Peter Burns founder of the Institute for Entrepreneurship discusses his initiative aimed at rolling out university programs for Entrepreneurship across the country. As part of this he talks about the University Entrepreneurs fund. This fund was first created last year as a $1 million venture capital fund for student entrepreneurs. Now Peter is looking to push it to $250 million and take it to a national level. Students from the Entrepreneurship program at any of the universities where the Institute for Entrepreneurship provides their program are eligible. From those programs, the best prospects can receive seed funding to get their projects off the ground. If I were still a student I’d be pretty damn excited about this program.

Overall this looks to be a great way to both train and seed the entrepreneurial spirit in young minds. Best of all, this is starting in Arizona with the College for Entrepreneurship at Grand Canyon University.

I’m generally not a big fan of Microsoft software though I do use Excel quite a bit. It’s a pretty good program, but it’s way too expensive for how I use it. I don’t go much beyond basic financial models and simple data lists. I’ve also been getting pretty annoyed with the fact it’s not a native binary on the Intel version of Mac OS X. I’ve tried various other Mac OS X solutions (Mariner, Mesa, AppleWorks) as well as some of the Web 2.0 solutions like Google Spreadsheet and I think I’ve finally found one that works well enough for me. It’s called Tables and while it’s rudimentary, my needs are also rudimentary so it’s been a decent fit so far.

It imported my Excel spreadsheets with no problems (again I’m far from an Excel power user) and will actually use the excel format directly (i.e. you can edit and save the excel files without importing/exporting).

It’s a pretty basic program right now and doesn’t support graphs or calculations that are too complex. For simple models (the stuff most people actually use) and the management of small sets of data it’s the first thing I’ve used that doesn’t drive me nuts in five minutes. A license costs roughly $51 (the developer is based in Europe, 39 €).

It’s not nearly as powerful as Excel and Excel does have better usability overall, but it’s a young program and does look promising. As long as Apple doesn’t come out with their rumored spreadsheet, the future for this program could be pretty nice.

Just came across this site called bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming app that allows you to build simple mind maps using nothing more than your web browser. I’m a big fan of mindmapping, although I don’t like to use the computer to do it. My approach just involves a blank piece of paper and a pencil and I intentionally try to get away from the computer when doing this. However bubbl.us looks to have some potential for collaborative brainstorming that’s kind of interesting. It’s fun to play around with anyway.

For Grid7 Venturecast #14 we recorded the audio for the presentations at the Arizona Entrepreneurship: Revolution in Marketing Conference. This was an event focused on introducing the concepts of social media and how it can be applied to help market a business. You know blogging, wikis, social networks and such. The opening presentation was by Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club and the closing presentation was given by Robert Scoble of Podtech and the Scoble Show.

The conference was mildly interesting to me, but I’ve been doing all the stuff they’re talking about for a long time so there wasn’t really a whole lot to learn from it. In reality, it was pretty fluffy overall. However, you could see all the business people in the audience drooling over the prospects opened up by this “new concept” of blogging and social networking. That’s a good thing, it seems most people in Arizona are quite behind the curve when it comes to this stuff. Anyway, if nothing else, Scoble’s section is worth a listen. Just make sure you stick with it past the part where he’s reading his RSS feeds on stage.

It has actually been out for a while (I’ve been slacking at this blogging thing) but the latest in our series of interviews with entrepreneurs in Arizona is online. This is an interview with the founders of UStrive.

Ustrive is a commerce platform that integrates with other social networking sites enabling the user to monetize his or her media across services like YouTube, Photobucket and Flickr. Bob Schobert (CEO) and Mike Fleet (lead developer) share their experience in developing Ustrive and offer advice to avoid some of the pitfalls of working with contract developers. Ustrive officially launched their site this morning - big thanks to Bob and Mike for squeezing in this interview given the timing. Start a dialogue with them via the comments link below.