fluxcapacity

Dear Fluxcapacity,

You might want to sit down for this. We want to tell you that we found another name - Occipital. Here's a list of all the reasons why we like Occipital, and we were even able to get Occipital.com. We've had a lot of fun here, but we all knew it was going to be temporary right? If you could get your feed readers to switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/occipital, that would be great. You can keep all the posts we've put up here for now.  Anyways, we wish you all the best, maybe we'll see you around some time.

Vikas, Jeff. Abhishek and Shun
Occipital.com

Last week I went to the Attic with the guys from Ignighter and Ben from Devver. Ben told us the story of his friend who was talking to a girl he liked at a party in college. Apparently, at some point there was an awkward lull in the conversation. Instead of trying to fill the void by bringing up an interesting subject, Ben's friend pointed his thumbs behind him in a vague direction and asked the girl, "Is this cool?" I'm don't know exactly what happened after this, but it probably didn't involve an exchange of phone numbers.

We started talking about the question "Is this cool?" and we realized that the meaning varies greatly based on the context of what you're doing with your hands and body while asking the question. Here are all the possibilities we came up with (the red arrows indicate hand/body movement):

Figure 1

In Figure 1, modeled after what Ben's friend did, the asker's hands are moving around in a vague circle. The asker is checking whether the situation around the himself and the askee (a party, a funeral, a ballgame,etc) is cool.

Figure 2


The asker in Figure 2 is either checking if the drink he is consuming is considered cool, or he's wondering whether it's cool that he got another drink on your tab even though you told him he's cut off.

Figure 3

If an unfortunate confrontation has occurred and a verbal exchange has seemingly ended, one can use "is this cool?" accompanied by the body and hand movement shown in Figure 3 to certify that the situation has been resolved. It's important to note, however, that this will only work if the asker is reasonably bigger and stronger than the askee.

Figure 4


Asking, "is this cool?" in a normal, relaxed voice accompanied by the back and forth hand gesture shown in Figure 4 means that the asker is romantically interested in the askee and is wondering if the situation between them is cool. Asking, "is this cool?" with the same gesture but with a lowered, more intense voice means the asker is interested in going with the askee to her or his place for the night.

Special thanks to Krista and Austin from TravelFli, and Adam from Ignighter for being "situation models".

A few weeks ago on 20/20 I came across the amazing story of a woman named Jill Price who remembers every detail of every day of her life. I don't really watch 20/20 that often but I like to check in every once in a while to make sure John Stossel is still rocking the mustache.

Jill's extremely rare condition is called hyperthymesia. Given any date after 1980, she can describe almost every detail of what happened that day from her point of view. This includes things that most people forget a few days later like the weather, what was on television, and what she had for lunch. Remarkably, this condition doesn't seem to have negatively affected her other thinking abilities in a significant way.

I found it interesting that she said her ability is both a gift and a curse. Her memories can be automatically triggered by any of her senses - a smell, a song, a name. Because of this lack of control, she often has to relive horrible memories along with the good ones. She describes her memories as a picture in picture that's always playing. So if something triggers a memory of a loved one dying, she is forced to experience it along with all the emotions she felt at the time. They showed photos of her over time, and it is clear that the condition has taken a toll on her.

Diane Sawyer of 20/20 asked Jill many questions like, "what happened on January 17th, 1983" and Jill was able to answer every time. Incredibly, one of the books that was used to question Jill actually had a mistake that she was able to catch.

All of the questions, however, were based on date and time. On the show Jill was never asked questions like, "when was the last time you were in Chicago?" or "who was the first person you met in college?" If she can only answer questions based on date and time, then it would seem to imply that while the temporal "index" of her brain was accessible to her in a controlled manner, she can't use other "indexes" based on location or her senses in the same way. I would love to ask her some questions to find out if this is the case. Also, I'd like to find out what happens if she is experiencing something incredibly happy in the present, and then a bad memory is triggered. What effects her more, the past or the present?

It's a fascinating case, and scientists are apparently learning a lot about our brain and memory because of her and others with the same condition.

It's been a crazy busy couple of days at TechStars. First, we had three of the heavy weights of the tech world, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft come talk to us.

Monday was "Google Day", we:

• Learned about OpenSocial, and AppEngine from Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer.
• Got to hear the story of FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007, first hand from founder Dick Costello. It was interesting to hear from him how the rallying cry for the company was "get all the feeds." Dick told us how people would come in with a bunch of feeds they got and other stuff that he called "rabbits". He said he would throw the rabbits away and then ask "Do we have all the feeds yet? No? Then go get all the feeds!" It's a very simple, measurable goal and it probably helped FeedBurner stay focused. Here's Devver's take on it.

Tuesday was "Amazon Day", we:

• Got excited about Amazon Web Services after hearing from Mike Culver. Amazon is building some ridiculously cool services for developers to use. We've already built some infrastructure around S3, but we'll be looking into other services like EC2 as well.
• Heard about Shelfari (Amazon invested in them) from founder Josh Hug at Colorado University. We got to hang out with him right before he presented at the Boulder New Tech Meetup. Josh did a great job showing off Shelfari, especially because he simply showed a compelling demo rather than a bunch of slides. He also had great answers, mostly "yes we already do that", for all of the questions he got asked. The presentation I enjoyed the most was Watching Grass Grow. The creator of the site uses webcams to keep track of and display seemingly mundane things like his lawn growing and paint drying. Apparently the site gets about 500,000 unique visitors a year!

Wednesday was "Microsoft Day", we:

• Learned about what Microsoft can do for startups from Don Dodge, Dave Drach, and Anand "A.I." Iyer. We actually met Don and Anand at MIX 08 in Las Vegas back in March and it was great seeing them again.
• Got to hear the story of NewsGator from founder/CTO Greg Reinacker. Greg was the only founder, and it was interesting hearing his perspective on getting started, his interactions with Brad Feld, bringing on a CEO, and building a site to scale.

But wait, there's more! Over the past couple of days we also:

• Worked hard to get a demo ready for a meeting with David Cohen.
• Rewrote our pitch 3 times.
• Horribly messed up App-X's pitch. At one of the sessions each of the teams had to give another team's pitch. I was chosen to give App-X's pitch, and I think I said something to the effect of, "App-X uses Salesforce and builds stuff on top of it to do stuff." Instead of quitting while I was only slightly behind, I proceeded to say another sentence which also made no sense. Sorry guys! I'll try to get better at it!
• Found out that UPS lost a 148 pound server we shipped. How do you lose a box that's 4' by 3' by 3' and weights 148 pounds!!? Luckily we had insurance on it.
• Watched the Wings win the Stanley Cup! We were at Conor O' Neills here in Boulder. Interestingly, there are two Conor O' Neills, one here and one in Ann Arbor where me and Jeff went to school.

Although it's been busy, we've had a lot of fun. I'm definitely looking forward to drinking a few beers on Friday night though!

We found Shun at Columbia University, where he's a master's student of computer science in the vision and graphics track.

Shun has worked on a lot of interesting projects, but what we thought was especially cool was his work with Professor Aoki at Tohoku University in Japan. There he designed a system using a projector and stereo camera that compensates for the photometric characteristics of a projected surface. What that means is that using what Shun's lab created you can use a projector with a non-white and non-uniform surface, like a brick wall, and still have it look good! Here's an example:

From left to right are the display surface, the original image, the image projected onto the display surface without compensation, the compensated image, and the compensated image projected onto the display surface.

When he's not working on hard computer vision problems, you can probably find Shun taking long walks around the city to clear his mind.

Shun really impressed us during the interview with his quick and creative responses to our tough algorithm question. He was even prepared with his old research paper when we asked about interesting projects that he had worked on. We are thrilled to work with him this summer.

A lot has changed in the last few months. We want to mention that Adam Herscher left in early January to pursue other opportunities. We wish him the best. More news coming soon.