fluxcapacity

Fluxify is now running on Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2, and our open source project will be updated soon, too.

Developers should check out Scott Guthrie's new post.  Adaptive streaming, DeepZoom on existing data sets (Google Maps tiles?), better ink support, server push communications, cross-domain sockets, and graphical design and interaction design via Blend.

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!

In fact, our own Vikas Reddy was the first TechStars founder to pull out the moves last night on one of the locals.  This left me in a circle of (mostly) guys, sipping a Tahona Margarita, and pondering how the team from Ignighter, a group-focused dating system, could have been shown up by a solo lanky guy in a Simpson’s T-shirt.  Just a few hours later, Ignighter beat me to it, and is already analyzing the replay footage.

Another reason we hopefully don’t suck is that we’re one of the TechStars’ Ten companies of 2008.  TechStars is the creation of David Cohen, Brad Feld and co.  In one of the first sessions this past week, David had everyone in the room give an example of what they suck at, and Brad shared his experiences with the concept of sucking (or sucking less than the competition).

I think that if we expand on this concept both individually and as a team, and we suck less every day, then we’ll have something to be happy about.  So “sucking less every day” is our new tagline for now.

I’ll close by mentioning that Shun currently sucks at identifying beer in the fridge.  On Thursday he sat down at his desk after migrating around the office looking for something to drink and cracked open a can of Dale’s Pale Ale.  I think he thought it was a new kind of cola, because you should have seen the expression on his face when he said “Is this beer?”

Yep, sure is.

Abhishek Gandhi will also be joining Fluxcapacity later this month as a summer intern. He is a master’s student at Columbia University who has studied computer vision and artificial intelligence, among other things.

His resume is impressive and we could really sense his passion for computer vision. He is able to think on his feet – during his interview he invented a new set of symbols to express conditional probability, since it’d been a while since he used more traditional ones.

Recently, Abhishek has been working in augmented reality (AR).

Left: Here, Abhishek uses ARToolkit and XNA to correctly position virtual cubes. Right: 3D pose is estimated without the need for specialized markers.

Abhishek likes foreign language films, good books, and hikes around the parks to escape from the city. Both Abhishek and Shun are going to do some amazing things this summer. Until then, good luck to them on their finals!

We were lucky enough to have a lot of interest for our intern positions. Last month was filled with interviews. There were simply no bad candidates, and we had to make some tough choices. We're set with interns for now, but we're perpetually interested in finding the perfect team.

The latest buzz is that a fourth fundamental circuit element has been fabricated. Dubbed the Memristor, it's a two-terminal device that acts like a resistor with a time-varying magnetic flux derivative with a memory effect. When you charge it up, you change the flux. That's right, a flux capacitor, and some others agree. The actual function is a characteristic of how much charge your flux capacitor can handle.

So now the only questions is, how are you going to use your flux capacitor? The inventor of memristors suggests building large artificial neural networks. Any ideas for what we should call those?