Facebook isn't useful to me, and I don't think it's just a generational thing. I want to connect to my friends and colleagues, I'm interested in what they're doing. I think I can share things that they'd be interested in, too. But Facebook's limited methods for organizing relationships don't give me any useful granularity, so [...]
In the class I’m teaching at CMU on entrepreneurship we talked about setting a long term vision for your company. I used Jim Collin’s research as a framework for the discussion, in particular setting a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) and having a vivid description of what life will be like when that goal is [...]
Le Ovo We took a fieldtrip with our students to see Cirque du Soliel's Ovo in San Jose. The show was entertaining, creepy, and wondrous all wrapped up into a big egg. I took this photo while people were entering and finding their seats, and right before one of the ushers told me [...]
Sunday night was the annual VES Awards. This year we honored Jim Cameron with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Ed Catmull with the Georges Melies Award. Bill Paxton did the introduction, which was part honor and part roast ("Jim calls his parents on his birthday to congratulate them."). Read more about the Visual [...]
Milk, food coloring, soap, plus a crop and white vignette in Lightroom. The shading around the edges is courtesy of the cup.
Ron Diamond of Acme FilmWorks brought his Animation Show of Shows to Electronic Arts today. The 85 minute show included 11 different shorts, plus a Q&A session with two of the directors afterward. Koji Yamamura (left) directed "Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor", and Alexi Alexeev (center) directed the (very) short "KJFG #5." Ron Diamond is [...]
Harter Ryan from Microsoft's Ensemble Studios gave the opening keynote speech at ICON2008. Kudos to Harter for not using a single bullet point in his presentation (a tenet I believe in wholeheartedly, but violated myself this time). Here he's silhouetted in front of an image of a large crowd as he discussed the potential size [...]
Yep, I started another company. Couldn't help it. I have a passion for media, and I was getting way too anxious watching the TV/broadband world change without being a part of it. Coincident with that, the commoditization of media creation tools is incredibly exciting, and of particular interest to me is the impact that is [...]
Rendering complex computer animation can easily demand thousands of hours of compute time, a task generally relegated to racks and racks of submissive CPUs fondly referred to as Render Farms. In days of yore, the cost conscious production company would triple shift every computer in the facility, creating an overnight render farm out of people's [...]
Anheuser-Busch has decided not to run a "controversial" ad during the Super Bowl, but instead to launch it just on their web site. Personally, I think they're really wimping out, as the commercial, called "Wardrobe Malfunction," is as tame as they get. But I love their quote in USA Today: "Our beer drinkers tell us [...]