Everyone knows I love Vonage… so a lot of people have been asking me if I was going to participate in their IPO. Many where shocked to hear me say:

No.

Don’t get me wrong, as a customer, Vonage is awesome… there’s no other phone service I’d ever have. However, this is an investment decision and here’s why I was down on them:

• With BIG competition like AT&T’s Call Vantage and Time Warner’s Digital phone – its going to be tough going for Vonage… for the incumbent carriers, VoIP is life or death for them… so they’re not going to down without a serious fight.
• At about $17/share – Vonage is saying that they’re worth around $2.5billion. I don’t know about that – especially when you consider that Vonage has never turned a profit.
• Don’t forget the whole Net Neutrality issue.
• To me, its clear that Vonage is involving their customers in the IPO because they want to build excitement and demand for their stock… the problem is that 3 days before the closing of the “customer round” they sent out an email reminder that it was “closing soon” and that we’d better hurry up and get our money in… which sounds like they had problems getting people to sign up. So Econ 101 says that when there’s no demand, prices go down.

So what ended up happening? Lets go see…

Shares of Vonage Holdings (VG), the Internet telephone pioneer, dropped in their trading debut Wednesday after pricing late Tuesday at $17 a share, the middle of the expected range.
Shares of Vonage fell $2.31, or 13.6%, to $14.69 in late trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors drop Internet phone pioneer Vonage

And my favorite:

“Internet phone service provider Vonage Holdings Corp.’s initial public offering encountered shareholder static Wednesday morning, and appeared headed for the worst IPO debut in two years.“

Vonage IPO is a Train Wreck

Perhaps Buffett was right – maybe investing (or not investing) in things you understand the most is a good thing. 🙂

This is a very impressive and compelling demo of Parallels for MacOS:

Watch this…. you’ll want a Vette afterwards:

😀

All you ever wanted to know about Apple’s New NYC Store.

If you didn’t already know, its all underground.

Video: Apple’s 24-7 retail store

And here’s a CNBC clip:

Update: Here’s a sweet Panaramic photo of it:

http://www.panoramas.dk/newspanos/f20-apple-store.html

Wow, its like Motorola is trying take over with cell phone radiation!

Ten highest-radiation cell phones (United States)

Ten lowest-radiation cell phones (United States)

Hate how SWA doesn’t have assigned seats? Don’t like the “herding of the cattle” while trying to board?

Change is not certain, and could not happen before 2008, company says.

Southwest considers move to assigned seating

I’ve always thought this was true, but its good to see someone has written about it:

You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

CEOs say how you treat a waiter can predict a lot about character

This is fascinating stuff:

Everyone thinking about buying a house should read this:

Sell Now! : The End of the Housing Bubble

One of my favorite quotes in the book talks about how the housing market in San Antonio has dropped 20% in value as of late, but nobody knows it because its typical that people don’t adjust for inflation or for the lower interest rates (which lowers the value of owning a home since it becomes less of a tax-shelter when interest rates drop).

Another great article of relevance is “The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide To The Coming Real Estate Collapse” in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

I no longer have the desire to own a home. 🙁

Update: Wow, looks like San Antonio is worse than the book said it was:

San Antonio’s housing market has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country, according to RealtyTrac Inc.’s 2006 U.S. Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report.

The Alamo City ranked eighth nationwide in the number of foreclosed properties — reporting one foreclosure for every 133 households in the first quarter of 2006.

San Antonio one of country’s worst housing markets for foreclosures

The Halo 3 trailer is out! Maybe its time to get a Xbox 360 and an HDTV set after all… 🙂

Halo 3 Trailer

Apple’s new set of ads are great… the “Restarting” ad reminds me of the Kill Bill ad that Dirk sent me a while back…

Good stuff:

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

See how the car you own rates by the IIHS standards:

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

(You can search for your vehicle on the left-hand sidebar)

This is a pretty cool demo of the Logitech Orbit Cam… For a $100 webcam, I think the software set is pretty amazing…

Wow… free Wifi in downtown Austin… sweet!

Right now, the network covers an area extending from Town Lake on the south to 7th Street on the north, and from Lamar Boulevard on the west to I-35 on the east.

Downtown wi-fi network goes live

Everyone is excited about this new Tivo box that came out.

YAY! Great! It has built-in ethernet! WOW! And it has dual-tuner capability – we can record TWO shows at once! Whoopie!

So Tivo finally delivers on a feature that people want, right? Dual tuners is the ultimate, right?

Wrong.

These Tivo idiots have released a box that can record two shows at the same time, however:

• The coax source MUST be analog cable TV. (no RF antennas allowed here folks)
• Only one of the sources can be an external tuner box like a cable or digital cable or sat dish box.

How lame is that?!

Why can’t you have two receiver boxes hooked up? And why can’t you use RF antennas for an input instead? (which would be great if you had DishNet or DirecTV since Tivo won’t let you have two receiver boxes!)

Bastards!

Tivo is a loser – no wonder they’re losing marketshare hand over fist. [sigh]

So yeah, the dual tuners are pretty much the only functional difference once you get the thing booted. TiVo is pretty up front about what it can tune and how: one cable box, max. Which means if your cable company only offers digital cable (like ours), you’ll only be able to use a single tuner with that single cable box. (TiVo called to let us know this thing won’t tune RF — yick.) If you have digital and analog on the same line, you should be fine recording digital and basic cable simultaneously

TiVo Series2 DT hands-on review

Apparently, I haven’t travelled all that much yet… gotta get working on that…

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

Ruby on Rails – a loser?

Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

Wanna download an entire set of photos off of Flickr? Don’t want to do it manually? This is your answer:

Recently a friend started using Flickr which is a great service. I personally like to save pictures locally and selecting them one at a time to download was too much of a hassle so I whipped up this program so I could download them more easily.

FlickrDown

I just watched a recording of Frontline that covered the Meth epidemic.

Its actually really fascinating.

I recommend you watch it too, you can watch the whole program online here:

FRONTLINE: the meth epidemic

Let this be known – I *LOVE* iFolder.

For awhile it was hard to recommend and use becuase it was commercial only… you had to buy the server software, and it wasn’t cheap.

But now, you can get iFolder for free!

I’ve been using it to sync my bookmarks and documents across multiple PC’s… you create it on one pc, and it appears on the other PC’s automagically. No manual syncing – it all happens 24×7 in the background.

Try it out:

Finally, after two years of development we have finally convinced the gatekeepers to release the iFolder server out into the wild. The team has been hard at work the last few weeks prepping the code, fixing file hierarchy issues and building packages so we present to you the first open source release of the iFolder server.

http://www.ifolder.com/index.php/IFolder_Server

I (finally) received my Kyocera KR1 (made by D-link) today after waiting for it for about two months.

It was worth the wait.

This thing is awesome. Its completely plug and play. You slide in your EVDO card, then you fire it up (AC or DC with the included car adapter) and you’re on your merry way surfing the net over cellular. If you don’t have an EVDO PC Card, you can also use an EVDO enabled cell phone and a USB cable to tether to the router instead. Either way, this thing is sweet.

CNET has a video review of the unit here.

The unit’s hardware is pretty complete. It has a Wifi AP, a 4-port 10/100 switch, a PCMCIA slot, a USB port, and a RS-232 serial port.

The router runs Linux as its base OS, so I’m sure it won’t take long for the OpenWRT team to port their feature-rich software to the KR1. Meanwhile there’s a group of folks modifying the base firmware with mods to include telnet, busybox, gpsd, and other useful goodies.

For about $200 (afer rebate) its the obvious choice for a mobile router when you compare it to something like a Stompbox which would easily run you three times that amount to build yourself.

Hell has officially frozen over…

Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.

Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader

I’m getting lots of messages (email, IM, sms, etc…) regarding my new grid hosting company, so I decided to post some facts:

Fact #1:

Clustering on PS2’s is very real, in fact, the NCSA has constructed a PlayStation 2 Linux cluster as a test bench for scientific computation.

From PlayStation 2: Computational Cluster:

The cluster consists of 65 compute nodes, 4 user login and development nodes, and 1 prototype node for software installation tests. All the nodes run the Sony Linux distribution for PlayStation 2. The compute nodes fill a 24-inch rack; 5 shelves at 13 per shelf

The Sony Linux kit (for PlayStation 2) includes a full Linux operating system. This distribution uses Linux 2.2.1 ported to the PlayStation’s Emotion Engine CPU, and is based on an earlier version of Red Hat Linux for PC’s. The distribution includes development tools that you would expect; libraries, editors, compilers and debuggers that you’d find in any Linux distribution. The kit also includes software tools that provide hooks into the PlayStation 2 specific hardware.

Fact #2:

Building a computational cluster using PS2’s, with the help of the people I met at SC’05, is absolutely something I would try to do. And apparently – none of my friends would ever be suprised if they heard I had.

Fact #3:

The entry was posted on April 1st – aka, April Fool’s day. 🙂

So:

Thank you for all the positive feedback and well wishes, but I’m not insane enough to try to build a company selling computational time on video gaming consoles. 🙂

Lots of people have been asking me what I’ll be doing now that I’m no longer working at Rackspace full time.

I don’t feel like explaining the entire business in detail, but I’ve had a fascination with grid computing and the virtualization of software services across computational clusters for sometime

Additionally, anyone who knows me, knows that I’m fascinated with repurposing hardware (both electronic or otherwise) to do new and different things.

Anyhow – last year, I spent some time at the Supercomputing ’05 conference in Seattle. There, I met lots of great hardware engineers and software developers. Since then, lots of us continued talking and we formed a new company. Over the past few months we have been building a new low-cost datacenter and setting up our own state-of-the-art computational cluster in a secret warehouse using Sony Playstation 2’s.

The amount of innovation and ingenuity I’ve seen with this new team rivals that of any tech company including Google and even Space-X. I’m very proud of what has been accomplished in such a short period of time.

We are in the middle closing our A-series round of founding of about $27.5million and if goes well, look for the official announcement of my new Grid Hosting Company(tm) later this year!

Wow – this is really cool.

Basically you take your cameraphone (1 megapixel or better), take a picture of a whiteboard or document, and then email that photo to scanR – and it’ll email back a PDF version!

Very cool.

Try scanR now. It’s fast, easy and FREE!