Want To Rent A Founder?...

Justin Kan is a busy guy. The serial entrepreneur is best known as the founder of Justin.tv , the online community that lets users broadcast, watch, and interact around video. Last year, he and team spun-off Twitch.tv , a gaming-focused version of the video streaming site, and the fast-growing Socialcam , which is on a mission to bring mobile video creation to the mainstream. Not one to sit still, Kan jumped into yet another venture in January, launching Exec , a task-management service in the vein of TaskRabbit and Zaarly that lets people post errands on-demand for $25/hour. Today, Kan and Exec announced via blog post that they are now getting into the founder-renting business. That is to say: Exec is offering a one-day-only special which allows anyone and everyone to book time with the founders of companies like Parse, Reddit, Hipmunk, Sincerely, and even Exec itself. If you’ve ever wanted to get some personal time with a founder from one of the fast-growing companies in Silicon Valley, without resorting to kidnapping them, now is your chance. This upcoming Saturday, April 7th, founders will make themselves available for calls, Skype chats, and more to offer advice, act as a sounding board, or just chat about the zeitgeist and such. To book time with founders, those interested are being asked to enter a short description of what is to be discussed, along with a phone number here , or on Exec’s iPhone app. One of the founders will then be in touch, according to the blog post. (Users are also asked to include “#execfounders” in their job description.) The team said that it will be doing its best to accomodate requests for specific founders, but likely won’t be able to meet the demands of everyone. Those looking to book time aren’t required to be in San Francisco, you can chat with the founders from anywhere in the world. The Founder Hotline, as I’m calling it, will cost $100/hour, with minimum half-hour increments. All proceeds to will go to benefit classrooms through the startup’s “favorite charity,” DonorsChoose.org. For more, check out Exec’s blog post here .

Kickstarter Shares The ...

February was a big month for Kickstarter . Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects , but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage. But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site’s population of donors can handle? Fortunately, that doesn’t seem to have been the case. The site’s big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding. There are a ton of details at Kickstarter’s blog post , but the gist is this: the two biggest projects lately, Double Fine Adventure and Order of the Stick, brought in millions of dollars themselves, but have also produced a halo of funding where there was very little before. In the gaming category, for instance, only one project had reached $100,000 in funding before last month. Since then nine have. And in webcomics, where the Order of the Stick book was categorized, the number of pledges per week, on average, has doubled. They’re not just staying in the original category, either: 22% of each group of original backers have been busy in other categories, backing nearly 2000 projects with over $1m all told. Many of the backers were on Kickstarter for the first time to back the big projects, and these big names on the marquee ended up working as advertisements for the site itself as well. It just goes to show that crowd-funding is a space with a ton of room to grow as new models and ideas are found to be applicable. Before last month, many would have thought that raising millions via Kickstarter was a fantasy. But the scale of the site is growing and naysayers are constant casualties. What remains to be seen is how long Kickstarter itself can remain on top. Just as it brought a change to the world of funding and launching products, another could bring yet more changes to the still-nascent field of crowd-funding.

Microsoft Demos Super-F...

As solid as modern touchscreens are, there’s very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group , it all comes down to latency — he notes average touchscreens have a latency of a 100ms, which yields a noticeable bit of lag between a user touching a screen and the screen displaying a reaction to it. Sure, it’s totally usable, but it never really feels like you’re fully in control. If you drag an app across the iPad’s screen, for example, the icon will dance around your finger a bit as the display tries its best to keep up. The display Dietz and his team have whipped up though could tighten that experience up considerably — unlike the 100ms delay of a regular touchscreen, his display knocks that delay down to 1ms flat. The difference is staggering, especially when Dietz trots out the slow-motion footage. With the delay between touch input and screen response slashed by “orders of magnitude,” a device packing a display like this has the potential to feel far more (for lack of a better term) natural than its brethren. There’s zero delay when you slide a checker across a board, for example, and bringing that sort of instantaneous feedback to the many screens in our lives could help to bridge the gap between operating a bit of software and the feeling of interacting with objects. Stylus-based interfaces would benefit greatly from this sort of tech. I spent a few brief moments playing with Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Note , and while the included S-Pen certainly did the trick, it was still jarring to see the line I was trying to draw following the pen rather than coming from it. (It took me a few tries to nail that TC logo, natch). But here’s the thing: as cool as this stuff is, I can’t help but wonder if it’s an accomplishment best appreciated by nerds. Microsoft’s interest in this seems purely academic — they’re not, after all, in the business of stamping out displays. The touch mavens at Synaptics showed off an impressively precise low-latency screen at MWC 2011, but whether or not this sort of tech will ever make it to the mainstream is something else entirely. Cost of implementation is one potential issue, but I would imagine for something like this, a bigger question is whether or not the average consumer will care enough. A stylus-driven UI is one thing, but our standard, slower displays have been doing an adequate job with finger-based input for a while now. Do we really need a disruption in screen tech if what we have is good enough? I say yes (I’m no fan of just “good enough”) but that’s really not for me to decide. I look forward to seeing if any manufacturers out there are willing to take the plunge on a low-latency screen like this, and I’m even more hopeful that people find they like how it feels.

TCTV Interview: Mike Do...

I had the distinct pleasure of bringing Mike Doughty, songwriter and author, into the TCTV studio to talk about his new book, The Book Of Drugs , his new album, Yes & Also Yes , and how the music business has changed during his long and tumultuous career. You may remember Doughty as the leader of Soul Coughing, a band that brought cerebral trip-hop into the mainstream and defined a genre of music that focused on organic rhythms and complex, often impressionistic lyrics. As a lonely white boy in the 1990s, I nodded along to Ruby Vroom and Irresistible Bliss while writing COBOL code to head off the Y2K bug. Doughty is past all that now – his book details the various and virulent ways his band members undercut and ruined the experience and, in turn, tore Soul Coughing down around Doughty’s ears. With his criticism in the back of my mind, it’s easy now to see the cracks in the acid jazz/”Cool G” facade. Soul Coughing is gone and he’s now a strong and melodic songwriter. He writes odes to women with unsingable names and celebrates second chances, building a canon that is upbeat but nostalgic. You get the sense that Doughty has come out of those dark years a better man. In this interview we talked about his current success and how he made it out of the music business alive. He cites Napster as his primary musical savior. After Soul Coughing split, Doughty found that his solo album Skittish ended up on the file sharing site where his fans shared tunes and actually sang along to unreleased music as he toured with just his guitar and voice. These shared files and his loyal audience ensured Doughty a second act, but on his terms.

Samsung Tops 2 Million ...

Samsung says it has sold over 2 million Galaxy Note superphones globally. Now, it’s only fair to remember that this number includes international sales, so even though the Note only became available on February 19 here in the States , it’s been on Asian shelves since October and U.K. shelves since November. Let’s put this in perspective. Apple sold twice that many (4 million) units of the iPhone 4S in its first weekend on the market. Samsung sold 3 million units of the Galaxy S II after 55 days on the market. So, when measured against these flagship smash hits, it’s hard to call the Note a mega-success. But that’s not to say we should dismiss it. The Note has gotten pretty poor reviews , two dies in Fly or Die , and is generally more of a niche device. It’s huge, comes with a stylus, and certainly takes the user out of their comfort zone. But people still seem to be excited about it. The company expects to sell another 10 million by the end of 2012, according to Forbes . Samsung has made a huge marketing push with the Note, including an over-the-top Super Bowl ad , trying to bring something a bit different into the mainstream awareness. It would seem that, at least in this goal, the company has succeeded.