Monday, October 31, 2011

I'm Fairly Lucky Now that Trevor Parker is following me on Twitter

I haven't really been a big fan of Twitter due to the dominance that celebrities have over this communication medium.  If people aren't accidentally posting nude photos of themselves, they are often inebriated and issuing a very short speech on a topic we don't trust them to understand (their life for example).   So, what becomes important given a situation such as this isn't who says what but who follows who. (I haven't thought that all the way through though).

Therefore, I'm happy to announce my latest follower on Twitter because it actually turns out to be someone who is trying to do something with their lives rather than sit around in my chat room all day watching the pot boil.  I'm talking about mowing.  With electricity as the fuel.  That's right, you guessed, my latest follower on Twitter is none other than Trevor Parker, partner at Viriditech Inc.  What do they do there, you ask?  They produce or want to produce Canada's first zero emission lawn care products.  Hhhhmmm.

Anyway, thanks to Trevor and the team at Viriditech for trusting me enough to follow me on twitter.  I did nothing to deserve that trust. In fact, I deserve the opposite of trust and I hope they don't try to run me over with an electric mower.    Let me leave you with one thought based on Trevor's last tweet: "Any fleets and/or people interested in a lawn tractor that cuts up to 4 acres of grass on about $1.50 worth of electricity?"


I love it when people can net it out.  Beautiful.







Thursday, October 13, 2011

Duke Nukem Forever Release Means EEStor Can Take Forever and Still Might Deliver

One of the things that bothers me (even about myself) is all of the whining and BS surrounding EEStor's obviously L A T E delivery of verifiably working technology.  Well, believers and doubters, keep your tears to yourself because nothing could be worse than promising a simple software game and delivering it 14 years later.   We're talking about energy storage breakthroughs not attempts at incrementally better video games.  Stop sniveling.  In a recent interview with Dick Weir, he purportedly said, "It’s time to kick ass and chew bubblegum…and I’m all out of gum.”  Why does that sound promising to me? Vaporware?

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Kleiner, Khosla & WSGR Together on Battery Start Up?

I've written a lot about Khosla's interest in EEStor over the past couple years.  I've also written about Khosla's interest in general in energy storage and Recapping Inc. in particular.  So, I find it interesting that Katie Fehrenbacher is reporting to have "heard that Kleiner’s John Doerr and Khosla’s Vinod Khosla are taking Board seats at QuantumScape," which is based on Stanford's "all-electron battery. "

If that were true, it would be an interesting move.  The problem is when I search SEC records, I can't find any support for the view but maybe it's just me.   I can locate the business entity records here:


Entity Name:QUANTUMSCAPE CORPORATION
Entity Number:C3334840
Date Filed:11/19/2010
Status:ACTIVE
Jurisdiction:DELAWARE
Entity Address:650 PAGE MILL RD
Entity City, State, Zip:PALO ALTO CA 94304
Agent for Service of Process:JAGDEEP SINGH
Agent Address:3000 SND HILL RD STE 190, BUILDING 3
Agent City, State, Zip:MENLO PARK CA 94025




For those that don't known, Jagdeep Singh is the founder of telco gear company Infinera and works with Khosla Ventures.  The address above is of Khosla Ventures.  650 Page Mill Rd belongs to Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, which if you've been paying attention, represented EEStor, for example in this key EEStor stock purchase document.

If Quantumscape is working with Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, that might not be a very good thing. If you recall, I reported previously that WSGR was sued last year over an IP conflict of interest issue raised by Existence Genetics.   I am not an attorney. I don't know if there is an issue here--maybe there is a firewall in place or maybe EEStor isn't being supported any more, etc. Anyone?

Additionally, it looks like Quantumscape has hired Christian Fesenmaier who came from Nanosolar.

iPhone 5 Delay/Schedule Kills Apple Founder Steve Jobs: Yes, Dead

Less than 24 hours after Apple Inc. created its first post-Steve Jobs, "oh shit" marketing moment by failing to extinguish the world media's most prolific prediction failure (nominally) in the history of human existence, Steve Jobs' internal components have crashed irreparably & permanently.  There is no backup.

Palo Alto, CA coroners Jim Balsillie & Michael Lazaridis report that Jobs, famous for having a temper even Martha Stewart might say was a bit touchy, died from a gradual deterioration of spirits leading up to the supposed "iPhone 5 announcement," (something even Al Gore knew was not coming).

Reaction worldwide was immediate & profound: shock... numbed & dazed by smart phone addiction, even among Droid users on the Sprint network.

With this loss, the rest of the world regains Jobs' estimated $8.3Bil of personal wealth which is a figure large enough  to prevent the death by starvation of 60 million children over the next 10 years, a fact that has newly charitable Bill Gates & Warren Buffet along with less friendly (but also dead) Adolph Hitler & Joseph Stalin adjusting their collars.  Asked about this unheralded Apple milestone via a series of faxed messages today, Jobs' New York based journalist daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs said that it wouldn't be surprising...given that his ludicrous paternity denials left her and her mother stuck on welfare the first two years of her life.  (They eventually reconciled)

In China, where most of Jobs' Apples....er Apple's Jobs were made, an insightful perspective was provided by The People, who, thanks to communist censorship, were only reachable via the Tor Project network which is a series of untraceable network links used partly by Wall Street insiders to exchange illegal trading tips and which is made possible through the ethical actions of some hacker group.  A man identifying himself as 31 year old Hu Yaobang offered this reflection on the passing of the great Apple innovator, "In rice field, I work 15 hour of twenty two years each day.  I attend five years of people's university to be the nuclear expert. Now we glue glass plate to aluminum band seventeen hours today.  I am desperate to be Steve Jobs."  When reminded that the impetus for the interview was Steve Jobs' death, Yaobang paused and then thoughtfully added, "May I then be the dead toe of Mr. Steve?"

One group who certainly worshipped Steve Jobs over the last several days of his life would be those suffering from Neuroendocrine Cancer, since a portion of Apple's revenue (via Jobs) greatly advanced the understanding of this terrible disease at least among Jobs' medical team.  Due to a knowledge sharing oversight not unlike the famous Apple stock option back dating felonies.. misdemeanors, none of them were healthy or alive enough for comment.

At the house of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen, comments were easier to come by. Recall that last year, Chen's data center was arrested and he was investigated for felony possession of an iPhone 4 as a non-Chinese citizen American and owning too many non-Apple notebooks and servers. "Don't you get it, dude? I didn't know it at the time but I didn't have an iPhone 4. I had a mother fucking iPhone 4S bro!!! THAT'S why they sent the law to my place.  They knew if that thing was announced, it would be the death of Steve Jobs!! Damn, I didn't get it. Damn!!"  Chen issued several more obscenities and became incoherent.

Steve Jobs is dead. There isn't an app for that.


Disclosure: I've been a life long fan of Apple and thus, Steve Jobs. We all handle grief differently.