Foundry Group Blog
Reposted from Feld Thoughts.
I’ve been an Internet email user since early 1984 when I got my first Project Athena account as an undergraduate at MIT. Notwithstanding all the “email is dead” messages over the years, I continue to use email as my primary online communication mechanism. There are an enormous number of things that frustrate me about email, most notably the lack of fundamental innovation in email clients and servers. That said, as a messaging ...
Continue reading Email – The Original Social Graph | Comments
Last Fall, we met the fine folks at Cloud Engines, the company behind the pogoplug, a wonderfully easy-to-use gadget that turns any USB storage device into a web and smart-phone accessible file system, giving users easy control over who they allow to access their files. In short, the pogoplug allows you to take the hard drive attached to your computer (or hanging off your router in the basement of your house) and make it accessible ...
Continue reading Pogoplug: Make your hard drive a cloud drive | Comments
At Foundry Group we’ve made investments in a handful of companies that participate in the online advertising ecosystem. But as we talk about how we think about these investments here on our blog and in other forums, we describe our efforts in this area not as “advertising” but as “glue.” Our interest lies in the intersection of advertising and our glue theme. Specifically we view advertising through the lens of connective technologies – those that ...
Continue reading Foundry Group’s investment in Medialets | Comments
Today, Gist has announced that Foundry Group has led its $6.5m Series A financing. We are delighted to be investors in a company that we think has a shot at solving “the inbox problem” that we’ve been thinking about and living with for a long time.
If you follow our themes, you know that Email and the Implicit Web are two of our favorites. Email is a long running theme of ours dating back to 1996 ...
Continue reading Our Investment in Gist | Comments
The annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association just wrapped up in Boston yesterday. As you can imagine in these economic times there was plenty for the group (which is the industry association representing the approximately 450 venture capital firms in the United States) to discuss. If you’re interested, Jason has a post on his blog talking about the main news from the meeting - the NVCA’s view on how to fix the current ...
Continue reading Jason is appointed to the NVCA Board | Comments
At Foundry we organize our thinking about investing into what we call “themes”. The themes we pursue are horizontal in nature and are driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Examples of the investment themes we are currently pursuing include Human Computer Interaction, Implicit Web, Email, Glue, and Digital Life.
As part of this approach we look to meaningfully participate in the ongoing conversation taking place within these thematic ...
Continue reading Join us at Glue | Comments
Last summer, we invested in a company called EmSense, which has developed a technology to measure an audience’s emotional and cognitive response to a media experience. EmSense does this by capturing real-time biometric data from a large group of test subjects by measuring brainwaves (via dry EEG sensors), heart activity, breathing, blinking, temperature and motion. Our investment in EmSense falls squarely into our Human Computer Interaction (HCI) theme.
As we detailed in our original blog post ...
Continue reading Shoot to Thrill | Comments
Foundry Group attended the latest incarnation of CES this past week and thought we’d give some of our thoughts on the show. In no particular order, here is “What We Learned at CES.”
Don’t buy a television for the next 6 months. This is certainly counter to what retailers and producers would want us to say, especially given the current state of the economy, but all the major brands are introducing exciting technologies in the first ...
Continue reading What We Learned at CES | Comments
We are pleased to announce our investment in FirstDocs, Inc. FirstDocs, located in Westwood, MA, is a legal process automation company dedicated to providing business and legal solutions to in-house legal departments and law firms. FirstDocs has developed a software platform that automates much of the creation process for the legal profession’s most commonly used documents. For law firms, automating this process allows for both faster and more consistent document creation – saving them time ...
Continue reading Our Investment in FirstDocs | Comments
We invested in Topspin Media last summer, and they’ve been busy cranking out multiple releases of their Artist Manager platform while simultaneously supporting numerous album releases from established and new artists who have adopted Topspin’s technology to enable them to release their music direct-to-fan. As a reminder, Topspin provides advanced marketing tools and services to enable recording artists to build successful brands and businesses online.
Many musicians chose to release their music using Topspin’s platform in ...
Continue reading Topspin’s on the Road | Comments