When we speak about the history of Oblong, we tend to start with the movie Minority Report, where John was Steven Spielberg’s science advisor.  If you haven’t seen the movie in a while, check it out.  It is one of the only movies that we’ve seen that holds up in its vision of the future even 8 years later.

And while there was a working prototype of the system during the time the movie was being filmed, that was hardly the beginning.  In fact, John had worked at the MIT Media Lab to create what was called The Luminous Room. 

The Luminous Room was Oblong’s g-speak platform version 0.5 (perhaps).  When we first considered investing in the company, we were amazed to see how long John had been thinking about the larger issues of GUIs and the data implications of operating systems.

If you are interested in seeing John’s early work, the Luminous Room link has videos which will show you the building blocks of what we think is one of the most interesting companies that we’ve ever invested in. 

With our HCI thematic investing strategy, we think often about the future ways we’ll connect with computers.  We aren’t the only folks who think the mouse and keyboard are dead.  If you want to read what John thinks of the future of UI design, read the article. 

Sifteo is a game-platform development company that has developed “Siftables” the world’s first table-top gaming platform. Siftables are sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities that act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them by piling, grouping and sorting to interact with digital information and media.

As cool as this sounds, it’s not nearly as cool as the company’s TED talk and demo below.

Sifteo is another investment in our Human Computer Interaction theme along with Emsense, Oblong, Organic Motion and Smith and Tinker.   

Founded by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi, out of the MIT Media Lab, we believe that Sifteo is developing the next generation popular gaming platform that will go beyond the early successes of the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPad/Pod/Touch. 

The Sifteo platform will have an easy to use SDK that will allow developers to create and sell games on the system.  The tools includes a gesture recognition system that abstracts user actions, such as grouping and sorting, into events the designer can easily attach to software events. Overall, the system radically simplifies and speeds game development.

Most importantly, Siftables are fun.  The embedded video shows but a couple of possibilities, but we really look forward to seeing all the of the creative content that is developed on the platform. 

We really look forward to working with Jeevan, Dave and the rest of the team, including returning investors and our friends from True Ventures. 

“Organic Motion is a global leader in the development of breakthrough markerless motion capture and analysis technologies. Our software products utilize state-of-the-art computer vision techniques and high performance graphics hardware to deliver an industry first set of production, entertainment, and research tools for use in a variety of industries.

We are seeking to expand our Manhattan, NY based engineering team with applicants who have a solid mastery of practical C/C++ development skills combined with strong analytical and problem solving skills in a variety of areas including computer vision, computer graphics, networking, pipelining and optimization, biomechanics, and more.

We are looking for candidates having 2 or more years experience in a professional development setting in addition to a PHD, Master’s degree, or an exceptional Bachelor’s.

Required skills include some of the following:

* C, C++ (required)

* Stereo vision – 3d reconstruction / mesh creation & optimization 
* 3D programming (DirectX, OpenGL, Shaders, HLSL, CG, GPU) 
* Multi-threaded / multi-process programming

* Networking – sockets, RPC, streams, low latency hardware

* Computer vision / image processing

* Low-latency / real time 

Secondary skills:

* Game development
* Distributed systems
* Motion capture creation / analysis 
* Physics

* Scripting languages (Python, Lua, Bash, Perl, etc)

* UNIX, Linux

* Mathematical modeling, filtering, signal processing
* Biokinematics
* GUI development (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets) 
* Autodesk 3d animation suite API

Responsibilities include: 
* Optimization (single-core / multi-core / multi-process) 
* Algorithm development (raw 3D data analysis) 
* Application development (server and client side)

* Code maintenance and troubleshooting
* Supporting conferences and shows (past shows: SIGGRAPH, GDC, CES, I/ITSEC)

This is an exciting opportunity to join a dynamic team with potential for rapid growth and access to a great deal of compelling technological resources. We are looking for individuals with fresh ideas and the skills to put those ideas to the test. This is a unique opportunity to have a major impact on a growing company!

If you are an excellent candidate, then please reply with your resume in Word or PDF format to careers@organicmotion.com. A code sample would also be a big plus!”

This investment is part of our human computer interaction investment theme, along with previous investments Oblong and Smith and Tinker.

We got excited in Organic Motion after we saw their technology which allows computers to see objects without using the traditional approaches of body suits and or ball markers attached to the subject. The limitations of this approach are significant as tracking is crude because these systems are limited to a number of specific points and a large number of movements can’t be deciphered or tracked. Furthermore, the setup process is time-consuming and costly.

Organic Motion’s solution is the first commercial markerless motion capture system. The company created an advanced system which looks at people in a manner very similar to the way the brain processes human vision. Significantly, the Organic Motion system does this all using off-the-shelf and readily available low cost hardware.

The company already has customers in the retail, military and education markets and was founded by CEO Andrew Tschesnok. Along with President Jonathan Rand, we look forward to a long and rewarding partnership with the company.

The genesis of the idea was to get our three portfolio companies in our Digital Life Theme together – namely Cloud Engines, Memeo, and Pie Digital – for a day or two of knowledge transfer and collaboration. After mulling the idea around, we decided to extend the gathering beyond our own portfolio and invite executives and board members of venture-backed and public companies that play in the broader Digital Life universe.

On the first day, we hosted board meetings with our portfolio companies followed by a dinner as a group at Restaurant 4580, one of our favorite places to enjoy an evening with a medium sized group. We began day two with a closed session where our three companies got together and talked about topics and issues relevant to each of them. In the second half of the day, we had an open session that included executives from companies as diverse as Apple, Comcast, CBS, Bug Labs, Boxee, EchoStar, Liberty Media, Sling Media, Sonos and Qwest. This afternoon session was organized around a series of interactive panels dealing with topics from building extraordinary consumer devices, marketing new products, and working effectively with strategic partners.

The day was concluded by a fireside chat with John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos and Blake Krikorian, founder of Sling Media, moderated by Stewart Alsop. The discussion of what the digital living room would look like in five years continued well into what was a fantastic dinner at 14^th Street Bar & Grill.

We had a great time hosting this superb set of people in Boulder. In addition to plenty of insights, we had a lot of fun together participating in a wide range of conversations that wouldn’t have happened at a larger conference. We’ve now got focused events covering three of our four primary themes – we expect it’s just a matter of time before we do something around our Human Computer Interaction Theme.

I’d just finished reading A Semantic Web Primer and was thinking about the various semantic web protocols that were the basis for our Implicit Web theme such as RDF, OWL, and XML.  At some point I realized that the bucket of Internet and web-related protocols that we have been investing in since the mid-1990’s included SMTP, RSS, XML, and of course HTTP.

During one of our weekly partnership lunches, we talked about all the various protocols that we liked and realized that “Protocol” was a great label for our theme that includes Email, RSS, and Implicit Web.  So – from this point forward, our new theme “Protocol” will join the three other core themes we are currently investing in: Glue, HCI, and Digital Life.

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 tool – it still dominates for me.

Several years ago I started saying that “my social graph is in email.”  I found it interesting that Facebook and LinkedIn used email as a primary messaging layer to remind me to come back to Facebook and LinkedIn respectively to check what was going on.  This signaled confirmation to me that these systems were making sure they were using the most persistent messaging layer to build and reinforce their social graphs.

For whatever reason, the primary email product providers have been either painfully slow at realizing this or have decided to ignore this.  Facebook and LinkedIn have benefitted massively from this, but the biggest recipient of this neglect is Twitter which has created an entirely new messaging protocol (think Twitter API as analogous to SMTP).

Suddenly, in the past year, entrepreneurs have woken up to the potential of the email social graph.  As I’ve mentioned before, we invested in Gist to directly address this opportunity.  Xobni is another well known company that is attacking this.  But another intriguing fact is the number of younger entrepreneurs that are working on this problem.  Each of the TechStars locations (Boulder and Boston) has a company that – at its core – is built around the premise of email as the original social graph.  In addition, as a mentor in the fbFund Rev 2009 program, I’ve recently started working with another company working on yet a different angle to this problem.

Now, these companies aren’t creating new email clients.  They are working on products or web services that take advantage of all the implicit information generated by your email activity.  They aren’t limited to just email (if you are a Gist user, you understand this well), but use email (name@domain.com) as a key information pivot point.  If you step back and think about it, while http://www.facebook.com/bfeld is new and full of yummy chocolaty goodness, brad@feld.com is really my “unique” identifier.

I’m not going to talk about the three new companies I’m working with on this problem yet – I’ll let them “launch” on their own timetable and I’ll talk about them when they are ready.  In the mean time, I’ve continuing to look to talk to more people that share this premise.  If that’s you, feel free to email me.

Unlike many venture capital firms that invest in certain geographic regions or specific technologies and sectors, Foundry Group’s investing activity is largely driven by a thematic approach. The themes we pursue tend to be horizontal in nature and are often driven by underlying technology protocols and standards or emerging market trends and customer needs. Rather than looking for short-term hits, we focus on themes that have the ability to drive a cycle of innovation (and hence provide multiple investment opportunities) over a period of five to ten years or more. We invest across North America in a multitude of sectors tied to our thematic approach.

Examples of the investment themes we are currently pursuing include Human Computer Interaction, Implicit Web, Email, Glue, and Digital Life. As one might expect, we are always in the process of evaluating our current themes and investigating new ones, but you can always get our latest and greatest thinking from checking out our themes link. One thing that you’ll notice is that our themes revolve around software and information technology.

You can get a sense of how our thematic approach translates into specific investments through our Portfolio Companies blog category and our list of current portfolio investments.

All of this being said, we don’t strictly limit our investment criteria to our themes—great entrepreneurs with great ideas still count for a lot in our book. In fact, our thinking about these themes can be born from and evolve as a result of our investment in an entrepreneur at the leading edge.

If you are thinking of sending us information regarding your venture, please know that we like to stick to investments that can leverage our core expertise in software, Internet and information technology. As a result, investment opportunities that don’t play to these strengths, such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices, semiconductors, real estate, retail and biotech aren’t good candidates for us.

At the present time, Pie is keeping their heads down and aren’t quite ready to announce to the world all of their plans, but we can tell you that Pie is another investment in our Digital Life theme. We are excited about the idea of them making our digital lives much easier to live in. Once they publicly launch, we’ll blog about them in depth.

The company is located in San Francisco and consists of founders John Barnhill, Drew Banks and Jeff Hansen and their diverse experience base from such companies like Apple, DHL, IBM, SGI, TeleSuite, Xerox and Wang. Welcome folks, along with the entire Pie team. We look forward to your future successes.