.TV Was The Brainchild of Bill Gross!

I was surprised to discover that Bill Gross was the original brainchild behind .TV!

Mark Suster Interviews Bill Gross

I spent much of today listening to and learning about Bill Gross, the founder of IdeaLab. Take a look at the list of companies Bill has had a major part in. It’s actually scary how much he’s accomplished! Also very inspring to see how excited he is about eSolar and the potential this company has to change the world. The Stanford talk (audio) (video) is presented as a lecture followed by Q&A. You’ll hear some of his history, especially early history, but then much of his philosophy around building companies. Especially interesting to me was his description of a great team: E for entrepreneur, P for producer, A for administrator and I for integrator. The notion of a team needing a good integrator (someone who enables communication between the team) is not something I’ve heard anywhere else and Bill feels having one is essential.

I also listened to the always excellent Mark Suster, This Week In Venture Capital interview with Bill (audio) (video). Here Bill, at Mark’s encouragement, talks in detail about the evolution of his career and the many successful companies he’s created. I was surprised to discover that Bill Gross was the original brainchild behind .TV!
(Click arrow to play audio) Bill Gross on the idea of Dot TV.

Memory Helmet MemoryHelmet.com

There is a permanent record of the stream of consciousness within the brain. …hidden in the interpretive areas of the temporal lobes, there a key mechanism that unlocks the past… (Penfield, PNAS, 1958)

[Update 7/14 Wow! DARPA just funded, to the tune of $37 million, two research teams to explore how memories are stored and formed. Both teams will use implanted electrical devices to measure and record brain function around memory.]

[Update 10/13 We’re getting closer! Check out this article about DARPA funding transcranial ultrasound stimulation which can access and modulate deep into the brains accessing targets to a finely focused degree.]

Now hear me out… and check out the video below the photo. When I was a kid I saw a documentary on Dr. Wilder Penfield, a Canadian neurosurgeon and a pioneer of surgical techniques especially related to epilepsy. In the documentary, Dr. Penfield had a patient lying on her side, conscious, while her brain was exposed. He applied a very small electrical current using a two-pronged probe to the surface of her brain, and the patient instantly had the memory of sitting by the fireplace around the Christmas tree as a young girl. She described the room in detail. She recalled the conversation. Wow! I thought. Someday we’ll be able to put a helmet on our head and navigate our memories with a joy stick.

I’m a little disappointed they’re not here yet 😉 but am encouraged by all the interesting advances in brain science. They say about our experience that it’s all still in there. Let’s hope the memory helmets aren’t too far off.   (PS I think this is a great band name as well.)

Memory Helmet
Photo CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Clarksworth

P2PCar.com MowFo.com

p2pcar.com Buy It Now Priced at DAN.
MowFo.com Buy It Now Priced at DAN.
I look at a lot of names, usually around ideas of my own, but often around a trend that’s breaking. Here’s a couple of names I found irresistible today. ‘Collaborative consumption’ is a buzz word around the phenomenon of sharing things rather than owning them outright. It’s estimated, for example, that the average electric drill will see a total of 12 minutes use in its lifetime. “What you really need is the hole, not the drill.” (Rachel Botsman, Collaborative Consumption at TED) People are starting to figure out how to share locally. Cars, for instance, sitting in garages while you’re at work, or in the driveway when you’re home for the weekend have become a target for peer to peer sharing. It’s kind of obvious the minute you think of it. There seems to be quite a lot of activity in the startup community around sharing cars. I was surprised to find that my first choice for a name, P2PCar.com, was available. I hope that, as new companies come into the space, one will be happy to find that a great name is available for a reasonable price.

p2pCar.jpg

As for MowFo? I saw that it dropped recently. I put it in my interesting list. And then I tried to forget about it. But I couldn’t. I just kept picturing a gardening truck driving by me with MowFo.com on the side. Or wouldn’t it be a great name for a grass cutting Roomba?


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Creative Commons License   credit: hagwall