GigaOM » Martin Tobias

Former Imperium CEO Martin Tobias Goes Kashless

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:45:51 +0000

We’ve been wondering what the former CEO of biodiesel company Imperium Renewables, Martin Tobias, was going to do next. When we interviewed the serial entrepreneur and angel investor back in May at the Future In Review Conference he said he was mulling over his options — including the intersection of Internet and green — and said he still had another company in him. Well, we caught up with Tobias this morning, and he confirmed that he has founded and is running re-commerce company Kashless.org (noted here and here, and in this job posting).

Tobias won’t say much about the company, and the site is in private alpha right now. But Kashless is a return to the software/Internet side of green, and Tobias previously founded and ran streaming-media company Loud Eye. And compared to running Imperium, which raised hundreds of millions and was at one time planning an IPO, Kashless sounds like a much less capital-intensive way back into the entrepreneurial world.

On the job listing sites Kashless is described as a:

ReCommerce community and platform enabling person to person product reuse, sharing, lending, trade and other “cashless” transactions. By increasing reuse, Kashless.org will divert a significant amount of waste from the landfill and extend the useful life of many products. The company is fully funded . . .

Tobias writes on his blog about a formative experience of cleaning out his garage and trying to sell old, but still good, stuff that lead to forming Kashless:

In the end I got rid of everything but it was WAY TOO HARD and took way too much time/energy/effort. Heck, I was trying to give something away for free!

As Tobias points out in his blog post, there are a variety of web sites out there that help sell and swap used goods online. Craiglist, Freecycle, less well known sites like SwapThing and several Facebook applications come to mind. But it does still take a large amount of time and effort to get your stuff swapped or sold — perhaps Tobias has a better way.

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Martin Tobias: The Fate of Next-Gen Biofuel Startups

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 07:39:07 +0000

The 10 next-generation biofuel startups that got funded last quarter were 10 of the reasons that cleantech venture investments hit a recent record. But how well are all these biofuel startups going to do in the market? We’re not sure, but Martin Tobias, angel investor and former CEO of Imperium Renewables, decided to give his take on how the younger crop will fare on his blog. While he agrees that some have promising technologies in the labs, he says getting the economics to work on the necessary large scale is an entirely different story.

Tobias’ favorite company is Sapphire Energy, a one-year-old startup that is looking to squeeze high-octane gasoline from algae that has raised $50 million from ARCH Venture Partners, the Wellcome Trust and Venrock. He likes the idea of skipping the big oil-controlled channel and going directly to the independent oil refiners, but wants to see more details on how the economics will work.

He also has a few nice things to say about GreenFuel, the algae fuel company that uses recycled carbon dioxide. He says he likes the strategy of placing algae farms near heavy carbon emitters for multiple revenue streams. Tobias has already invested in algae fuel startup Inventure Chemical, so he’s been following this area closely.

And that’s about the nicest things Tobias had to say about some of these companies. On Range Fuels he thinks the technology will be a lot more expensive than first-generation biofuels, and contends:

“While Khosla likes to pay lip service to investing in technologies that are economic w/o government incentives, cellulosic ethanol generally through the 2.5x RFS credits, and Range Fuels specifically through large DOE grants have been showered with government money. If the plant eventually does get up and running”

For the rest of them, it’s equally as bad. Mostly Tobias is skeptical of getting the lab processes to scale large enough and cheap enough to produce enough return on investment. When it comes to Altrabiofuels spin off EdenIQ and Khosla and GM-backed Mascoma, he says repeatedly “show me” the money.

For algae fuel company AuroraBiofuels Tobias says that the company “lays out too much wood to chop in my opinion and not enough focus.” And for both Fulcrum Bioenergy and Amyris Biotechnologies, Tobias thinks some of their commercial milestones are so difficult to reach in time that he’ll give anyone $100 if either company hits them.

Before Tobias digs into company specifics, he highlights the biggest problems he sees for the biofuel industry as a whole: oversupply, waning political support, lagging distribution infrastructure, and cold debt markets. We’ll see if a year later, cleantech investments are still up, despite the fact that there will be some misses for next-gen biofuels.

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World Time Engine Knows Timezones

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:00:00 +0000

We’ve discussed the hassles of dealing with multiple timezones and distributed web-working teams before. New site World Time Engine (in open beta) tries to bring order to this chaos. At root, it’s a huge database: type in a location (like “Scotland” or “Indianapolis” and it will show you the current time – with choices if your chosen location is ambiguous. But there’s a lot more here as well.

The best feature for web workers is probably the meeting planner – type in a whole set of locations and a proposed time, and it shows you what that time, and other times, works out to across all those locations. They also have a phone interface and a developer API available. You can also purchase their timezone maps for use in your own web site.

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3Tera Unbundles Applogic and Unveils a Virtual Data Center

Alistair Croll — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:01:28 +0000

Virtualization holds lots of promise: Move your physical machines to virtual ones, and you’ll reclaim capacity at the same time that you make operations easier. But applications seldom run on one machine; instead they’re a combination of servers, switches and routers. 3Tera’s recently announced product road map may let companies provision whole data centers atop cloud grids like Amazon’s EC2. Call it a Virtual Data Center.

“Most large-scale systems, in order to move up the ladder and serve more customers, require more and more resources,” said Bert Armijo, 3Tera’s VP of product and marketing. “If you manage them as individual virtual machines, the problem is that the human load — the ability to actually remember what’s running where and to manipulate it all — becomes overwhelming. At some point, somebody makes a very small mistake that results in a very large outage.”

3Tera’s Applogic makes software that runs on a grid of hardware: A flat array of commodity servers, Gigabit Ethernet and direct-attached storage. The software turns this into a resource pool that can be provisioned to users. A graphical front-end, called an infrastructure editor, lets administrators drag and drop data center components like firewalls and load balancers.

3Tera sells to enterprises that want to run their own grids, as well as to roughly 20 managed service providers that want to offer on-demand data centers to their customers. Pricing starts at $500 a month for the smallest virtual data center, which is a single 8-core node, 8GB of RAM, 750 GB of storage and 2TB of transfer, though the company recommends a minimum of a three-server configuration. Within that, the manager can slice up the virtual resources into 100 individual servers in the VDC. In recent months, the firm is increasing utilization at roughly 15 percent per month.

3Tera was bootstrapped on its founders’ pocketbooks, but in April it took in a first financing of $3.7 million; the largest investor in the round was Japanese distribution partner Net One Systems. At the same time, the firm announced plans to open up its software to work with third-party components by unbundling its software into execution, catalog and control components. “We’ve proven out the ability to move applications between data centers and to abstract infrastructure definition from physical hardware,” said Armijo. “Now, somebody could write a connector between our control interface and the [Amazon] EC2 execution engine.”

3Tera has strong parallels to firms such as Elastra. While they look like competitors, Armijo says he thinks VDC companies need to cooperate. “It’s in our interest to show interoperability and the ability to run applications that span both systems. This is what will inspire users to put their applications into the cloud.”

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FastMac Optical Drive Upgrade Kit

Michael Clark — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:39:35 +0000

I have two older Macs at home, a Powerbook G4-1.5Ghz and an iMac G5-1.8Ghz (both purchased in 2004 and now out of AppleCare). When I was given the opportunity to upgrade the DVD-burner in ether of those machines with the FastMac Optical Drive Upgrade Kit ($149.95), I jumped at the opportunity. Burning CDs or DVDs takes forever. I was sent the APP-5691 kit, which is a 8X Super Drive. The box is about 2.5″ high, and just a bit larger than a CD. Upon opening the box I see a lot of padding, a CD, and the drive in an anti-static bag.

I looked through the files on the CD, and discovered this drive would work in either of my computers. Having opened my Powerbook case before, I knew I wouldn’t be doing that again anytime soon. So I looked through the CD for the instructions on how to replace my iMac’s drive. Hmm, odd, no instructions. I went to the FastMac web site, and couldn’t find any instructions there either. In fact, I kept going in circles through their site navigation. Intuitive it wasn’t.

So I submitted a tech support email. Three hours later I received a message back saying that they needed to know the size of my screen and speed of the processor so they could help me. I sent them that information, and 15 minutes later was told to download the documentation from Apple.com. It seems quite strange to refer customers to the manufacturer’s web site for instructions, but ok. The Apple manual was very detailed, and having opened up my iMac before to upgrade the RAM and to install an Airport card, I was sure this would be an easy upgrade.

Yeah, and I won’t get any junk mail from any politicians before November’s elections.

I Need a What?

I did a backup of my data, just in case. I then used Disk Utility to create an empty DVD disk image. I burned that disk image to a DVD, and 53 minutes later, it was finished. I unplugged everything from the iMac, gave it a few minutes to cool down, then lay it face down on the carpet, opened the case, unscrewed the brass screws (and only the brass screws) and removed my DVD drive from the iMac. That’s when I noticed the FastMac drive didn’t have the connector on it. The connector plugs the back of the drive into the iMac motherboard. No problem, I’ll just unscrew it from the old drive and put it on the new drive. Look closely at the connector in this photo:

It takes a tiny Torx screwdriver. Ugh! Who has those lying around? I email technical support again asking where to get a tool for that. They write back quickly to suggest an electronic or computer store. Gee, thanks. I put the iMac back together. The next day I go to the local hardware store, and buy the smallest set of Torx bits I can find. I take the iMac apart again, remove the drive, and yell. The bits are too large. I put everything back together again. The next week I visit a computer store and buy a Torx bit set, with sizes T3 through T10.

I get home, dismember my iMac again, and discover that the iMac G5 uses a T6 Torx screwdriver. I take the connector off of the iMac drive, and connect it to the FastMac drive. Whew, almost done! Of course then I notice that the iMac drive is wider than the new drive. Of course, I also have to remove the mounting bracket from the iMac drive, and add that to the FastMac drive. Again, you need the T6 Torx bit, and be careful not to mess up the rubber along the bottom edges of the mounting bracket. You need to slide the drive out of the bracket by pushing fairly hard on the drive. Do not squeeze the drive while handling it, you can mess up the alignment of the laser. Fifteen minutes later I mount the new drive onto the iMac. Everything goes back together, plug all the cables back in, and voila! The iMac starts right up.

I check System Profiler and it does see the new drive:

I then burn the empty DVD image. It’s finished in 24 minutes. I get another disk, and burn a backup of some of my Music folder. 14 minutes, all done, works great.

One thing that is different is the original drive had a covering over the slot, so when you insert a disc it slides more smoothly. The FastMac drive has a larger opening, so it feels like the disc is not actually being inserted, but then the drive will pull the disc in. It’s just different, and I think I’ll get used to it.

Bottom line

FastMac Tech support is ok, although their web site could very easily be improved by adding in a few web pages pointing people to the Apple upgrade documentation, and FastMac should tell people about needing to move the connector and mounting bracket from the old drive to the new drive. I’m wondering if FastMac is expecting to only sell these upgrades to consultants and other geeks, rather than the general home user. Apple’s instructions assume you are replacing the drive with an Apple-supplied part. The drive so far has worked just fine. The actual drive swap was fairly straightforward, although if you’ve never done a hardware upgrade before, it will be scary. If you have an older Mac, a drive upgrade will help you keep some life in the machine. Another school of thought is to not upgrade older computers, and instead put that money into your computer replacement budget.

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SmugMug Adds HD Video Support

Om Malik — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:26:35 +0000

SmugMug is one of those rare Web 2.0 companies that has the temerity to charge for their photo-hosting and sharing service. A poster child among startups that are utilizing Amazon.com’s Web Services, SmugMug has built a reputation as a quirky but well-managed startup that is profitable and is said to have annual revenues of around $10 million a year.

How do they do it? By offering a dead simple and easy-to-use service, which starting today includes HD video-hosting as part of the power user and pro-package. SmugMug is going to allow you to upload and share HD videos via its service, which can be played back using QuickTime. The new higher-definition video support means that videos will be accessible over a plethora of devices, including PlayStation 3, the iPhone and the iPod. The maximum size of video support: 1280×720 video, which makes it easy to watch on those lush plasma screens in the living room.

[podtech content=http://media1.podtech.net/media/2007/09/PID_012441/Podtech_Seagate_Hybrid_Jourlait.flv&postURL=http://www.podtech.net/home/3805/seagate-announces-hybrid-drive-for-laptops&totalTime=333000&breadcrumb=bbdcd88a1aa6457cb3c7a8634e25bcd7]

They will roll out a Flash version relatively soon. Up until recently, they were allowing limited MPEG-1 video playback support. The service isn’t cheap: $150 a year. The benefits include clips that last up to 5 minutes and can be uploaded. There is also a $60-a-year power user package that allows you to upload DVD-quality videos that are up to 2.5 minutes long.

Now this is not a YouTube-like video-sharing service; it is meant to be used more as a personal multimedia vault. From that perspective, SmugMug is worth the price. It is built for uploading memories, and sometimes those memories include stupid pet tricks.

More details are here.

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OQO product announcement Dec. 3rd in London

James Kendrick — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 05:11:24 +0000

Yesterday I received an intriguing invite from OQO to a pre-launch unveiling in London of a new product on December 3rd. OQO will also announce something they call the Anytime/ Anywhere Computing Environment. There’s not a lot of additional information but it sounds like a totally new product and not a Model 02 update. OQO CEO Dennis Moore will be at the event to answer questions from the media so this sounds pretty big to me. Unfortunately I can’t attend the London unveiling but will try to get the scoop when it happens.

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H.264, like MP3 for Video

Om Malik — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 17:27:48 +0000

The New York Times: Packet8 phones also do not use the new H.264 video encoding and decoding scheme, which provides high-quality, 30-frames-a-second images with half the bandwidth requirements. In some ways, the new codec may mean to video what the MP3 compression format has meant to audio.

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