Our company Oblong was recently the subject of the new Bloomberg Series, Innovators.  If you want to see 30 minutes of great TV about innovation and entrepreneurship focused around our portfolio company, it’s a great watch.  They are in episode “Turning Point.”  We are really excited about our partnership with Oblong and all that they’ve accomplished, so we are proud that others are recognizing their successes. 

(As a technical note, we find that in Windows, IE works better than Firefox to view it).

Brad and I were lucky enough to see the Bilski argument at the Supreme Court.  We were both beyond impressed and each wrote about our experience.  Jason’s recap is here.  You can find Brad’s summary here. 

We are hopeful that as a result of this case, business method patents will be forever dead and gone.  Given the tenor and body language of the court, we would be surprised if it turned out any other way.  Perhaps most interesting was the courts’ investigation into software patents, even though that was technically not the issue at hand.  We, individually at the Foundry Group, are not fans of the current ecosystem surrounding software patents and would be happy to see the court take action on this front too. 

We anxiously await the ruling. 

We are pleased to announce our investment in Organic Motion, Inc. The company is based in New York City and is a leading innovator of computer vision and advanced motion capture systems. Organic Motion’s core computer vision technology dramatically increases a computer’s ability to see and understand the motion of humans and other living organisms. The company offers groundbreaking turnkey and customized motion capture systems that utilize its patent-pending breakthrough computer vision technology.

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.

Last week we hosted what we called the “Foundry Group Digital Life Summit” here in Boulder, Colorado. While we are no strangers to helping host conferences such as Defrag and Glue, this was a much more intimate event that we arranged ourselves.

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.

We are very happy to announce our investment in Next Big Sound, Inc. (“NBS”). NBS is an online music analytics and insights company located in Boulder, Colorado. They measure the growth and popularity of bands across major web properties and sell actionable insights around those data to band managers and other industry professionals. NBS has developed a scalable architecture that can quickly add new sources of information and aims to be the definitive source of quantifiable fan data surrounding the music ecosystem.

This investment fits into our Glue theme and even touches upon our Protocol theme in that users (bands) can draw conclusions and correlations from the vast amount of data on the Web about their activities.

Normally, we don’t invest in companies that focus on vertical markets, but this is our second company focused on the music industry, along with Topspin. We’ve believed for a while that Music Business 2.0 is a reality whose time is upon us. The old days of making records, lobbying for spins on radio stations and letting the record companies own the relationship with fans are nearly over. We believe the future of the business lies in direct-to-fan relationships and Internet marketing.

As part of this future there will be new opportunities created to service these new direct-to-fan and Internet marketing models. We believe a key opportunity involves data. Currently, the industry-norm data report is from SoundScan. For thousands of dollars per month, industry professionals are able to see how many CDs and digital downloads have been purchased along with how many plays have occurred on terrestrial radio. We believe that this report is already mostly irrelevant. Consumers are more often spending their listening hours on the Internet and spending their dollars on merchandise and tickets, as opposed to traditional music offerings. The explosion of social media, including YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and the blogosphere have shifted the listening audience to other venues and current information sources for the industry do not cover these properties.

In our conversations with record companies and band managers and our ongoing involvement with Topspin, it has become apparent to us that the industry is craving data, metrics and reports that take into account the next generation of music consumers. The industry is in a state of flux with many differing opinions about what “works” but no one has quantifiable and usable data to defend their theses.

NBS has created a scalable web platform that already is tracking approximately 500,000 bands and over a quarter billion points of data points across web properties such as Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm, iLike, Twitter and IMEEM. One of the most compelling features of the NBS platform is that it automatically creates the list of artists to follow, instead of expecting artists to register and make themselves known. This is critical for giving artists a great experience the first time they use the data with historical trends already in place, as well as the instantaneous ability to compare themselves with other relevant artists.

Furthermore, the type of information and analytics the company is creating is the first of its kind on the web. While we believe there will be others trying to do the same in the future, the company’s blend of industry-specific knowledge, technical capabilities, compelling interface design and first-mover advantage creates a huge opportunity.

NBS will derive revenue from industry professionals who will rely on this data to make decisions regarding their artists. Today, they are used to paying $4,000 a month for reports which track CD and digital download sales. While this information is important, it only explains what happened and provides no data as to why certain events may have occurred. NBS data will provide greater insights into the information that they are seeking and will allow the industry professional to make better decisions.

NBS is a 2009 graduate of TechStars and we were fortunate to get to work with the team over the summer. We are honored to continue to be their partner with their first round of financing, as they had no shortage of funding options after a very successful summer.