Seed funding in NY
Just read this note from Hank Williams where he reports the creation of a fund called nycseed and dedicated to seeding New-Yor tech entrepreneurs.
NYCSeed is literally for two guys in a garage. The requirements are two techies that live in New York City, and a compelling idea. The terms are fairly simple: a convertible note for $200,000 that ultimately gives them around 10% of the company. The note converts to equity when the next round closes.
I really find this idea brilliant, as some proof of concept phase *are* costly – that is when you’re going on hardware or highly technical grounds that require some heavy investments to be able to show decent prototype. Hope old Europe can come up with something similar some time soon, I’ve seen so many brilliant ideas wasted by entrepreneurs-to-be that got drawn away from their project due to bad seed practices ranging from business angles taking 50% of stake for 50k€ to VCs not really shaped to manage this kind of mini-deals.
I’m really looking forward to see their first deals and I hope they can demonstrate that seed funding makes sense (I guess it makes even more sense if you can keep on investing in the following rounds somehow…).
Release day again for the RC2 of our head motion analysis mod for the Second Life viewer. We reached RC2 which brings a lot more reliability to motion detection to RC1 mostly by introducing a camera calibration process. By waiting a few secs, the camera will analyze the environment around you and “erase” all the unnecessary stuff that might trick the shape recognition system thus reducing unwanted motions that might have occurred to you on previous versions when used in “noisy” environment.
This is my holiday’s book – that I received home the day after I left (Ok, it costed me only 4€ but shipping from the US is so slow…) – and it’s developing a really interesting vision about the use of wearable computing in 2020s which is giving me a whole bunch of new ideas for VR-WEAR.
