kapor

As a teenager, Curtiss Pope worked as a clerk at Food 4 Less in east San Jose, Calif., gathering up shopping carts and helping customers find grocery items. He got the job to help his single mother of nine pay the bills, but it also seeded the idea for a start-up he's launched while helping to buck a well-documented Silicon Valley trend.

Pope, an 29-year-old African-American, goes up against some tough stats as he seeks funding for his company, AisleFinder, which aims to help people find items in grocery stores.

According to a recent CB Insights report, which tracked … Read more

Starbucks once had visions of turning its outlets into entertainment centers where customers sipped coffee and listened to the latest tunes. But that hasn't exactly worked out according to expectations. CNET News.com's Greg Sandoval explains.

Webware's Rafe Needleman spoke with the senior executive at Comcast charged with a new attempt to integrate television, the computer, and the phone.

And as one of the first software executives to battle Bill Gates, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor has seen many sides of Microsoft's co-founder. Take a listen to some of his recollections on the eve of Gates' final … Read more

One of the best parts of working on the Bill Gates transition stories was checking in with some of the pioneers of our industry.

Although the audio here was part of the reflections package that posted earlier Tuesday, I thought it was worth calling out our files of three luminaries reminiscing about Gates.

Below are the words of Ethernet creator Robert Metcalfe, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and VisiCalc's Dan Bricklin.

Gates 'isn't evil' Ethernet co-inventor Robert Metcalfe heavily criticized Gates in the 1990s on issues of Micrsoft's anticompetitiveness. Yet, he admits he likes Gates, even if … Read more

You're sitting in a conference room negotiating the sale of your company, still haggling at the 11th hour over a price. But wait: Should you even be there to begin with?

Jerry Yang and David Filo apparently thought so. They flew up to Seattle last weekend to meet Steve Ballmer and Kevin Johnson at the Sea-Tac airport in a failed last-ditch attempt to reach a deal with Microsoft.

This is the part where you're supposed to intone that it's not personal. (Cue The Godfather theme.) Yahoo's co-founders had their numbers crunchers nearby, but listening to Microsoft'… Read more

While the Nintendo Wii has garnered attention from consumers and media alike for its innovative motion-based controls, Linden Lab is experimenting with a new way to interact with its Second Life virtual world with nothing more than a Webcam. Codenamed Segalen, the technology makes use of 3D Webcams, such as the ones from 3DVsystems, to track user's body gestures to let them navigate and edit within the environment.

In a YouTube video (embedded below), Second Life creator Mitch Kapor and Kapor Enterprises Inc. employee Philippe Bossut demonstrate the basics of moving around the 3D virtual world without the use … Read more

STANFORD, Calif.--Mitch Kapor, like many people, is well aware that virtual worlds are often very difficult to use.

The founder of Lotus 1-2-3, who also happens to be the first investor in Second Life publisher Linden Lab and its chairman, spoke at the Metaverse Roadmap meeting here today on the topic of what can be done to make using virtual worlds a better experience.

"I'm obsessed with what's going to make these things easier to use," Kapor said, his face lit with excitement. "I think a piece of hardware is involved."

And that … Read more

The virtual world Second Life might be a household name today, but back in 1999 when its founder first brought a small group of developers together in a sketchy San Francisco alley, changing the world wasn't looking like much of a possibility.

In Wagner James Au's new book, The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, readers are treated to a glimpse of those early days, when Philip Rosedale, formerly the CTO of RealNetworks, rented a warehouse on San Francisco's Linden Street and started Linden Lab.

As a fan of process and a longtime writer … Read more

I guess it was just a matter of determining how long Mitch Kapor's patience would last, since he has enough money to fuel a dead project for a loooonnnggggg time.

He fed Chandler and the Open Source Applications Foundation for six years on the premise that it would deliver a mind-blowingly innovative PIM (personal information management) suite.

Six years later, Chandler just blows.

OSAF announced this week that Kapor is leaving and taking his funding with him. It's about time.

Kapor--the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the founding chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, and the chairman of Linden Labs--certainly can find other things to do.

OSAF wasn't a bad idea, and Chandler wasn't either. But neither was managed particularly well. Time to move on.… Read more