Exbiblio Blog - The Story of a Startup

We are joyous to announce the birth of Vaughn Summers — the 8 pound 10 ounce son of our Office Manager Lauren Summers and her husband Dusty. We believe that Vaughn is just about the cutest baby we have ever seen!

We have been silent for a few weeks as we were preparing for a major demonstration of our technology (it went very well). With a few days off after the push, I went to Vermont to enjoy a fall weekend.

New England had the best foliage in years! While I was there, I went to PUB — a Friday night gathering of friends in Manchester, Vermont — where we do all sorts of fun things — including carving pumpkins. This Qi Jack-o-Lantern will be added to others in Bennington, Vermont to see if they can set a record.

Check it out!

For the last hundred years, Earth has experienced a rapid loss of forested area. Reports continue to indicate huge forests losses.

Almost half of the planet’s original forest has been destroyed, mostly during the last three decades. Between 1990 and 1995, the net forest loss equaled 33 football fields per minute (112 600 square kilometers annually).

About 47 percent of the world’s forests occur in the tropical zone, 9 percent in the subtropics, 11 percent in the temperate zone and 33 percent in the boreal zone. In the tropics, about half of the mature forests, between 750 to 800 million hectares of the original 1.5 to 1.6 billion hectares, have been felled. Between 1990 and 2000 alone, natural forests in the tropics disappeared at an annual rate of fourteen million hectares, a rate of loss of an acre a second. Between 1960 and 1990, about 20 percent of total tropical forest cover was lost.

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There are an estimated 15,000 jaguars remaining in the wild. Of this, the Aros-Yaqui population in Sonora, Mexico number less than 100. They are the largest breeding jaguar population found in this part of their range. With habitat loss in Mexico and conflict with Mexican cattle ranchers, the jaguar population has continually diminished. Ranchers blame jaguars for the deaths of livestock and will shoot on sight to preempt an anticipated attack.

Conservation organizations have responded to the jaguar’s habitat needs. In 2003, Naturalia created a 10,000 acre jaguar reserve known as Los Pavos ranch. This ranch consists of subtropical woodland and thornscrub along the Rio Aros in the heart of jaguar territory. Following purchase of the ranch, cattle were removed and “jaguar guardians” hired. The “jaguar guardians” live on-site, conducting field studies of jaguars and other animals.

Now Naturalia, Wildlands Project, and the Northern Jaguar Project, are working to expand this 10,000 acre reserve to 50,000 acres. A 10,000-acre reserve is not sufficient to sustain jaguar populations. Male jaguars in arid lands need as much as 50 square miles of territory or more. Expansion of the reserve to 50,000 acres not only helps jaguars, but it also helps other critical species such as the eared trogons, military macaws, ocelots, and the southernmost-known nesting bald eagles. Fortunately, just this month, through donations by Exbiblio and other donors, the deed for the 40,000-acre ranch was signed and the first payment made. The organizations now need to raise approximately $900,000 by January 2008 to make the final payment and secure the 40,000-acre ranch.

In addition to this 50,000-acre reserve, these organizations are working with ranchers in the area to ensure the large corridor areas that jaguars need are safe for passage. One example of their work is “the bounty” program. Under this program, automatic cameras are set up on nearby ranches and the organizations hire ranch workers to maintain these cameras. Whenever a camera photographs a jaguar, the ranch owner will receive a payment—sometimes as much as $500. The photographs are then used to create a map of jaguar migration routes or “corridors.” These corridors and the sites they connect are critical to jaguar survival.

Through this program, the jaguar is now more valuable to the rancher alive than dead. More importantly, mindsets are being changed and partnerships formed. Now ranchers are asking “how can we get more of those jaguars on our ranch.” This is just what is necessary if we are going to recover the jaguar: protecting core habitat reserves and conserving safe corridors to allow dispersal of the species to other areas to encourage recolonizing.

As the unabashedly analog guy in this resolutely digital company (heck, I used to be a banker before I became an honest business man!), I simultaneously marvel and despair at encounters with cutting-edge technology: How do software and hardware engineers do that stuff, and why can’t I? OK, so I’m pretty good now with my digital camera, and just succumbed to the siren song of Apple and bought an iPhone. But I still use a 70-year old fountain pen, a 50-year old Leica, and have a funky leather saddle (Brooks, of course) on my titanium road bike.

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In the conventional, “textbook” way of doing things, early-stage companies secure initial funding from “friends and family members” or angel investors, then through crisp and timely execution of a well-articulated business plan graduate to a stage of development, and level of sophistication where they are able to attract investment from venture capital firms. The company typically would be formed as a “C” corporation, would recruit a CFO or VP Finance to generate all the projections/spreadsheets and implement all the operational controls that VC’s expect, engage legal counsel to pull together the standard set of documents for a Series A funding round with the standard set of preferences, etc., etc. The company is then set on a standard three to five year trajectory towards either an initial public offering, or as a candidate for acquisition by a large, publicly traded technology or web services company. All bog standard, all terribly predictable and all terribly…uninteresting. But oh! so tempting to head down that well-trodden path as the lowest-friction, least risky way to bring a new idea to fruition.

But, what happens when the core idea of the company itself - how it should be structured, how it should behave in society, what it’s financial and human/social objectives are - is largely at odds with these conventions? Should the founders, board members and staff opt to head down the well-trodden “conventional” path and hope to preserve at least some of the core values and objectives of the company? Or take a chance in pioneering a new way of building a company; one that combines a resolutely for-profit technology business with a deep commitment to social issues?

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Quentin Stafford-Fraser (introduced earlier) recently spoke at the 2007 GOVIS conference.

His first talk, ‘Changing the Face of the PC’, tells the story of the creation of Ndiyo, DisplayLink, and Cambridge Visual Networks, the technologies and motivations behind them, and some thoughts about the future.

Quentin and Martin King are founders of DisplayLink (formerly Newnham Research) as well as Exbiblio.

The second talk was focused on Exbiblio—our vision, technology, company, values, and more. Please have a look, to see who we are, what we are doing, and how we intend to do it:

View on Google Video

Videos to download: (right-click to save to disk):
For iPod (71 MB)
High-quality MP4 (162 MB)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

We’ve been having trouble getting the image sensor data through to the main memory on the Rosencrantz form factor board, but today, Oscar, from Synapse, figured it out.

Getting the image processing unit (IPU) configuration right in the iMX31 has been a difficult task, and as of yesterday, we were getting images through, but only half an image frame’s worth of data per frame. Today, Oscar triumphantly sent us a picture of a gnome taken with the form factor board.

This takes a major concern off our shoulders.

The “oPen™” name was originally assigned by the development team as a project name for our interactive, handheld scanning tool. Although the name oPen is certainly a clever double-entendre, it was never intended to be the name of the commercial device. In that capacity the name has a couple of major problems.

Calling it a pen plops it into a mundane category of existing products that embody only a small amount of our functionality. These handheld scanners (e.g. C-Pen, IrisPen, DocuPen, etc.) have a reputation for producing a frustrating and limited user experience. With all of that established baggage already out there, oPen may as well be shmoPen. Who will notice?

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Recently the New York Times released a poll that it conducted with CBS News. In that poll, 90% of Democrats, 80% of Independents, and 60% of Republicans all said that immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with climate change impacts. Only 1% said no steps were needed.

This poll, if representative of America, would suggest that we have arrived at a place of awakening. In part this is a relief. It is a relief that we no longer have to explain the science and numbers surrounding climate change to the masses. The public has become informed, and now there is a need for solutions.

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