Why Pebble failed

Pebble was an early smartwatch company that launched with a successful Kickstarter back in 2012, with a focus on providing a customizable wearable front-end for apps that ran on your phone. They had pretty good success for the first few years, but then started running into cash problems, and eventually ran out of money and

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Old Gods of Appalachia

A while back my friend Jay turned me on to Old Gods of Appalachia, an eldritch horror anthology podcast set in the Appalachian mountains. Steve Shell and Cam Collins (both Virginia natives) weave the idea of ancient evils imprisoned in the mountains with the very real hardships, temptations and injustice experienced by the poor settlers,

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Resurrecting DocBug

I started blogging at DocBug back in 2003 as a way to think through my ideas about technology, culture, and whatever else was on my mind that didn’t fit LiveJournal’s vibe. For several years I was posting three to four times a week, sometimes spending hours researching a post, but after I got married and

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Launch of Loon balloon

Announcing the Loon Collection

[Originally posted to LinkedIn on 10/4/2021, migrated to DocBug 2/10/2022.] When we started Loon we had no idea whether delivering wireless internet via long-lived high-altitude balloons was even possible, much less as a sustainable business model. No one had ever done it before, and there was no road map or guide book. So we consulted

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Loon shutting down

[Originally posted to LinkedIn 9/23/2021, migrated to DocBug 2/10/2022.] As many of you know, Loon is shutting down. We landed our final balloon a few months ago, and while a few folks are still helping with the wind down, most of us (including myself) have moved on. Delivering wireless internet via high-altitude balloons was always

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