Spire, the small company that makes great laptop bags, has released a line of new courier bags. We recently got a couple of them and asked Cory Barnes about his new designs, and this is what he said,

“You’ll notice the handle is in a different location. The old handle was the most common complaint we received with the old Endo because it caused the bag to hang at an angle when you carried it. There is more padding in the bottom — if you feel the bottom you’ll see that there is foam built into the bottom of the bag, but it doesn’t go all the way across the bottom. It’s only below the laptop compartment, so this keeps the bag from being too bulky. There are also 5 additional pockets and 2 extra pen pockets. And a removable key fob.”

I enjoy listening to people like Cory talking about their products. It’s fun to notice the details, and inspiring to hear a fellow business owner having such pride, care and enthusiasm for his products. I hope Spire’s new line does well!

Oh boy, we had lunch more than two weeks ago and I just got around to post this. How do people keep up with their blog everyday? I sure can’t.

We met with the two young fellas from Barrel at Sobaya. Only in their second year of operation, and they are thriving as a design studio, starting a t-shirt company (and doing their own photo shoots), art directing a magazine, and keeping a casual wine-drinker guide. And, if you can believe it, they have more fun stuff cooking in their midtown office.

Great conversation, and great food, as you can see in the photo above.

Came across this New York Times article about FriendFeed, a new service that is reminiscent of what we were looking to achieve with SuprGlu. FF allows you to subscribe to your friends’ Internet activity, e.g. music they listened to, entries on their blogs, or photos they shared, all with the convenience of just one feed. With SuprGlu, which already had the aggregation covered, we had planned on rolling out a feature called SuprFriends, which would’ve allowed you to subscribe to your friends’ Internet “life-streams.” What prevented us from proceeding down this path was:

1. We were self-funding SuprGlu and it had no revenue model–and we disliked pursuing an advertising model at the time
2. It became really tough to scale our technology without additional funding once we had a decent userbase and a TON of data to deal with

So lacking a revenue model and being simply not interested in the venture capital (despite inquiries) because we thought VCs were evil, we decided to work on something else.

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We had lunch with the ladies from Front Studio exactly one week ago.  I can’t really remember what we talked about over lunch (that’s not to say the conversation was not memorable – quite the contrary), but I do remember the food.  We went to eat at Shopsins and the food is interesting.  How interesting, you ask?  So interesting that when Danny’s “Cilantro Thin Dumpling soup with Chicken” arrived, 3 digital cameras came out at our table.  Yours truly took the picture above – that flat thing person on the right is  holding is an iPhone.  I know, it doesn’t look like it can take a picture but it really does.

At the end of the Shopsins menu, it says, “We apologize that we can not accomodate severe food allergies.”

Time for another Iridesco project.

Coming soon.

Not to be outdone by our soon-to-be-even-closer neighbors, I went to pick up two fancy donuts from Bbbbbalthazar this afternoon. I asked for chocolate, the lady said ’sold out’, so I got two sugar. And a latte, in one of their thick fancy cups. The coffee, $3.25 for a small cup, is nasty, but the cup design is nice. The donuts, $1 each, are nice. Let it be known that I’m a man for fluffy donuts, and the best ones I’ve had are from San Jose, California.

For the Mac enthusiasts: yes, that’s the new iMac behind the donuts. $1300 (with tax) a pop, and it sucks more than the coffee I just had. The display is horrendous. That’s all I’m going to say about it. These new iMacs are smart and they don’t like it when you write bad things about them.