I have great respect for Inc. magazine but when I easily discover an obvious factual error when I’m casually reading an article, I get a bit concerned. The article in question is about Ping Fu and her company Geomagic. The article states:
Last summer, DSSP crossed into public consciousness by playing a key role in the perilous landing of the space shuttle Challenger; relying on Geomagic software, NASA engineers scanned and inspected the spacecraft’s damaged shuttle tiles with a 10-foot-long robotic arm, and subsequently determined that they could safely withstand the stress of reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.
The summer in question is summer 2005. See the problem? Anyone remember the name of the space shuttle that landed this last summer. Hint: it wasn’t Challenger. The space shuttle Discovery landed this last summer. I’m pretty sure that I’m not unique in that I have lived during and remember both shuttle disasters. I saw the Columbia disaster as it happened. I was at lunch (in 6th grade mind you) when Challenger happened back on January 28, 1986. So unless the author of the story, John Brant, is less than 19 years old (highly unlikely), he should have known that we lost Challenger a long time ago. Twenty years ago next month as a matter of fact. But then, a part of my wishes that the above was true and Geomagic did help bring back Challenger last summer. If only…
[...] I’ve been harsh in the past with journalists not checking their facts and leaving in blatent errors in their articles. Now I’ve found something obvious, not blatent, in the online arm of a magazine. I thought the blog section of BusinessWeek would be pretty interesting and to some extent it has been. I noticed a new posting about a “stealth” startup which was supposedly funded by Granite Ventures. The postingnames the company as “mxPlay” and tries to tie it to a Sourceforge project called “mxplay”. Clearly, they must be the same thing since the names are the same and therefore the author (Justin Hibbard) speculates that “mxPlay” the company is perhaps building an open-source music player. Makes sense. Until you actually look at what the Sourceforge project is about. Yes, it is a music player of sorts (actually a mod player is what it looks like) for old Atari platforms. That’s right. The claim here is that a VC is funding open source development for a program that is originally for a long dead platform. Makes perfect sense, right? Yeah, no. [...]