I’m up in Alaska and have been sucking down books. Following are five flyby reviews for those of you with different tastes.

Chirunning – Good book on combining T’ai Chi and Running. If you are a long distance runner, it’s worth a look to explore some of the concepts the author talks about. I used some of it on my run today and it felt logical.

Triumph over Turbulence – Awesome entrepreneurial autobiography of Jim Magoffin – the founder of Markair – one of Alaska’s original airlines.

Teach Yourself Movable Type – Ah – there’s a book for everything. Pass on this one – not enough content to justify its existence.

Ten Big Ones – Mental floss par excellence. I’m a little burned out on Janet Evanovich and the… Read more

My wife Amy sent me the following Voltaire quote (via A Word A Day).

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

Something to chew on… Read more

Rally Software – which we funded with Boulder Ventures in October 2003 – just shipped their first product. Nine months from startup funding to v1 – not bad!

Rally provides an on-demand subscription service for Agile software development. I’ve written a little about Agile software development in the past – we’re finding many of our software companies are adopting various Agile development approaches. The “on-demand subscription service” is a key attribute of Rally’s product family – rather than heavy upfront licensing fees for software development tools, a customer can quickly and cost-effectively begin using Rally’s products.

If you or your company is using or considering Agile software development, I encourage you to take a look at what Rally’s products can do for you. If you are… Read more

NewsGator announced our investment last week. I received a number of nice notes from folks in the RSS world. I also received a bunch of questions about why we invested, how the process worked, whether we were going to do other RSS investments, and where NewsGator is going now that we’ve made the investment. Suffice it to say that these are all relevant and good questions and in true blog fashion, rather than send individual emails answering them, I’m going to try to address some of the questions here as openly and transparently as I can to help anyone that is interested understand how and why this investment happened.

I thought I’d begin by talking about why we invested in NewsGator. To answer this question, I have to start… Read more

I’ve looked at thousands (tens of thousands?) presentations pitching new businesses since the mid 1990’s. The vast majority of them suck. Unfortunately, it’s not Powerpoint’s fault (no – it wouldn’t be better if Freelance has become the standard).

It’s the content creators fault. Edward Tufte – a master of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, thinks Powerpoint is evil and corrupts absolutely. Blogs like Beyond Bullets help reduce the corruption, but given that I’m trying to get a very specific set of information in a short period of time (usually 30 – 60 minutes), more specificity about what I think is “good” is probably helpful.

Several years ago, Chris Wand (one of the guys that works with me at Mobius Venture Capital) put together a list… Read more

Every now and then, a VC runs across an entrepreneur that has enormous vision, the mental agility to tune his idea to the market reality, and the chutzpah to pull it off. Randy Adams from AuctionDrop is one such guy.

I met Randy for the first time when he came in one Monday to our partners meeting to pitch us on the idea for AuctionDrop. At the time he had a average looking powerpoint presentation that pitched a big idea – a national chain of drop off centers for eBay. The premise was that it’s a pain in the ass for the average Joe to sell something on eBay, that people would pay to have someone else do all the work for them, and that eBay would… Read more

Amy finished The Kite Runner the other day and immediately called me on my cell phone and said “I just read the best first novel that I’ve read so far this year.” NPR’s Susan Stamberg had a great piece on summer reading and first novels this morning and – as Amy has been working on her first novel – she reads a lot of them. So – when Amy says “this one is the best”, I immediately put it on the top of my reading pile.

Wow! The Kite Runner is stunning. It’s the story of two boys growing up in Kabul. The special relationship between them unfolds throughout the book in unexpected ways. They grow from young boys to adults with the backdrop of the final days… Read more

When Raj Bhargava came up with the idea for Quova in 1999, one of his initial examples was that law enforcement would eventually focus on the Internet as a way to track bad guys that did bad things. Quova has had good success in the government marketplace and today announced that it was partnering with a company called Forensic Explorers to launch a new product called GeoLookup.

Forensic Explorers NetWitness product models what users do with computer networks. Quova’s GeoPoint software instantly determines the real-world geographic location of a web site visitor. The combination enables NetWitness to incorporate real-time geolocation into their product – immediately helping identify the geographic location of an Internet attack or suspect based on their IP address.

Both the Internet and the world… Read more

I predict that the upcoming national election activity will put blogging on the map as a broad populist activity.

The Associated Press just ran an article titled Democrat Convention Credentials Bloggers. The Dems seem to be embracing blogging while the GOP is still trying to figure it out (per a statement from GOP spokesman Leonard Alcivar).

A year ago, I helped fund the startup of an organization in Colorado called the Rocky Mountain Progressive Network. RMPN’s mission “is to provide an independent, credible voice to counter the policies of the far right, hold our elected leadership accountable, and promote concrete solutions to improve the quality of life for the Rocky Mountain region.”. From the beginning, the organization has extensively used blogging as one of its central communication mechanisms… Read more

My wife Amy – who is a writer – decided she wanted to try blogging (both reading and writing). She’s intrigued by my fascination with blogging and thought it might be easier than trying to get her novel published, especially since she’d have to finish it first.

I decided that rather than set her up, I’d watch while she went up the learning curve. Amy’s comfortable with computers (she’s no luddite), but she lusts for the days of DOS and WordPerfect (“DOS was good enough – what was wrong with F7 to exit WordPerfect – Lotus Agenda was so cool!”). So – this would be an interesting experiment and would be insightful for anyone who is a non-techie and is thinking about creating a blog.

We sat down in front of her… Read more

Halley Suitt had an intense post this morning on her father’s last day. I expect it’s powerful reading for anyone – whether your father is alive or not… Read more

We’ve been struggling with the explosion of social networking software and our perception of its usefulness for a while. David Hornik from August Capital has a priceless post on the Churchill Club’s event last night called Blogging and Social Networking: Who Cares?

A brief except of the full post follows:

“Welcome blah blah blah relationship capital blah blah blah social contracts blah blah blah media businesses blah blah blah identify the rabid fans of the iPod blah blah blah utility media blah blah blah this is the future of the web blah blah blah RSS blah blah blah Spam blah blah blah killer app blah blah blah business model blah blah blah advertising model blah blah blah is this a product or a feature blah blah… Read more

There’s been an overwhelming amount of “news” in the past year about the growth of India’s technology sector. Much of the focus has been on the significant trend of US companies outsourcing jobs to India – starting with call center and data processing type jobs but accelerating in the past year to higher-end software development, engineering, and design jobs.

As the outsourcing of jobs to India has increased, there’s been the expected political backlash. Since it’s an election year, both Bush and Kerry are taking strong positions on this issue.

Independent of my views on Bush or Kerry, I believe the resistance (or opposition) to outsourcing is a simple case of protectionism. There are endless debates on this, but I’ve always felt that protectionism was a

Feedburner implemented an upgrade to their statistics page today. It’s solid progress.

I’ve written about the issue of blog stats in the past. This is an area that both as a blogger and an investor I’m particularly interested in because of my historical involvement (and success) with several analytics companies (I use the phrases analytics, stats, and metrics interchangeably). Fred Wilson and Pamela Parker have also posted recently on the issues of stats and Matt Blumberg, Fred, and I have had several discussions about this in the past few weeks as we try to figure out what our reader adoption looks like.

Feedburner has come up with a new concept called circulation as their core measurement. Their definition of circulation is “an approximate measure of the… Read more

I’m gearing up for my next marathon on my goal of running 50 (one in each state) by the time I’m 50 (I’ve done 4). I’ve decided on the Deseret Morning News Marathon in Salt Lake City on July 24th. While it’ll be a hot day at altitude, the course starts at 7500 ft. and drops to 4500 ft., so with the exception of two stretches (each two miles), it’s – as they say – “all downhill“.

As part of my training, I’ve begun swimming at least twice a week for an hour. I grew up in Dallas and spent the summers at the neighborhood pool, so I thought I knew how to swim. After a couple of hard one hour swims, I realize that I suck at swimming… Read more