My summer “book a day diet” began with a chewy one.  Fortunately it was short (a “bookette” – only 62 pages).  John Kenneth Galbraith is 95 years old.  So – that makes him the Yoda of economists. And – sometimes – I felt like I was reading something Yoda written had.

Economics of Innocent Fraud is not the first of his books that I’ve read; I hope it’s not the last.  Galbraith takes on the gap between “conventional wisdom” (a phrase he coined) and “reality” and uses the construct of both unintentional (innocent) and intentional fraud to explain how humans continue to snooker themselves.  His writing is dense, but delightful (almost poetic at times) and his wit is beyond acerbic.  About halfway through the bookette I let out a giggle and said… Read more

We have a bunch of cool companies.  One of my new favorites is Sling Media who makes the ultraspiffy Slingbox.  My collegue Ryan McIntyre sits on their board and has a comprehensive post with links up about this nifty new device that helps you watch your television (cable, satellite, or DVR) wherever you are.  You can watch Ryan and the CEO of Sling – Blake Krikorian – talking about this type of stuff on The ISV Show.

If you are so inclined, you can treat yourself to a new toy this holiday weekend and – instead of buying a car at the endless “4th of July sales” – wander over to your local CompUSA (or the CompUSA web site) and pick yourself up a Slingbox.… Read more

Amy and I arrived in Homer today.  Yippee.  Everything in the house works except the hot water.  Oops.  Guess we’ll have to figure that out tomorrow.  Following is the view from my living room at 10pm.

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I was recently asked the following question by email by a reader of my blog.  Rather than respond with a one-off email, I figured I’d post my answer here since it’s broadly applicable (ah – the joy of a cross country airplane ride when one is caught up on email.)  The question follows:

At my company, we’re looking at recapitalizing from 3.5 million shares to 35 million (and contemplating 350 million). The reason is pretty straightforward (although we might be way off base here): we want to create “more shares” so that as we roll out our stock option plan there is some enhanced psychological value in “getting more shares,” for employees. Although the value once you do the math is the same, I personally believe that people would rather get

I’m on the board of the Colorado Conservation Trust.  I think it’s currently the most impactful environmental conservation based organization in Colorado – I am so enthusiastic about it that I merged a non-profit environmental organization that I helped start – the Front Range Alliance – into CCT last year and joined the CCT board.  CCT is continuing the mission of the Front Range Alliance with the Front Range Mountain Backdrop initiative.

One of the really fun projects that CCT did last year (at the request of one of our major donors) was to hold a high school video essay contest.  The winner – 10th grader Michael Beggs of Boulder High School – produced a remarkable video titled “Grasslands”.  Second place was titled “Oil and Gas Development… Read more

I’m at MIT all day at a symposium run by Eric von Hippel on Democratizing Innovation.  It’s a classic “drink from a fire hose” type of day – short (15 minute) descriptions of 40 or so research projects over two days.

Most of what I’m interested in is the research around open source.  However, given that I recently read FAB and have been thinking about a “personal fabrication machine”, I was totally jazzed to hear about eMachineShop – an online machine shop that allows a user to design, price, and order custom machined parts online.

The company’s tag line is “Why waste time traveling, calling, faxing or emailing to conventional machine shops – and waiting days for quotations? Reduce your total time up to 90%! Open doors to new

Matt Blumberg – CEO of Return Path – posted a job description for a new VP of Marketing on his blog.  Jennifer Wilson – Return Path’s long standing VP Marketing is having a baby and going on maternity leave (congrats Jennifer!) – when she returns it’ll be on a part time basis.  So – if you are (or know) and A+ VP of Marketing in the Denver or New York area, please drop Matt a note… Read more

I hate Spam.  Fortunately, one of our companies – Postini – does a remarkable job of eliminating it (turn on Postini, magic happens, Spam disappears.)  Recently, I’ve been under attack from other Spam variants, including trackback/comment Spam and IM Spam (SPIM).  Today, Postini announced a partnership with IMlogic to collaborate on a Spim blocking service.  Dudes – IM there… Read more

As I wander around in summer school, I’ve been working my way through Brian Harvey’s Computer Science Logo Style 2/e, Vol. 1: Symbolic Computing.  So far I’m finding Harvey to be a fantastic writer and his approach to introducing computer science concepts to be very accessible (to me).  In addition to being a good writer, Harvey has written a Logo interpreter that goes along with the book series.

For those of you that are sneering and thinking “Logo – that’s for kids”, Harvey has a fun four line program showing the power of Logo that he uses to challenge one to reproduce in four lines of Java.

I’m still too early in the book to have any thoughtful commentary about my “programming rebirth” other to say that it’s… Read more

When I read James Frey’s first book A Million Little Pieces, I thought it was the most intense book I had read in a long time.  Frey’s second book – My Friend Leonard, which continues where the first book leaves off, is even more intense. 

This book starts at the bottom (like the first one does), starts to climb a little, and then turns you upside down and smashes your head into a concrete floor over and over again.  I started it in the Seattle airport last night on my way to Boston on the red eye – I figured I’d just get started and then put it down when I settled in on the plane to fall asleep.  Bad plan.  An hour into the flight, I finally… Read more

I’ve just agreed to be a judge for the finals of the Microsoft produced Imagine Cup Programming Competition.  This is a college programming competition that now has over 15,000 students enter.  I’m heading over to Yokohama, Japan at the end of July with Scott Maxell of Insight Venture Partners and Chris Pacitti of Austin Ventures who are my co-judges for the finals.  We’re apparently going to do an American Idol like thing – nerd style.  Scott insisted on being Simon and I offered up – much to the chagrin of Amy - that I’d be Paula.  I think it’s awesome that Microsoft produces a worldwide college programming competition – it was easy to agree to judge when asked.… Read more

I’m at Gnomedex.  Rick Klau said it earlier today when he said that the Gnomedex theme song is “It’s Raining Men.”  I’m in a room with 500 people and there are less than 10 women in the room.  I’d better tell my friends a the National Center for Women & Information Technology that the RSS tech universe needs to be studied a little more.  Remarkably, within the first hour of the conference, we destroyed the “newly amped up WiFi at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.”  So – there you go – RSS Disconnected.  We just sang the official Gnomedex theme song (led by Dave Winer) – “Yellow Submarine.&rdquo… Read more

Gnomedex starts tomorrow (ok – I guess it officially started tonight, but I chose to spending the evening gorging on sushi with Amy and then watching the Spurs crunch the Pistons.)  I’m not a conference guy (I get restless) but I happened to be in Seattle and it has turned into the center of the RSS universe for a few days.  So – off I go to Gnomedex tomorrow.

In preparation, NewsGator released two new things this week.

• Podcast support: FeedDemon already had it.  Nick and Greg quickly figured out how to take the stuff that Nick had created and integrated into NewsGator Online.  I tried it this morning.  Fucking awesome, especially given that it’s a code level integration between NewsGator Online and FeedDemon.  My iPod Shuffle

Seth Levine has a guest blogger on his site today contributing to his M&A series – his friend Daniel Benel, a corp dev exec at Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT).  Daniel’s post is well worth reading – he covers three topics that fall in the category of “things sellers try to tell buyers that a sophisticated buyer will see through, so don’t be a wanker” (my words, not his).

• Hockey Stick Projections
• We Don’t Pay For Synergies
• Overboard Competitive Concerns

Once Jason and I finish our term sheet series (soon), we’re going to start dissecting a standard M&A letter of intent.  This will be a nice technical / legal compliment to Seth’s practical viewpoints.

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Star Wars 3 was technically beautiful, but thematically disappointing to me.  However, Seth emailed me a link to Store Wars (via his dad Randy).  You’ll have to decide whether or not you are on the dark side of the farm.  Worth a five minute break from your day.  Hang in there until the end – yogurt is delightful… Read more