I officially have an iBrick (an iPhone that does not appear to be able to be activated by normal human means.)

I’ve had an entertaining series of problems.  I’m still amused, but getting closer to annoyed. 

I picked up my phone last night at the Flatiron Apple Store on the way home from the airport.  It took me 45 seconds to purchase it (no line.)  I tried to activate it when I got home.  iTunes went through its upgrade cycle to 7.3 and then gave me errors that I didn’t have the right version to work with the iPhone so I had to deinstall / install iTunes 7.3.  I did that and tried to activate.  It got hung up trying to check my credit and told me I had to go… Read more

Amid all the iPhone stuff, Apple came out with a new product called iLaunch.  The Onion has the late breaking news at Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product.  (Thanks Dave.)

Yes – I have my iPhone.  No – it doesn’t work.  iTunes 7.3 on my Vista machine doesn’t seem to have the iPhone software working correctly (it keeps giving me an install error.)  I’ve now done the uninstall / reinstall iTunes drill – let’s see if that helps.

Update: Got the iTunes activation working with a re-install, but apparently my credit isn’t good enough for AT&T and I need to go by an AT&T store to get pre-authorization.  My partner Ryan is in the same boat.  How bizarre and unsatisfying.  I guess I’ll be leaving my  house today.

Well – I couldn’t help myself.  I’m sure this has made the rounds already and I missed it in all the hype, but this video basically sums it up.

This is the best product launch I have ever seen in my 41 years on this planet.  Just unreal.  Thanks Kimbal for the link.… Read more

We are moving our offices to Boulder.  As of Monday, our new address will be:

1050 Walnut StreetSuite 210Boulder, CO  80302

Due to the miracle of modern technology, all of our telephone numbers will remain the same.

My office has been in Superior, CO since 2000.  We’ve enjoyed being above a liquor store and a pizza joint for seven years.  While I’ve gotten tired of telling people that “Superior is basically Boulder”, I figured out that it wasn’t really helpful to say “Boulder is superior.”

We’ve traded our pizza joint for The Rio, Walnut Brewery, The Kitchen, Amanti, and The Foundry (our namesake bar across the street.)  If you decide to go for a five minute walk, you’ll pass by a bunch of our friends, including Me.dium, TechStars, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures, Kachi Partners… Read more

It’s the end of the quarter again – do you know where your VP of Sales is?  I bet he’s standing in line in front of an Apple Store waiting for his new iPhone.  Amy got so tired of the iPhone noise that she went to Paris (maybe she thinks the lines are shorter there.)  You could just follow along from home and read Scoble’s Palo Alto line experience.  Or you could just wait in a virtual line with Fred and get an unlocked iPhone.

I’m been cuddling my Dash all morning telling it that all will be ok in the world. And the noise about the iPhone is so loud that no one in the blogosphere seems to have noticed that Facebook has been down since… Read more

There are two opposite approaches in the world that most software companies take when talking about future products.  1. Say nothing until the day of the release and 2. Talk regularly about your roadmap.  There used to be a third – “announcing a product but then not shipping it for a while” (anyone remember vaporware?) – but that’s faded into the background for the most part at this point (and is distinctly different than #2.)

Alex Iskold of AdaptiveBlue has a great example of talking regularly about your roadmap up on his post Work In Progress: SmartLinks WebService and Automatic SmartLinks.  I’m very intrigued with AdaptiveBlue and very impressed with the way Alex thinks.  I also love that he’s talking about what he’s working on and asking for thoughts… Read more

Boulder is one of the most athletic cities in the world.  Even though I’m a marathoner and can do +/– 2,000 feet on a two hour run, I’m way down low on the fitness ladder here.  The range of sports people play are wildly diverse, including stuff like “I ran up a 14,000’ mountain and back with one arm tied behind my back and all the toes on my left foot taped together while wearing sandals and a bike helmet.”  So – it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone living here that we have excellent shuffleboard facilities in Boulder.

My friends at Slice of Lime hosted a real shuffleboard dustup session with the TechStars gang last Friday.  At the end of it they retreated to a more traditional Boulder experience &ndash… Read more

Amy and I watched The Matrix Reloaded this weekend.  What a great movie.  I love The Keymaker (along with the The Merovingian and The Architect).  I commented to Amy this morning that she was an extraordinary list maker (she is truly the best maker of lists I have ever encountered) and we’ve decided that if Matrix Redux (aka Matrix IV) ever comes out, she’s going to apply for the part of The Listmaker… Read more

With this post, we continue the “Feld Job Board.”  If you are a god-like software architect that isn’t intimidated by the notion of making a real-time system work across 10,000 distributed servers, this might be for you.  Location doesn’t matter, but we are going to do our best to relocate you to Boulder, CO.

If you’ve been following along at home, you know that I’m very excited about a company in Boulder called Me.dium that I’m involved in.

On the heals of their financing, Me.dium is looking for a superstar Chief Architect.  Me.dium is building a real-time representation of all the activity on the Internet.  To build a near real-time system that scales to thousands of servers requires intense engineering at every layer.  The Chief Architect at Me.dium will work… Read more

You find ads for RSS feeds and podcasts in the most interesting places.  Today, it’s the Wall Street Journal Online.  I wonder how many commodities traders woke up this morning and said “yeah – I need to get news, commentary, and special offers via RSS.”

 … Read more

Lijit has a lot to celebrate this week.  They just closed a $3.3M round of financing, their first birthday was last week, and they’re looking to double the size of the team.  Come by and help them celebrate at their Louisville offices this Thursday (June 28th @ 4pm.)  If you are a technical dude (or dudette), they may hire you on the spot.

Lijit is currently located at 864 W. South Boulder Road in Louisville but working hard to migrate to downtown Boulder.… Read more

Creating companies is hard.  Most fail.  Overnight success is rare (my favorite “overnight success stories” are the ones that take 10+ years, like iRobot or Harmonix.)  While strategy plays a key part in the outcome of an entrepreneurial venture, the fundamentals matter a lot.  Take the following parable that I got from a friend recently.

I was thinking about you as I drove home from my tennis match the other night. My doubles partner was clearly excited to implement what she had learned in previous doubles strategy lessons. Minutes before we stepped onto the court, she developing signals she was going to use for poaching, staying put at the net, etc. Since I had never played against our opponents before, I wasn’t initially concerned about strategy. I figured assess

I’ve been chairman of the National Center for Women and Information Technology for the past two years.  The mission is straightforward – it is “to ensure that women are fully represented in the influential world of information technology and computing.” 

NCWIT programming is organized into “alliances” – we have an academic, workforce, K-12, and entrepreneurial alliance.  The academic and workforce alliance are the most mature; the entrepreneurial alliance is the youngest.

A year ago I sat down with Lucy Sanders – the NCWIT CEO – and a few other folks (including Heidi Roizen and Lee Kennedy) to discuss the most impactful thing we could do to raise the visibility of successful women entrepreneurs in the IT / computer science field.  While there are some very notable successful women, we… Read more

Once again I woke up to a Saturday morning blog post flurry on Techmeme.  Today’s was on the criticism by Valleywag of the Microsoft People Ready campaign that ran on the Federated Media network.  It appears that everyone is talking about it – and I guess I just did also (oops.)

This particular conversation made me think of a pair of blog posts that Stan Feld (my dad) wrote recently.  I recommend that you – dear reader – take your brain out of the tech industry echo chamber for a moment and think about the notion of critical thinking.  Let’s wander over to the health care industry for a few minutes.

First, read through Stan’s post titled Women’s Health Initiative (WHI): Medical Community Undermines Itself.  Take your time… Read more

TechStars is really cranking – I’m totally blown away by what everyone is working on and the level of engagement of the TechStars mentors.  I’m very optimistic that some great stuff is going to come out of this adventure and I’m looking forward to our first demo night on Tuesday.

A number of out of town visitors have swung by in the last 10 days including Don Loeb (ex-FeedBurner – now Google), Eric Marcoullier / Todd Sampson (ex-MyBlogLog – now Yahoo), and Noah Kagen (ex-Facebook – now Mint.)  Thanks guys for making the trek to Boulder – I know it was a massive personal sacrifice.

David has been videotaping a lot of sessions and put them up on TechStars.TV.  Some of the teams are now blogging… Read more