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 28^th @ 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.

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 their strengths and weaknesses during the warm up, then play to them accordingly.

We ended up losing 6-4, 6-4 to a team that wasn’t as strong as us. One of the reasons I think we lost is because there was too much focus on strategy and not enough on fundamentals. Our opponents capitalized on some very basic mistakes and ended up taking the last four games from us to win the match.

Clearly there are worse ways to spend a Monday evening than losing a tennis match. But, as a funder/board member/sounding board/cheerleader, have you ever counseled a start-up team where there is an imbalance between strategy development vs. executing on fundamentals? How do you steer them back on course, especially after they’ve experienced defeat?

I’ve been in way too many meetings where the talk is endlessly about “strategy.” Whenever you are in an endless cycle of a “we need a strategy” or “our strategy needs to be X” type discussions, step back and think about whether or not you have a team that is capable of actually building a business.

Great strategy is useless if you don’t know how to serve, volley, and hit the ball.

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 wanted to shine a bright light on some of the younger ones and those who could be additional role models for young women interested in entrepreneurship in the IT arena.

We came up with the NCWIT Heroes program – a series of short podcast interviews.  These 15-minute interviews interviews are going to be released weekly with approximately 20 women IT entrepreneurs chosen from among more than 100 nominations. I’ve found the project fascinating – both identifying the women and helping set up the interviews. 

The first three interviews are with:

• Lucy Sanders: CEO and co-founder NCWIT; Bell/Lucent/Avaya Labs
• Helen Greiner: co-founder and Chairman of iRobot
• Elaine Wherry: co-founder of Meebo.com

Listen along or subscribe to the podcast for your weekly fix of NCWIT’s Heroes.  Thanks also to Larry Nelson of w3w3.com, Ben Casnocha, and Jay Habegger for helping out.

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 – like most of the stuff my dad writes it is a little chewy, but he decomposes the issue extremely well and substantiates his perspective with a critical review of the statistics involved.

Now, read a post he wrote a few weeks ago titled What Has Happened To The Medical Professions Ability To Apply The Scientific Method To Our Medical Articles?.  Again, take it slow and pay particular attention to the statistical analysis (even if you don’t really know statistics – he does a good job of explaining what you should be looking for.)

Stan was a practicing endocrinologist for 30 years.  While he’s retired from private practice, he believes that it’s finally time we (as in “we the people”) reform the completely foobarred health care system once and for all.  These two posts are great examples of how the medical community undermines itself through its behavior. 

As we wander into yet another election cycle, I expect our brains will be flooded with an overwhelming amount of unsubstantiated opinion masquerading as fact.  Many people will quickly react to public sentiment without really doing their homework.  The mob will be able to shape reputations quickly and – when the floodgates open on an issue – it’ll be difficult to sort the signal from the noise.

This is one of the beauties of blogging and user generated content.  It’s also one of the risks.  Think critically.  Have your own point of view.  Make sure you know when you are reacting to fact, fiction, an opinion, an assertion, or a trend. 

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 – Matt has a funny post up titled Wear your swimsuit to your next VC meeting.  The quote of that particular event was Lisa Rutherford’s answer to how you should dress for a meeting with a VC; answer: “Be clean you.”

I love helping to create companies.  As my wife likes to say, I’m “lucky to have found a spot in the universe where my work is my play.”

In April, Lijit published what we thought were the first Widget stats.  Last month, comScore published their “Widget Metrix”, a new service they have started to track the usage of widgets across the Web.  The data was interesting – and very different – as the two methodologies were different (Lijit is looking at it from the publisher point of view; comScore is looking at it from the visitor point of view.)  Both approaches are important indicators of both widget growth and popularity.

Lijit just published their June Widget Statistics.  They are tuning their algorithm – the crawler now includes 29,139 blogs and the definition of a widget is any regularly-occurring functionality on a blog powered by an external service, voluntarily installed by the blog owner, and powered by Flash or Javascript.

Based on the June crawl, the top 10 most popular widgets on blogs are: google-analytics, sitemeter, googlesyndication, technorati, statcounter, mybloglog, blogrolling, feedburner, haloscan, and truthlaidbear.  The analytics widgets still dominate (over 50% of blogs) with ads and trackbacks on about 20% of all blogs. 

I expect both the comScore Widget Metrix and the Lijit Widget statistics to rapidly evolve over the next few quarters as both absolute and trend data become richer, the sample sizes continue to expand, and the methodologies become more evolved.

I’ve had an account on Facebook for a while. Until a month ago – around the time of the F8 Platform launch – I checked it once a month.

In the last 30 days, I’ve been checking it once a day.  My friends list has exploded, I’ve added a bunch of apps (just to play around – hint – important reference to a note below), and exercised most of the features that I could find.  VCs and entrepreneurs have “discovered Facebook” – everyone is talking about it on blogs and in pitches (as in “we are going to build a Facebook app for X.”)

A week ago, I started thinking that there was a key problem with Facebook.  This problem is directly linked to the absolute strategic brilliance of the Facebook folks around the launch of the Facebook platform.  This problem is clearly articulated in in the post “I have 250,000 users, now what?”

Be patient – you get to hear the problem in two paragraphs.  Last week, I started saying to people “Facebook is a substitute for television.”  I don’t think I made this up (I’m sure someone else said it first), but for the last decade many people involved in the Internet have been searching for the pure substitute for TV – what will you spend your online time playing with instead of sitting and passively watching TV.  Facebook finally seems to be the tipping point for this.

Granted – Facebook is active, not passive, so it’s theoretically better for the human brain.  However, in my interaction with Facebook, I’m still in “complete playing around mode” – I haven’t been able to derive any real discernible value from any of the hundreds of ancillary applications that are appearing.  Some are just plain silly (but often clever) time wasters; others are just republishing of content or reorganizing capability that I have through some other application.  None of this is the “problem” – but it’s the root cause of it.

The Problem: As of today, Facebook is deriving massive benefit in all the application development that they’ve enabled.  They’ve brilliantly created an open community that allows developers to quickly create applications that can rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of users.  This dramatically extends the functionality of Facebook by offloading the R&D and feature development to the apps developers.  (How about all of them there adverbs – I sound like a press release.) However, as far as I can tell, none of these Facebook apps developers are deriving any real benefits (if you are a Facebook apps developer and ARE deriving a tangible benefit, other than customer acquisition within the Facebook infrastructure, please weigh in.)  In addition, Facebook has shifted all of the infrastructure costs to these apps developers, creating the “I have 250,000 users, now what?” problem.

It seems like Facebook could easily turn on CPM based ads on all of the Facebook apps pages and do a revenue share with the application developer.  Suddenly, the application developer would get paid for the massive new page views they are getting (as would Facebook), and Facebook would create a real incentive for the publishers to stay with their apps and grow them. 

In the absence of this, Facebook is going to need to address the “value to the apps developer” quickly, before some of the larger apps vaporize due to the developer saying “I’m not willing to keep paying for servers and bandwidth.”  I can think of a couple of other approaches here, including Facebook building an in-the-cloud infrastructure for their developers that they make available to one’s that reach a certain level of popularity.  But – the straight “we’ll make more money and share it with you” seems the most logical approach to me.

Amy and I have been married for 14 years today.  On June 21st, I always have the Little River Band song in echoing in my head all day and a larger than normal jump in my step.

For those of you mix summer solstice with a dollop of marriage, happy anniversary.

To Amy – thanks for an awesome 14 years.  I’m looking forward to at least 103 more.  I’ll see you tonight.

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, has an excellent blog post up on the Whole Foods web site titled Whole Foods Market, Wild Oats, and The Federal Trade Commission. 

Whole Foods is trying to acquire Wild Oats and the FTC is challenging the merger.  As I scanned through my online newspapers this morning as part of my morning routine, I saw articles in each of them (Boulder Camera, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, NY Times, and WSJ) about this.  The deal is getting a lot of airplay locally since Wild Oats is a Boulder-based company and Whole Foods has significant presence here.

Most of the articles positioned the story using a few quotes from an email from Mackey.  My first reaction was “eh – that sounds pretty normal from a CEO of the market leader – what’s the big deal?”  One of the articles pointed to the blog that Mackey wrote.  It’s brilliant – one of the best examples I’ve seen of a CEO using a corporate blog to get his point of view clearly out in the open.  The executive summary follows:

The goal of transparency is presumably one that the FTC – if they approach this from an enlightened point of view – can respect.  Many corporate blogs are just regurgitated PR – the authenticity of this one from Mackey is really impressive. Who knows how this really plays out – it’ll be instructive to watch.

I am regularly amazed at the amount of money consumer electronics, mobile device, and cell phone companies spend on “stupid customer service tricks.”  I got the following note from a friend that has a Sony Reader.

My screen cracked for some reason.  Probably got hit in my bag somehow.  I sent it in to Sony for service and they offered to fix it for $272; a new unit is $299.  I declined. I sent a letter to the Sony USA VP marketing.  I pointed out that when my ipod broke, I got a new one in 20 minutes at the store, no questions asked.  And the contrast in experiences is why my family of 4 has 8 ipods but is only likely to have 1 reader. I got a nice phone call last night and a new reader is on its way! 

I am a consumer electronics junkie – you name it, I probably have (or have had) it.  My best two customer experiences to date have been the Sonos (truly amazing) and Slingbox (we are investors so I’m glad it’s amazing.)  Apple has also been a happy place to be, as long as I walk into the store and give them my sad puppy dog look.  Most everything else sucks.  When something breaks (like my Sony DVD player did last month), I just buy another one to replace it rather than struggle through the six week “send it in and then pay us almost as much as another one to get it fixed” routine.)

The Sony Reader example above is completely consistent with my reality.  It’d be so easy for Sony to start by sending out another one and have a delighted customer.  The result would be worth much more than the cost of incremental customer acquisition and the customer destruction support function.  The strategy of “send me your broken thing and I’ll replace it” seems so logical today in a world where people shout from the rooftops about the great experiences – buying much more goodwill than a million banner ads. 

At least the Sony USA VP Marketing has a clue.  Maybe Sony should put her in charge of customer care!