Videos like this one remind me that I live in a very tiny corner of the universe.

Only 8% of the people interviewed (out of a sample of over 50) correctly defined a browser.  It also shows how effective Google has been in their approach to branding, especially given that they just aired their first TV commercial a few weeks ago.

If you support the Startup Visa and have a blog or a website, put the Startup Visa Twitter Widget up on your site.

And – on March 2nd at 12 noon Pacific / 3 pm Eastern – we are going to do a Tweet Hall for the Startup Visa.  All you need to do is tweet @2gov supporting #startupvisa exactly at Noon Pacific on Tuesday March 2nd.  We’ll collect your Tweets and deliver them during our visit to the White House on March 4th.

I love the Pogoplug.  We’ve been investors in the company for about a year and it has been a blast working with the team.  Pogoplug is in our Digital Life theme and has a lot of conceptual similarities to our previous investment in Sling Media (now part of EchoStar).  We love products like the Pogoplug and the Slingbox “software that ships with a little plastic box that does magic stuff” that, in Pogoplug’s case, provides you access to any of your external hard drives from anywhere in the world on any device.

Today, there was a great review of the Pogoplug in Walt Mossberg’s column in the Wall Street Journal titled Get Your Storage Out of the Cloud.  WSJ’s Katherine Boehret also has a nice short video review below:

I have several Pogoplugs – one at each house and at my office in Boulder.  They are remarkable – they just work.  If you have an external hard drive or are considering cloud storage for any meaningful amount of data, you owe it to yourself to grab a Pogoplug.

Today, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) introduced the StartUp Visa Act of 2010.  The group of us behind the Startup Visa project have been working closely with key members of each Senators’ staff on this and we are incredibly pleased with the proposed bill. 

Following is the text from the press release announcing the bill:

“Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today introduced legislation to drive job creation and increase America’s global competiveness by helping immigrant entrepreneurs secure visas to the United States.

The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 will allow an immigrant entrepreneur to receive a two year visa if he or she can show that a qualified U.S. investor is willing to dedicate a significant sum – a minimum of $250,000 – to the immigrant’s startup venture.

“Global competition for talent and investment grows more intense daily and the United States must step up or be left behind,” said Sen. Kerry.  “Everywhere Dick Lugar and I travel for the Foreign Relations Committee, we see firsthand the entrepreneurial spirit driving the economies of our competitors.  Creating a new magnet for innovations and innovators to come to the United States and create jobs here will offer our economy a double shot in the arm – robust job creation at home and reaffirmation that we’re the world’s best place to do business.”

“Our country should strive to attract to the United States the most talented and highly skilled entrepreneurs.  We should channel the power of innovative thinkers from around the world and American investors towards creating jobs and encouraging economic growth and future prosperity,” said Ranking Member Lugar.

The StartUp Visa Act of 2010 would amend immigration law to create a new EB-6 category for immigrant entrepreneurs, drawing from existing visas under the EB-5 category, which permits foreign nationals who invest at least $1 million into the U.S., and thereby create ten jobs, to obtain a green card.  After proving that he or she has secured initial investment capital and if, after two years, the immigrant entrepreneur can show that he or she has generated at least five full-time jobs in the United States, attracted $1 million in additional investment capital or achieved $1 million in revenue, then he or she would receive permanent legal resident status.

More than 160 venture capitalists from across the country have endorsed the senators’ proposal.  That letter of support is attached.”

The support from the venture capital and super angel community has been fantastic.  Now that we have both a sponsored house bill (HR 4259 – sponsored by Jared Polis (D-CO)) and a sponsored senate bill, it’s time to crank up the grassroots support.  Look for a few specific things to do in the next few days on both this blog and the Startup Visa blog.

Jon Hansen has started interviewing me periodically on his show on BlogTalkRadio as part of his Thought Leaders Series.  Yesterday’s interview focused on my experience of investing in Rally Software and included short discussions on how Rally got started, how and why I decided to invest, and the role various factors play in my decision making process.  Jon does a nice interview. 

I’m very proud of my friends at Rally – they’ve created a company that is well on its way to being one of – if not the – most significant software company in Boulder.

My folks stayed at my condo in Boulder the last few nights with me so I was inspired this morning to write a quick post in the Letters to my Dad series that I’m writing with my father (he’s calling his posts “Father and Son.”) 

In my dad’s last post, Father and Son #3, he wrote about our overthrow of the administrative regime in my high school at the start of my senior year when they botched the AP course schedule because of a “computer glitch.”  He calls it a “lesson in leadership and self reliance” and tells a great story of how we (him and I) quickly mobilized about 60 parents and students in 24 hours to get together, proposed a solution to the problem, presented the case the superintendent and principal, and then fixed the problem.  We all got to take more than one AP class (even though school was over for me my senior year at lunch time since there were no other classes to take) and I even wore a tux to prom.

But that’s not today’s story.  When I was young, my dad regularly took me on rounds with him at the local hospitals.  He was the most experienced endocrinologist in Dallas (and one of the first doctors to specialize in clinical endocrinology) so he was in high demand.  He was also extremely respected by his peers, loved by his patients, and adored by the nurses and hospital staff.  Looking back, I like to say that he was the doctor that we all dream of having – engaging, funny, 100% focused on you and in the moment, extremely responsive, and extraordinarily competent. 

I loved going on rounds with my dad.  I’d bring a book, sit at the nurses station, and read while he saw patients.  Occasionally the nurses would let me look through charts (this was well before HIPAA) or play around with the medical equipment (in the 1970’s there were a lot of beeping noises and flashing lights – perfect for an eight year old.)  Hospitals were big places which seemed huge to me at the time.

However, there were two things I didn’t like.  I hated the way hospitals smelled and was always afraid of touching things.  I didn’t realize what this was at the time, but looking back on it I realize it was an early instantiation of OCD which I’ve struggled with throughout my life.  I’m sure the linkage between the environment and the events in the hospital (sick people, dying people) reinforced something around this at a deep psychological level. 

More obviously, I disliked a lot of the doctors.  I thought my dad was amazing and loved listening to the nurses talk about “Dr. Feld” when they thought I couldn’t hear them.  I’d have my head buried in a book in the corner and they’d be chatting about how amazing (where amazing is a proxy for a wide variety of great attributes) he was.  In the mean time, they’d bitch about virtually every other doctor.  I learned the word “asshole” at a relatively early age as that was the most common descriptor I remembered.  Most of the other doctors were assholes – they were arrogant to the nurses, short with patients, and many of them seemed genuinely uninterested in what they were doing.  Now – a few of them were like my dad, but only about 10%.  The rest turned me off.

When I was about 10, I grabbed a thin green book on endocrinology off of my dad’s shelf in his study.  I discovered a lot of books in his study over the years (including Atlas Shrugged and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).  The endocrinology book wasn’t titled “Endocrinology for Dummies” but it could have been – it was an introduction to endocrinology presumably aimed at a first year medical student.  By 10 I was devouring ever book I could get my hands on so I’m sure I laid down on a couch in our house and started reading.  The only thing I remember is how unbelievably bored I was by the book.  I’m sure it was way over my head, but this wasn’t a unique experience for me – even when I didn’t really understand very much of what I was reading I usually sucked it down anyway and went back and tried again at a later time.  I remember finishing this book and thinking something like “I never want to read about endocrinology ever again.”

My dad tried to be home for dinner every night.  He’d often head back to the hospital after dinner to go do more rounds.  At dinner we’d go around the table and talk about our day.  We alternated who went first – there was no rhyme or reason to the order that I could tell although my parents might have had a secret sequence that I didn’t know about.  A few days after I put the book back on the shelf, I went first.  I was really nervous so I just blurted out what was on my mind “I don’t want to be a doctor!”  It probably came out more as a plea or a shout, but I remember it sounding like a scream in my head.

Once I had said it, I felt so much better.  I’d been carrying around the thought for a few days terrified of what my parents would say.  All of my relatives were already asking the typical jewish “is he going to be a doctor when he grows up” question every time they saw me with my parents.  I hadn’t realized how much this was weighing on me – now it was out in the open.

I remember a short moment of quiet followed by my father quickly saying “you can be anything you want to be.”  We then spent most of dinner talking about this and when dinner was over I had a bunch of different possible careers in front of me to explore.  None of them were being a doctor.  And – I felt great because I’d learned that a huge lesson that day – that I could be anything I wanted to be.

I love the stuff that ya’ll email me (or comment) after I write a post that challenge my thinking.  While occasionally the notes are hostile (which is mostly just entertaining), they are usually really thought provoking even when I disagree.  And, when they give me a new way to think about something, they are really satisfying.  For all of you out there that read this blog – you guys are great – thanks for helping me think!

Last week I got an interesting proposal to deal with the problem of patent trolls.  Here it is. 

“It seems to me as though the solution to patent trolls is a pricing issue.

If patents were to get progressively more expensive over time, a patent holder would have to weigh the financial return of a patent against the cost of maintaining it. For example:

Patent Fees
Year 1 — $1,000
Year 2 — $10,000
Year 3 — $100,000
Year 4 — $1,000,000
Year 5 — $10,000,000
Year 6 — $100,000,000
Year 7 — $1,000,000,000

The model above protects really valuable patents and sets patents that aren’t valuable free. Pharma could live with the fee schedule above, and software companies which have patents that are really core to a business would be protected for 4-5 years, an eternity on the Internet.”

What do you think?  What’s the fundamental flaw in this?

Every day I get emails from folks either raising money or telling me about their new idea and asking for feedback.  The conventional wisdom is that VCs rarely invest in things that reach them randomly (or “over the transom” in someone’s VC vocabulary – I can’t for the life of me figure out why that phrase hangs around.)  However, this isn’t the case for us as 10% of the companies we’ve funded in the past two years were initially from “cold call” email inquiries (Brightleaf and Organic Motion).  So – I’m very happy to get a steady stream of random emails – keep them coming!

I’ve noticed a trend toward more video presentations lately.  I looked at one this morning and it reminded me of the old writers adage “show don’t tell.”  This applies nicely to every pitch you ever do.  Specifically, I don’t want to hear you describe what you are going to do, I want to see it.  Or – if it’s not built yet, see an example of it.  It’s always better to point me at a URL, even if it’s a very rough prototype, as I can usually get a much quicker view of what you are doing by simply playing around. 

The video I watched today was a two minute segment of the entrepreneur looking into the camera and describing his business idea.  The idea was fine although I could tell within 15 seconds that it wasn’t something we’d invest in given the market he was going after.  I ended up watching the full two minute video to see if he ever shifted from “tell” mode to “show” mode.  He never did – the two minutes ended and the whole video was the entrepreneur describing his idea. 

In my book, this was a wasted opportunity.  I could have read one paragraph that contained the same content.  The entrepreneur didn’t take advantage of the medium (video) in any way.  While he did a nice job on the monologue, he wasn’t trying out for a TV commercial, a TV show, or a movie.  He missed the goal – get my attention and hopefully get me to engage to the next level.

For most of the great VCs I know, the way an entrepreneur makes a connection when there is no pre-existing relationship is to generate an immediate interest with the product.  That’s what happened for us in the case of Brightleaf and Organic Motion.  The entrepreneurs were highly credible, but more importantly we immediately got excited about their products, which caused us to be more interested in going deep and exploring an investment.

This is a repeating theme that for some reason isn’t said strongly enough.  The great entrepreneurs (and sales people) “show”.  Just think of how Steve Jobs does it.  Show me!

I have a number of friends who are patent attorneys.  Some have strong negative feelings about software patents that mirror mine while others keep me entertained by arguing both sides of the situation with themselves while I sit around and listen.  One of my friends – let’s call him Sawyer – has very strong negative opinions as he’s spent most of his time recently defending his clients against software patent suits including an increasing number from patent trolls (non-practicing entities).  He spends a lot of time in East Marshall, Texas and has figured out where all the best restaurants are.  While East Marshall isn’t quite as nice as an invisible, mysterious island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it clearly has a number of similar characteristics.  Sawyer has decided that he can’t write publicly about his thoughts and experiences so I’ve agreed to channel his experience into my own parallel universe.  Look for more missives from him (and better references from me with regard to Lost as I finally learn what really has been going on.)  In the mean time here’s his reaction to the New York Times profile last week on Intellectual Ventures.

Last week there was an article in the New York Times profiling Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures ("IV").  I suppose since it’s a profile, the article is by nature one-sided, but given how I broke into a cold sweat upon reading it, I was a little surprised at how unbalanced the presentation was on the merits.  Mr. Myhrvold is characterized as a savior of inventors while his detractors are those big scary companies who want to infringe patents without compensation to the little guys.

What is the underlying premise of IV as a net positive for innovation and the U.S. economy?  The traditional defense is that patents incentivize innovation.  That has to mean innovation in a particular field, e.g., "software patents incentivize innovation in software."  Let me underscore this point:  there is no positive evidence for software patents improving or increasing innovation in software.  None.  I could make the same statement for pretty much any other field except biotech (which has its own problems that can be explored another time).  There are a variety of articles setting forth why patents actually hurt innovation in software particularly, (e.g., the famous Bessen and Maskin working paper on the subject).  Note that raw empirical data is hard to come by either way by nature of how the patent system operates, but the lack of positive evidence is telling.

Perhaps Mr. Myrhvold recognizes this, because in the article he says “I’m trying to get inventions that kind of respect as an economic entity.” (Emphasis added).  IV apparently incentivizes innovation on…inventions?  "Inventions" are actually a term of art in patent law, they are the things for which one can legally be granted patent rights.  IV, therefore, seems to admit that it wants to enforce patent rights so that we can…have more patents.  Mr. Myhrvold wants to create an entire economic category based on payments to entitles that don’t build, produce, sell, etc, any products, or create anything of value (i.e., that don’t innovate, at least in any useful way that advances human progress), in exchange for not being sued on exclusionary patent rights.

Let’s internalize that for a second.  IV has collected over a billion dollars so that it can get more patents.  They make no products.  They apparently don’t funnel ideas to anyone else who makes products.  Heck, the only useful thing I’ve seen out of IV is that mosquito-killing laser that Mr. Myhrvold showed off at TED this year.  They collect massive amounts of money for their investors, and funnel much of it into buying and developing more patents.  When I talked to a headhunter recently, in the midst of the worst market for legal jobs ever, she told me that the one employer who was always hiring people with experience in patents was IV.  So, anecdotally, they hire a lot of lawyers.  They set up a lot of shell companies.  They sue people, or threaten to sue people, for massive license fees. 

Now think about where this money would go otherwise.  Microsoft, Apple, and Google, not to mention other large technology companies, have sizable legal departments with teams of attorneys focused full-time on managing the 50+ software patent cases they each are a defendant on.  My guess is that they individually spend hundreds of millions of dollars defending and settling such suits per year.  Most of the suits are backed by investment funds (here’s an example of one) through shell entities.  Many of these funds are backed (with no transparency) by traditional investment banks and hedge funds.  What we have, then, is a net outflow, on a yearly basis, of at least several hundred million dollars, from technology companies who "make stuff" and unquestionably innovate, to speculators and investors who don’t.  I don’t think that baseline fact is something anyone would question.  IV dresses that up in the clothing of "invention," but they’re really just out to capitalize on a broken patent system like every other non-practicing entity ("NPE" as we call them – they hate being called trolls).  What kinds of cool products and technologies would that money be used to develop?  We’ll never know, I suppose.  At the very least we can presume that the pace of innovation in technology is being slowed by this net outflow of capital to non-innovating parties.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that it isn’t just big companies who get sued.  Startups, especially in software, are constantly targetted by patent suits, especially by pseudo-competitors who want to kill more innovative upstarts.  How many great companies have been sunk by the costs of patent litigation?  Think about it this way – if Facebook had been sued on a social networking patent within a year of its existence, would it be around today?  It’s doubtful.

Finally, I think it’s important to address the moral point that’s always in the background when NPE’s talk about their business – having a patent doesn’t mean that you really invented anything, or that the person you’re suing would actually infringe in a rational world (the U.S. Constitution also only allows Congress to grant patents for "promoting progress," not for moral reasons).  Patents are legal documents, highly opaque, and the meaning of patent claims rarely, if ever, rationally corresponds to a real world product.  Patents are granted through a pseudo-adversarial administrative procedure where highly trained lawyers do their best to push extremely broad claims with extremely sparse/vague disclosure through overworked and underpaid patent examiners.  That’s the name of the game.  As much as companies like IV want to turn patent enforcement into a moral issue, it isn’t.  Patent lawyers are paid to get broad patents, not capture the essence of a real "invention."  And alleged infringers, in every case I’ve been involved in at least, don’t flagrantly violate patents.  They’re caught unaware, and even when they are aware, have the impossible task of figuring out if they would infringe.  It’s really a difficult Catch-22, but the patentees enjoy it, because it allows them to call defendants the "bad guys" while taking the moral high ground.

I’m extremely impressed with Vivek Wadhwa’s posts on TechCrunch.  He’s been blogging periodically for them since last fall and has shown that he’s willing to take on difficult, controversial, and complicated issues and discuss them in data driven and systematic ways.

Recently, Vivek wrote a post titled Silicon Valley: You and Some of Your VC’s have a Gender Problem that resulted from a research project he did with the National Center for Women & Information Technology (I’m chairman).  I thought the post was excellent.  The comments, however, were really enlightening to me.  The amount of anger and hostility, especially irrational attacks, surprised me.  Well – I guess it only surprised me a little – it mostly disappointed me.

After that article, Vivek sent me an email with the following questions “why did you originally get involved with NCWIT” and “how would you fix the problem of the dearth of women entrepreneurs?”.  The first one was easy – I pointed him at a post I wrote in September 2005 titled Why the NCWIT Board Chair is a Man.  I then spent some time thinking  and emailing with Lucy Sanders *the CEO of NCWIT), about what we have learned to address the question of “how would you fix the problem of the dearth of women entrepreneurs?”  My goal was to boil my answer down into a very simple set of suggestions, as NCWIT has several programs in their Entrepreneurial Alliance that address this problem.  In my experience, a simple answer is much better than a complex one, especially for people who haven’t yet thought hard about the problem but are interested in it.

I came up with two specific things that I’ve learned over the past five years and have incorporated into my brain:

1. We simply need more technical women in the software industry.  If there were more, there would be more starting software and Internet companies.

2. Existing entrepreneurs and VCs can help a lot by encouraging women to become entrepreneurs and then supporting them when they take the plunge.   It turns out that the simple act of encouragement (from parents, teachers, peers) is hugely impactful across the entire education and entrepreneurial pipeline so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it is also important in the startup phase.

At some level it’s that simple.  The implementation and execution of these two (related) concepts is really difficult.  So, when I read Vivek’s post this morning titled A Fix for Discrimination: Follow the Indian Trails I realized he had once again totally nailed it.  The example of how Indian entrepreneurs, first as individuals, and then through TiE, became a force in entrepreneurship through the US and the world, is a great one.  And it’s an excellent analogy for women (and other groups that feel discrimination in the entrepreneur ecosystem.)

Once again, the early comments were disappointing in their anger and hostility.  However, given some of the stuff I’ve heard over the past five years through my involvement in NCWIT, they weren’t a surprise to me this time.

If there is one thing you read today, go read Brad Burnham at Union Square Ventures excellent essay titled Software patents are the problem not the answer.

Several years ago when I first started saying things like “software patents are invalid constructs” or “software shouldn’t be able to be patented” or “software patents are a huge drag on innovation”, I was told by many people (lawyers, journalists, patent trolls, and other VCs) that while I might be right, no other venture capitalist would agree with me or support this position.

Several years ago my partner Jason Mendelson agreed and since then he’s become outspoken about his desire for the end of software patents.  Some people said that was cheating since he’s one of my partners at Foundry Group, but I’m ok with getting people on board one person at a time.  BTW – my other partners – Ryan McIntyre and Seth Levine – also strongly agree with this position.

Several months ago, Brad wrote a great essay titled We need an independent invention defense to minimize the damage of aggressive patent trolls.  I’m good friends with Brad and his partner Fred Wilson and we’ve had a number of conversations about this over the past six months, including the creation of an ad-hoc group we are calling “Abolish Software Patents” (which is similar in structure to the group behind the Startup Visa Movement.

Today, Brad wrote Software patents are the problem not the answer in response to the New York Times article on Nathan’ Myhrvold’s firm Intellectual Ventures approach to creating “invention capital” which was a soft profile piece in response to Myhrvold’s HBR article The Big Idea: Funding Eureka! 

Brad’s post is outstanding and mirrors my perspective on this.  And – if you want some entertainment (and additional perspective on what’s really going on) go take a look at TechDirt’s post today titled Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures Using Over 1,000 Shell Companies To Hide Patent Shakedown.

This problem with software patents (and the patent system in general) is going to come to a head in the next year or two and I hope the venture capital industry and broader software / Internet entrepreneurial community can rally behind intelligent solutions to this problem.

Innovation happens all over the place. While I typically write about innovation in software and the Internet (which are the two areas I invest in), it’s useful to occasionally step back and tell a story about innovation in a different area that I’ve been exposed to.

Peter Frykman was 15 years old when Muhammad Yunus proposed alleviating poverty through the innovation of the social-objective-driven entrepreneur, one who “competes in the marketplace with all other competitors but is inspired by a set of social objectives.” In 2008 Frykman founded Driptech, his for-profit social venture located in Palo Alto, CA, with a mission to create extremely affordable, water efficient irrigation solutions for small-plot farmers in developing nations.

By devising drip irrigation technology that eliminates the complexity of emitters, Frykman and his team reduced the number of parts for a drip system by over 85%, cut the costs typical of commercial drip irrigation by over 60%, and simultaneously improved reliability and ease of maintenance. 

This innovation makes Driptech the first company to design and manufacture drip irrigation specifically for the world’s poorest farmers, allowing them to grow crops year-round while conserving water, labor, and time. Not only can these farmers now finally produce enough vegetables to meet their own families’ nutritional needs, they become micro-entrepreneurs by growing additional crops to sell in local markets, substantially raising their incomes.

But Driptech’s contribution to poverty eradication doesn’t end there. Frykman’s decentralized manufacturing model will deploy production facilities directly to where the product will be sold, allowing for local customization of the systems, additional cost reductions, and added benefit to rural economies through the generation of jobs. The for-profit nature of the venture is not only economically sustainable, but scalable as well, promising future positive social impacts that will grow along with the company.

Having proven his product through a pilot study in India and initial sales in China, Frykman recently raised angel funding to ramp up his manufacturing capabilities. While this isn’t an area that we invest in, I was turned on to Peter via a good friend, Scott Petry, who was the founder of Postini (and is now at Google).  Scott pulled in another long time friend – George Northup – the President of Memeo (Foundry Group is an investor). I find it easy to be supportive of entrepreneurs in social ventures that are supported by good friends.

So, congratulations to Peter Frykman and Driptech. Don’t miss his panel on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business 2010 Conference on Entrepreneurship coming up February 26th from 1:30-2:45pm.

After not seeing the word patent in my daily information routine for a few weeks, I saw it twice today – first in an article titled Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’ (in the NY Times) and then in Region Sustains Robust Patent Production in the WSJ.  Both stirred me up early this morning, but for different reasons.

If you are interested in patents, I encourage you to read Turning Patents Into ‘Invention Capital’ as I’m very interested in your reaction.  I’d love to hear what you think in the comments (anonymous is fine if you are concerned about attribution on this one.)  I have an opinion and this article didn’t add anything to my thoughts (which is partly why I’m looking for yours as I’m curious what others think.)  So I hit Ctrl-W and went to the next tab in Chrome.

The title of Region Sustains Robust Patent Production was fine (and yes it refers to Silicon Valley), but the first sentence in the article made me nuts:

“The economic slump has yet to damp innovation in Silicon Valley, at least not by one widely followed measure: patent production.”

It’s a short article that basically states that Silicon Valley received a similar percentage of utility patents granted in the US in 2009 that it did in 2008 and 2007. 

“Silicon Valley denizens received 13,231, or 7.9%, of the total 167,350 "utility" patents granted in the U.S. in 2009, according to IFI Patent Intelligence, a unit of Wolters Kluwer Health that analyzes patent data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That is on par with Silicon Valley’s share of patents nationwide in 2008 and 2007, according to IFI.”

Other than the factual statement, there is no possible way the conclusion made in the first paragraph can be extracted from this data.  The primary flaw here is that patents take many years to be granted.  The number of patents granted in 2009 has nothing to do with the innovation activity in 2009! 

Now, I don’t believe that patent activity correlates to innovation.  While this might have been true in the 1970’s, there are so many factors in today’s broken patent system that undermine this.  The article even points one out in the list sentence:

“Like many tech firms, Cisco offers some financial incentives to employees who file and receive patents, he (Tony Bates, SVP at Cisco) says.”

The “pay to file” dynamic is a mechanism that undermines the integrity of the patent system.  Here’s the issue: assume I am a huge company that pays my engineers on average $100k / year.  I offer $1k for every patent filing they make during work time.  So, as an engineer, you can increase your compensation by 1% for every patent you file (forget about whether it actually gets granted).  As the large company, I’ve got a huge legal machine in place to file the patents – all you need to do as an engineer is going through a prescribed process, write up a bunch of stuff that gets dropped into the patent application, and come to a few meetings to review the patent application.  Is that worth an additional 1% of your comp regardless of the quality of the application?  Sure! 

Regardless of whether you think patents are useful, this is just such a crummy indication of “innovation”. 

I’ve been obsessed with the notion of email as the ultimate social network for a while.  I wrote a post in 2007 titled Social Networks In Obvious Places that catalyzed me to thing harder about this as an investor.  I eventually decided that the email address is the ultimate reference id for one’s current online identity and that it was ludicrous to ignore this notion. This ultimately led to my investment in Gist in 2009. 

Today, there are a number of folks approaching different parts of the problem.  I believe the underlying data architecture and approach is critically important, as email resides in many different data stores and move through many different systems.  In addition, there are numerous other applications that use email as the key reference id independent of username (LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook come immediately to mind, but there are thousands of others.)  There is no question in my mind that the web (or the cloud if you like) is your friend in this scenario.

This morning, I noticed that Microsoft had released a beta of Microsoft Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003.  I’m running Outlook 2007 on my desktop at home so without thinking too hard I downloaded it, installed it, restarted Outlook, downloaded the LinkedIn connector (the only one available for 2007), restarted Outlook again, and started cranking through email.  I liked the Email Connector window that appears at the bottom of my Inbox view, but I noticed that none of the LinkedIn data seemed to be appearing for my specific contacts.  I didn’t think much of this and figured Outlook was doing something magical in the background (since various info from my Inbox and Calendar started appearing in this view.)  I noticed a few things I didn’t like, such as the every calendar item taking up two lines in the display because the second line was an invite.ics file, but I figured that was just beta stuff.  After an hour or so, I had to jump in my car and head to Denver for a board meeting. 

Once I got into AT&T cell phone range (about ten minutes from my house) I swiped left on my iPhone and typed in the last name for a CEO of a company I’m on the board of.  I noticed that I had two entries for him.  This was strange because I’m meticulous about keeping my address book clean and deduped.  The first entry didn’t have his phone number.  That was really strange since I call him regularly.  The second entry did and looked like the correct record.  I called him, but something was bugging me.

After we talked, I did this again to call another person.  Same issue.  This time I noticed a picture with the little LinkedIn logo on the first entry, but again no phone number.  The second entry didn’t have the LinkedIn picture, but had the correct phone number (and full entry).  By this point I’d figured out what had happened.  I called Amy, told her to shut down my computer at home (I usually leave it on during the day) just in case my new friend the Outlook Social Connector could be stopped before it imported my entire LinkedIn file as new contact records.

I was annoyed throughout the day that I’d munged up my address book.  Tonight, when I got home, I hopped on another board call.  I fired up my computer, uninstalled the Outlook Social Connector, and then spent a few minutes poking around in Outlook contacts trying to find an easy way to delete all the new records.  I fought my way through a few different Outlook contact views and couldn’t figure out how to get the records to consistently appear.  If I searched by name, all the dupes came up.  But if I went into a list view, no such luck – only the correct record appeared and the new LinkedIn ones were no where to be found.  I manually started scrolling through my address book on my iPhone while on the call but by the time I got through the B’s I realized this was an idiotic way to do this and there must be a better way.

A few minutes later it occurred to me that Outlook might have created a new “subfolder” in the contacts view and put all the LinkedIn ones there.  Lo and behold it did and all I needed to do to get rid of the 1800 new contact records was to delete the LinkedIn folder.  Done.  After some happy iPhone syncing they are all gone from my iPhone also.

The decision to take this approach at a data level is beyond comprehension to me.  Almost 100% of the duplicate LinkedIn contacts shared the same email address as my Outlook address records.  I didn’t want a NEW contact record for each LinkedIn one, I wanted them to be “magically attached” to my existing contact record.  So – when I look up Brad Feld, I don’t get the “Brad Feld” Outlook contact record and the “Brad Feld” LinkedIn contact record.  They are both brad@feld.com – that’s all I want.

So – be forewarned – unless you want to gunk up your address book with duplicates, don’t install the current beta of Microsoft Outlook Social Connector.  Maybe I did something wrong, or have a weird configuration of Outlook 2007, but I simply did a straight install.  Maybe Microsoft will fix this in the next version, but it definitely doesn’t seem ready for prime time, especially on live data.