Today Microsoft announced that they have agreed to acquire Danger.  Congrats to the gang at Danger who have created a dynamite set of products with a significant and passionate user base.  Hats off also to my Mobius partner Greg Galanos who has been involved as an investor / board member in Danger from the very beginning.

Today’s guest blogger is my partner, Jason Mendelson.  I’m immensely proud of Jason, my partner Chris Wand, Stratify’s CEO Ramana Venkata, his excellent management team, and all the great folks at Stratify for their fantastic work in creating the market leading eDiscovery company.

Today, Stratify and Iron Mountain announced they have entered into an agreement for Stratify to be acquired by Iron Mountain for approximately $158m in cash.  Stratify is a Mobius Venture Capital portfolio company that Chris Wand and I have had the pleasure of serving on the board for the past several years.  We’ve really enjoyed the journey that we’ve shared with Ramana Venkata, the CEO and the rest of his capable management team. 

Stratify has revolutionized the way that attorneys deal with the eDiscovery process.  For those of you fortunate enough to not know what “eDiscovery” is, think about all the millions of pages of paper, and hundreds of GB of email and files that lawyers comb through when one party sues another.  What used to be a completely manual process that resulted in spiraling costs and sometimes marginal quality, has now been partially automated by technology.  This process has been dubbed “eDiscovery.” 

Stratify’s best-of-breed patented technology uses statistical algorithms to “read” documents – in any form, in any language and automatically group like items together, discarding duplicates, segregating out irrelevant data and creating computer-generated named folders where similar-subject matter documents are stored.  Also included in their platform are analytics to study relationships between documents, emails trails and a host of other capabilities that make anyone who sees them wish for a more stringent document retention policy. 

Iron Mountain Digital and Stratify have had a burgeoning partnership, whereby Stratify eDiscovery solutions were offered in combination with those from Iron Mountain, the trusted name in information management.  It’s a natural partnership that the company holding and protecting  information assets for enterprises is acquiring the technology and expertise to make them actionable – giving  their customers the ability to analyze and leverage information in valuable ways. 

We were the only institutional investors in Stratify and therefore we played an even larger and more active role in supporting the company’s efforts than normal.  Whether it was sitting around drawing on a white board developing mock ups of screen shots, or tagging along on early sales calls trying to sell to lawyers who had never heard of the term “eDiscovery” it was a great experience.  In fact, it was fun.  It’s even more rewarding that the company became such a huge success.

Today marks a great step in Stratify’s ambitions to make enterprises’ unstructured information actionable, one vertical at a time.  I look forward to saying that “I knew them when,” as they join the Iron Mountain platform to create even a larger and more dominant footprint.  Congratulations to Stratify and Ramana with special mentions to Meena, George, Sanjeev, Steve, David, Joy, Parveen, Allyson, Rob and Wendy.  Also we wouldn’t be where we are today with the incredible assistance of Peter Falvey and Michael Barker at Revolution Partners and Jon Gavenman of Heller Ehrman / VLG.  You were all a true pleasure to work with.  Congratulations too, to Iron Mountain for their brilliant decision to join forces!

BusinessWeek has a web slideshow running called Big Tech Buyouts.  It profiles the founders of 10 Internet companies that have been acquired this year.  Three of them – FeedBurner, Sling Media, and Postini – are companies we were investors in.  Everyone appears to be smiling.

Notice the abundance of gray hair (or in Dick Costolo’s case, no hair.)  I realize this is shameless brogging, but it’s fun sometimes.  And I’m really proud of these guys and the companies they helped create.

Today EchoStar announced that is has acquired Sling Media for $380 million in cash.  My partner and 2007 travel buddy Ryan McIntyre is smiling tonight as he crawls into bed and reflects on another great deal on the heals of his successful investment in Postini (acquired in July by Google for $625 million.)  I’d recommend that he snuggle up to a Slingbox, but I’ll restrain myself.

Ryan has written a nice essay on the story of his experience with Sling Media.  The Sling team – led by Blake Krikorian – has created a great company and a superb set of products.  I knew I was in love when I turned over my first Slingbox and noticed a little sticker with the phrase “Lebowski” on it.  Sling packed an incredible amount of innovative software (and a tiny bit of hardware) into a plastic box that was mostly filled with air.  The magic was in the software (dynamic video-stream-optimization technology called Lebowski) which reinforced our view that “it’s all about the software.”

Guys – awesome job.  EchoStar – you guys just made a really smart purchase.

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

1050 Walnut Street
Suite 210
Boulder, 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, Greenmont Capital, Google (@Last), Confluence Commons, Lacuna, Collective Intellect, Prospect Street, Tango, Applied Trust, Blink Gallery, Paul Berberian and Co., Slice of Lime, Metzger, Van Heyst Group, Ravenwood, Texture Media, Mango, and I’m sure I missed a bunch.  Of course, being Boulder, there is sushi everywhere.

We’ll miss the constant entertainment from our friends at Return Path and StillSecure (who we shared offices with in Superior), but I’m sure they’ll enjoy the nice big juicy offices we’ve left them to expand into.

If you haven’t tried Technorati in a while, go take another look.  At their birthday party, they rolled out a new major upgrade to the service.  Dave Sifry – the CEO / founder describes it in detail.  My quick scan around the blogosphere pundits showed consistently strong positive feedback.  I often get asked how I manage to keep up with as much information as I do – especially about the companies I’m involved with.  Part of my secret weapon is Technorati, NewsGator Online search feeds, and FeedDemon.  Plus – they all work really nicely together.

Happy birthday guys.

My partner Greg Galanos led the first round investment in Danger, the company that makes the T-Mobile Sidekick.  I’ve loved it since the day the Sidekick 1 came out and – over the past five years – have tried pretty much every other mobile / data device and always come back to my Sidekick.

I got my Sidekick 3 a few days before heading to Alaska.  I didn’t expect it to work up here (my Sidekick 2 didn’t work last summer – T-Mobile’s service wasn’t strong enough.)  Imagine my surprise when I showed up and it worked perfectly.  I’ve had two weeks of it now and it is a simply awesome product.

Greg pointed me to a great review of the Sidekick 3 on the hiptop.com site.  The author totally nails why this is such a great product.  The brilliance of the company has been that they’ve known their demographic and stuck to it (hint – I’m not in the demographic.)  Amazingly, with each interation, the product adds more distance from the alternatives.

After several years of trying to explain to people the difference between a Sidekick and a Blackberry, I finally settled on a straightforward analogy.  Sidekick: Blackberry = Mac:Windows.  That kind of says it all.

When Niel Robertson – the founder and CTO of Newmerix – started talking about his idea for a set of “next-generation software quality assurance” products aimed at packaged application vendors, he regularly listed several packaged application vendors, including PeopleSoft, Siebel, Oracle, and SAP as candidate packaged applications to target.

Newmerix focused their development initially on PeopleSoft products and has released three products – Automate!Test (automated software testing), Automate!Change (change management), and Automate!Program Manager (product management and regulatory compliance) – all for the PeopleSoft platform. 

When Oracle acquired PeopleSoft, a number of VCs that I know said something like “Brad – your screwed – there’s no reason for these products after Oracle owns the entire ERP footprint.”  “Au contraire” I responded (using one of the few French phrases that I’ve actually managed to learn), the trend and complete migration zoo that Oracle will generate insures the need for these types of products (if you want a hysterical and detailed overview about why this is happening, take a look at Niel’s brilliant post titled “I Pity The Fool” – I bet you never thought that Mr. T and the elusive Dirk Benedict could be woven into a serious discussion of Oracle’s migration path for the various products they’ve acquired.)

Of course, only time (and performance) will tell the end of the story, but so far it’s getting more and more exciting every quarter.  However, every time I talked to Niel, he’d look at me and say something like “SAP.”  Sometimes it was more, but often that was it.  Today, he backed up his word(s) by announcing that Newmerix now supports SAP’s products.  We are starting via the acquisition of the Object Manager product line from a company named Skywire – these products immediately become Newmerix Automate!Change for SAP and Automate!Program Manager for SAP.

These acquisitions use a long time “early acquisition” strategy that I’ve used successfully in many of my portfolio companies (Fred Wilson kindly referred to me as the “master of the venture rollup” – fortunately I can count some real masters like Jerry Poch and Len Fassler as mentors.)  If you’ve followed NewsGator’s trajectory, you know that they have acquired three companies to date – FeedDemon/BradSoft, NetNewswire/Ranchero Software, and Smartfeed.org/Windows Mobile Reader.  

As an early stage VC, I’ve found that when you’ve got a clear long term strategy developed, a super strong leadership team that is open to integrating new technologies, people and products into their company (vs. a classical “not invested here approach”), and a willingness to get close to great small companies that can help you quickly extend your product footprint, a buy (vs. build) approach is often really compelling.  There are lots of risks and not every acquisition or company is successful, but if you do it right, you can end up with some very nice companies like Return Path.

Congrats Niel and the Newmerix team on your nice strategic move – I look forward to the next one.

Eric has a great use case for the Slingbox and the World Cup.  Since the only real excitement in soccer is a goal or a penalty (I know, blasphemy), multitasking with soccer is easy.  The photo example is here.

I occasionally hear things from people about how “spam is on the decline.”  This always entertains me because immediately after receiving an email like this, I get a 200 message comment spam attack on my blog and three IM windows pop up in Trillian with random people I don’t know saying “Hi” with a link to what I’m sure is something truly evil.

Yesterday, Postini announced that instant messaging attacks had increased by 500% in May.  They are dealing with large enough numbers and a diverse enough sample size for the numbers to be statistically significant.  Here are some interesting ones for you.

Instant Messaging

• 138% increase in corporate IM traffic
• 500% increase in IM spam attacks
• Nifty new names for IM attacks such as Browaf, Tilebot, and Khoobe

Email

• Postini processed 25 billion email messages in May (13% increase from April)
• 86% of traffic was spam or contained viruses
• 65% of traffic was rejected at the network layer (e.g. directory harvest or denial of service attacks)

If you like stats, Postini has consolidated ones across their entire system.  IM (what I think of as “Spim”) is clearly on the rise. 

Spam in the blogosphere has continued to accelerate unabated.  Why – oh why – do people think that I want a comment that says something like “I haven’t been up to much today. I’ve just been letting everything happen without me. Basically nothing seems worth bothering with. I’ve just been hanging out doing nothing. I just don’t have anything to say right now. More or less nothing happening.” on my blog with an associated link?  At least my filters are working on the porn ones now.