Fortunately, as Jack Bauer tries to find his way around China next season, he’ll have Telcontar’s maps to help him.  And no – I really don’t think they are going to kill him – “he’s much too valuable.”

I love exponential curves – they are beautiful things.  Whether they are linked to positive or negative things, they signal opportunity.  Dave Sifry – CEO of Technorati – has started on his February 2006 State of the Blogosphere report.  He starts off with a very pretty exponential curve and begins his periodic dissection of the growth of the blogosphere.

If you are interested in Sling Media’s $46m financing by the likes of Liberty Media, EchoStar, and Goldman Sachs, my partner Ryan McIntyre (who sits on their board) has his view of it.

If you haven’t used Technorati for a while because of either performance or accuracy issues, try it again.  Dave Sifry – Technorati’s CEO – has a post up describing their performance improvements.  As a Technorati investor, I’ve given Dave and team lots of steady feedback and have watched with happiness as the performance, relevance, and accuracy has steadily improved as they’ve continued to scale up and tune their infrastructure to handle the massive number of blogs that they are indexing.  Oh – and they’ve added a bunch of cool new features along the way.  Dave and his team listen – if you have issues after trying it again, email me and I’ll pass it on or give them feedback directly.

It’s last week’s news (literally) but if you are interested in hearing directly from Brent Simmons (NetNewsWire) and Greg Reinacker (NewsGator) on NewsGator’s acquisition of NetNewsWire, Niall Kennedy has a good interview online.

Look for more M&A news this week – everyone knows that Moreover has been acquired – the current rumor is that it’s Verisign again (who acquired Dave Winer’s Weblogs.com last week).

On August 4th, Greg Reinacker – NewsGator founder and CTO - announced NewsGator Enterprise Server and stated that it would ship in Q3.  On Friday night, September 30, at 7:28pm (Mountain Time) Greg sent out an email stating “FYI – build 3202 was declared “gold” at 7:13pm tonight.” 

In my first company, we had an enormous amount of scrutiny on releases as we shipped them all the time.  Since we wrote custom software, we often updated our customers’ systems and – as a result – were releasing software for clients as frequently as daily (although typically we tried to stay on an approximately once a month cycle.)  Since we usually had more than 20 active clients at a time, we could have a half a dozen releases in any given week.

For a while, we’d say things like “we’ll release it on Tuesday.”  We eventually figured out that this meant (at least to the person working on the software) “I can work on this up until 11:59:59pm on Tuesday, at which point the client will be asleep anyway, so I can let it slip until Wednesday morning and finish it up then early before the client gets to work.”  You can imagine what this devolved into. 

We eventually started specifying date / time pairs for releases – it was ok to release something on 9/30 @ 11:59pm (or 9/30 @ 12:01pm).  9/31 @ 12:01am didn’t work, although I’m sure someone tried.

So – 9/30 @ 7:28pm counts for Q3.  Congrats NewsGator. 

Dave Sifry – the CEO of Technorati – has published his latest State of the Blogosphere in two posts: Part 1: Blog Growth and Part 2: Posting Volume – that looks at the growth of the Blogosphere over the past six months.  Some fun facts (as of July 30, 2005) follow:

• Technorati tracks 14.2m blogs and 1.3m links, about double what it tracked six months ago
• Technorati tracks 80,000 newly created blogs each day (a blog every second)
• Technorati tracks 900,000 blog posts each day (10.4 posts a second)
• 55% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past three months.
• 18% of the blogs Technorati tracks has a post in the past week.
• The weekend posting average is 5% – 10% less then the daily posting average.

Dave has more coming this week (Part 3 – coming tomorrow – includes the growth of tagging).

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.

Microsoft announced yesterday that their MSN division acquired MessageCast.  We were the seed investors in MessageCast and my partner Heidi Roizen sat on the board.

As with many acquisitions that happen early in the life of a company, this one is bittersweet.  On one hand we are very happy with the deal and excited for the entrepreneurs (Royal Farros and Dave Hodson) and their team.  On the other hand, we were enthusiastic about the long term prospects for MessageCast and were looking forward to a continued working relationship with a group of folks we know and love working with (Heidi and Royal go back many years as they were partners in T/Maker – the folks that brought us clip art.) I was the backup partner on MessageCast and delighted in badgering Royal and Dave about RSS whenever I had the opportunity.

This is a completely logical deal for both Microsoft and MessageCast.  They had been working very closely together around the MSN Alert service.  MessageCast had integrated MSN Alerts with RSS and build an extremely publisher friendly service to enable a publisher to distribute his RSS feed (or any other data feed) via Microsoft Messenger.  MessageCast was beginning to work with other IM services (the usual suspects) but had such significant IP around the MSN Alert SDK it made perfect sense for Microsoft to integrate this into their Alerts business.

Royal, Dave, et.al. – congrats.  Microsoft – well done!

I’ve never completely understood the whole cell phone industry subsidize handset thing, but I’ll roll with it (ok – I understand it – market share, total value of the customer, service plan lock-in, uplift pricing for additional functionality over time).  I love my T-Mobile Sidekick II (as you’d expect since I’m an investor – but I really do love it even though Amy forbids me from taking it to bed with me).  You can get it for NEGATIVE $50 from Amazon right now.

Paris Hilton loves her Sidekick II also (note to self – don’t use your famous dog’s name as your password).  If you want a demo of how she uses it, click here.