Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app. 

There are a lot of fun connections here for me.  For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist.  If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot.  The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).

The iPhone app has been out for a while and is a killer.  I’ve seen the Android app – it’s equally cool and useful.  Each of them connect up to the Gist service that lives in the cloud and connects together all of your contact information, builds an implicit social network based on your email traffic and friends lists, and surfaces a variety of content (including news as well as real-time stuff) for your contacts.

Learn that Name was a Startup Weekend Seattle project from a few months ago.  Andrew Hyde, who is the community manager for TechStars, created Startup Weekend and I attended the first one in Boulder.  It has become an amazing worldwide phenomenon that is now run by Clint Nelsen and Marc Nager.  So – that’s linkage two for me.

The idea for Learn that Name came from Eric Koester, a lawyer in Cooley’s Seattle office.  Eric has been super helpful on the Startup Visa initiative as well, working on an ABA brief for us that will hopefully be officially approved soon.  Who said that lawyers weren’t a force for good in the world?  So – that’s linkage number three.

TechCrunch’s article gives a little more history on the deal and how the proceeds (yes – there are proceeds) are being split up among the team members that participated in the Startup Weekend project.  I know that at the very first Startup Weekend that I attended in Boulder there was a hope that some of these projects would spin out and either get commercialized or acquired.  I’m proud to be involved in one of the first ones to have this happen.  Oh – and Learn that Name when played within Gist’s iPhone app is a lot of fun.

Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud.  The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything.  Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year - is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application management “Pogoplug Simple.”

The Trial Edition makes it easy to test drive any of about thirty different open source applications on any of several cloud server providers.  Register with your email address, log in, pick an application, click Install, and in about 30 seconds you’ll be up and running with a fully-functioning application accessible on the web.  You don’t need an Amazon EC2 or Rackspace account, as with “appliance” providers.  You don’t need to learn about “instances” and “images” and security groups.  You don’t need to know how to install and configure a web server or MySQL, or download, install and configure software code.  You don’t even need to configure the application itself – Standing Cloud plugs in default values for you.  And it’s free.

Like the Pogoplug, the Standing Cloud Trial Edition doesn’t do anything that a motivated IT professional couldn’t do another way.  It’s just a lot faster and easier.  But for someone who is *not* an IT professional, it removes some rather high barriers to both open source applications and cloud computing.

The Trial Edition is just the beginning for Standing Cloud.  Soon you will be able to host, manage, and scale applications with the same emphasis on simplicity.  Give it a try and give me feedback.

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.

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that I’m a huge believer that the way we interact with computers in 20 years will be radically different than how we interact with them today.  I’ve put my money where my mouth is as Foundry Group has invested in a number of companies around human computer interaction, including Oblong.

For the past few years, every time someone talks about next generation user interfaces, a reference to the movie Minority Report pops up.  Sometimes the writer gets this right and links it back to John Underkoffler, the co-founder of Oblong, but many times they don’t.  Today the NY Times got it right in their article You, Too, Can Soon Be Like Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’.

That’s a picture of John Underkoffler at Ted on Friday giving one of his jaw dropping demos of Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment.  Lest you think this is science fiction, I can assure you that Oblong has several major customers, is generating meaningful revenue, and is poised to enter several mainstream markets with g-speak derived products.

The company has been steadily building momentum over the past few years since we invested.  The TechCrunch article The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3) gives you a little of the history.  More of the history is at Oblong’s post origins: arriving here that go back to 1994.  I personally have stories going back to 1984 when I first met John, but we’ll save those for another day.

While there is an amazing amount of interesting stuff suddenly going on around HCI (and we have invested in a few other companies around this), Oblong is shipping step 2 and about to ship step 3 while most are working on step 1.  As John likes to say, “the old model of one human, one machine, one mouse, one screen is passe.”

My friends at NewsGator had a great 2009 – enterprise social computing came into its own and they were at the front of the pack.  If an organization uses SharePoint and is interested in social computing, NewsGator Social Sites is a must have product.

Yesterday, NewsGator acquired Tomoye.  The two companies are highly complimentary – Tomoye adds a set of SharePoint related community and social computing products to the mix as well as a fantastic government-centric customer base including organizations like the Federal Reserve Bank, The United States Army, Defense Acquisition University, The United States Air Force, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and U.S. Agency for International Development.  Eric Sauve, the founder/CEO of Tomoye, has built a really nice business that I’m excited to welcome into the NewsGator family.

CMSWire has a nice article summarizing the deal.  If you are interested in enterprise social computing and want to get connected to the folks at NewsGator, feel free to drop me an email – I’d be happy to introduce you. 

Yesterday was Return Path’s 10th Birthday.  Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO and founder, wrote a great reflective post on his blog titled A Perfect Ten. Among other things he covers what he is proudest of from Return Path’s first decade as well as what he regrets or would have done differently.

Matt and his team have created a significant company that is profitable, a market leader in its segment, and is growing nicely.  It has a strong balance sheet and an excellent leadership team. While the business has evolved significantly from its creation a decade ago, it has always has a clear sense of purpose and vision which has stayed pretty steady, in large part due to Matt and his executive teams’ leadership and stability.

Since I’ve been involved in Return Path since 2000, I thought I’d tell my story of how I recall my initial involvement.  Some time in early 2000, we (Mobius) met with three entrepreneurs (Eric Kirby, George Bilbrey, and Kevin O’Connell) about an idea for a company they had created to provide “Internet Email Change of Address” services.  This was a process similar to what the US Post Office does when you physically move – where you fill out a change of address form – but for email when you change your email address.  The business was originally called IECOA but fortunately was changed to Veripost about the time we invested in it in 2000.

Veripost was physically based in the Mobius Colorado Incubator that we ran from 2000 to 2004.  Since it was one of the first companies in the incubator I got to know the founders and the early team well.  Veripost quickly grew to about 20 people, built a neat service, and started signing up partners.  They had one competitor – Return Path.  At first, Return Path was demonized, as in “those guys are giving away the service for free and are going to ruin the market” or “their technology sucks – they are just spending a lot more money than us to get visibility”.  While there were elements of this, it was more a function of a deep seated early rivalry than anything else.  Matt and Eric had met each other a few times and it turned out that Matt and George both knew each other from working together earlier in their careers at Mercer Management Consulting.  So, even though there was healthy competition, there was open contact and mutual respect.

When Veripost went out to raise their Series B financing, they met with a few investors that had recently met with Return Path, who was also out raising a round. I recall at least one of them giving feedback to the Veripost team that the two companies were identical in this very early market and rather than bludgeoning each other over the head, should consider joining forces.

Eric knew that I was good friends with Fred Wilson, one of Return Path’s investors through his fund Flatiron Partners (I was also a small investor in Flatiron Partners so indirectly a tiny investor in Return Path.)  Matt and Eric encouraged us to talk in the context of a merger and financing.  I can’t remember who initiated the call, but Fred and I had a typically frank conversation where we quickly cut to the chase and agreed that it was worth exploring merging the companies and doing a financing behind one company.

If I remember correctly, the call took less than 15 minutes.  It went something like this:

Brad: “This feels like a 50/50 deal – let’s just keep it simple.”

Fred: “I want a little more for my side because we’ve invested a lot more money than you have. How about 55/45.”

Brad: “Done.”

Matt and Eric had similarly effective conversations and agreed early on that there would be tough cuts on both sides with the goal of ending up with one company rather than two companies pretending to be one.  As part of that, they got comfortable with the idea of having two locations (NY for headquarters / sales; Colorado for engineering and ops).  Matt would be the CEO, the Veripost executives would transition out of the company with the Colorado engineering leadership becoming part of the management team.  The combined company would end up at 20 people which was the right size for the business.  Given that the Return Path brand was better known than the Veripost brand (and frankly was a better name) the combined company would be called Return Path.

Matt and Eric quickly built a joint plan and presented it to several of the VCs they had each been talking to.  Greg Sands at Sutter Hill totally got it, agreed with the thesis behind the merger, and put down a term sheet to lead a round of the merged company.  After some legal mechanics, the new Return Path was born to go after the ECOA market.  Eric, George, and Kevin transitioned out of Return Path as expected and the company began gaining ground quickly.

Simultaneously, George started a new company (with support from Eric) called Assurance Systems.  With it he tackled a new email related problem that he’d come up that he was calling “the email deliverability problem” – specifically that desired email was increasingly getting caught in spam filters, especially as more focus came on the “spam problem.”  Even though we (Mobius) hadn’t invested in Assurance Systems we gave George space in our incubator and stayed close to what he was doing, including plenty of “hey – how’s it going” moments in the bathroom.

Return Path helped out with the early sales and marketing and Assurance Systems was pretty quickly generating more revenue per month than the Return Path ECOA product.  It quickly became obvious that Assurance Systems should be part of Return Path and Matt and George worked out a deal for Return Path to acquire Assurance Systems.  Today, Assurance Systems is the core of Return Path (we sold off the ECOA business several years ago) and George and his co-founder Tom Bartel are still key members of the Return Path team.

I’ve got many other Return Path stories – many good, some bad – but most are instructive.  But I’ll let this one stand as a tribute to Return Path on its 10th anniversary.

Finally, in Matt’s post he thanks his investors and board members for our “unwavering support” over the years.  Matt – right back at you – thanks to you and everyone at Return Path for the incredible effort you have put in to building this great company.

Special Bonus Feature: Matt knows I Hate Powerpoint and I encourage you to read his post Powerpointless and Fred Wilson’s post Presentations vs Discussions.  Matt took a hint from my post The Best Board Meetings and ran the entire eight hour meeting without a single powerpoint slide.  It was awesome.

A month ago, NewsGator released TapLynx – their framework for building iPhone apps.  They took the core code of NetNewsWire for the iPhone, abstracted it out, and built a really powerful and easy iPhone app development system as an SDK.  A month later, the iPhone apps built on top of TapLynx are starting to appear, including All Things Digital, Variety, Discovery, TechStars, and the amazing and entertaining Foundry Group iPhone app.

You can download the TapLynx SDK for free to evaluate it.  You only pay if and when you deploy your app to production.  The license price for the TapLynx framework is $3,499 – when you consider the amount of code it includes and the time it’ll save you, it’s a steal.

That said, the folks at NewsGator have gotten into the holiday spirit.  For 24 hours, they are going to celebrate Black Friday (11/27) by offering 50 licenses for $500 each.  

A final note – the TechStars and Foundry Group iPhone apps were built by our friends at Slice of Lime.  They are one of the TapLynx Premium Partners and are ready to crank out an iPhone app for you whenever you are.

I’m in NY all week with a jam packed schedule so I thought it would be a good week to talk a little about how I use Gist since I’ll use it every day to help me deal with a shortened daily information routine.  As you probably know, we are investors in Gist and I’m on the board so – while this is fanboy stuff – there are also a few other goals of this post including (a) helping you understand the promise of Gist, (b) enticing you to give it a try, and (c) eliciting feedback from those of you that have given it a try and want more / better / different (e.g. feedback of any kind is good).

I’m going to start with the Dashboard View.  This is the one from yesterday (I grabbed a screen shot before I left for the airport) – I was intending to write this on the plane but my superpower kicked in and I slept most of the way.

In the left hand column you can see the people that I have news on.  If you know my world, you’ll recognize a lot of those names.  They are the people that I have “at least some email contact with.”  If you squint, you can see that I’ve set “Importance” to at least 50 – I find this is the right threshold for me.  I then sort this column by “Name” as my brain likes alphabetical order instead of "most recent” order.  I set the time frame to “Last 48 hours” – that catches things if I don’t check at exactly the same time every day.  Finally, I turn off “tweets” in the dashboard as I find them too noisy.

I then work my way systematically down the list.  I start at the top, scan the center column to see if want to read anything on that person, click on any URL to expand, and then click the check mark to the right of the person’s name when done (to mark “as read” – at which point that person disappears from the dashboard view).  Gist automatically highlights the next name and I repeat.

I usually have between 25 and 50 names in the list – sometimes it gets as high as 100.  I find that this dashboard view gets almost all of the daily news I care about with regard to people I know.  It occasionally misses something – usually a person I care about that doesn’t fit about the “50 importance” threshold so I can quickly and easily change that.  But, for a first pass through what’s going on, this is a super efficient way to start the day.  Max time spent per day – 15 minutes (usually less).

It took me about two weeks of running Gist to get this Dashboard tuned just right.  Whenever someone would pop up that I didn’t care about, I’d click the universal sign for “no more of that” (the big red circle with the line through it – “Stop watching for new items”).  Once I got used to the tuning rhythm, it was trivial to deal with.

If you have Gist installed, give the Dashboard another try and give me feedback on what would make it easier to get up and running with it and using it every day.  If you don’t have Gist running, give it a try. 

Fanboy out – time for a run down Park Avenue – wave at me if you see me (no, not that Wave).

We’ve been investors in Oblong since 2007 and I’ve talked about them regularly on this blog including a post titled I’ve Seen The Future from my first meeting with them.  I’ve known two of the founders – John Underkoffler and Kevin Parent – since we lived together at MIT (we all lived in a fraternity called ADP on Mass Ave. at the same time, along with a bunch of other entrepreneurs including Colin Angle – the founder of iRobot and Jeet Singh / Joe Chung – the founders of ATG.)

A few months ago my partner Jason Mendelson was introduced to a reporter from Bloomberg who was looking for “innovative companies to interview” for an upcoming Bloomberg TV series called Bloomberg Innovators.  Jason immediately thought of Oblong and made the introduction. 

Bloomberg Innovators has four thirty minute episodes – the first one titled Turning Point is about Oblong.  In addition to highlighting the amazing stuff the gang at Oblong is doing, the show takes you through the history of how the innovation that is called Oblong’s g-speak Spatial Operating Environment was created.  As part of this, you get to see some pictures of John Underkoffler 20+ years ago in the Media Lab working on the Luminous Room along with some background on John’s work on the movie Minority Report.

If you are interested in how innovations evolve, the future of human computer interaction, Oblong, how some VCs think about investing in the future, or just want to have your mind blown with some amazing stuff, spend 30 minutes enjoying the show.

Bloomberg TV doesn’t allow embeds, so you’ll have to launch Bloomberg Innovators: Turning Point from here.

Bloomberg TV is running a show called Bloomberg Innovators.  One of our portfolio companies – Oblong – is the focus of the first episode that airs this Friday (10/30) on Bloomberg TV at 9pm and 11pm ET.  As a special bonus, Jason and my Donkey Kong machine are in the trailer and both Jason and Ryan are in the episode that stars John Underkoffler, Kwin Kramer, and a bunch of the Oblong gang.  Oh – and Jason’s hair looks funny.

The Gist iPhone app was released this morning.  It’s the first of two meaningful iPhone releases this week from companies I’m an investor in.  Not surprisingly the Gist iPhone app is tightly coupled with the overall Gist service which I’ve written about in the past. 

Bill French wrote a great review on iPhone CTO titled Mobile Professionals Develop Business Acuity and Information Readiness With New Gist iPhone App.  In this he clearly explains what Gist is trying to do, why it’s special-magic-happy, and where it has room for improvement.

Gist is providing a little Apple love today with a change to their avatar on Twitter.  If you are so inclined, give Gist a try and send me any feedback (good or bad) that you have.

For those of you that are regular readers, you know how excited I am about Gist, an investment we made earlier this year.  On Tuesday Gist launched their open beta program making Gist available to everyone.

The coverage of the launch was extensive with articles describing how Gist works and what it is useful for in sites including GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb, Forbes, Mashable, Cnet, eWeek, NetworkWorld, WebWorkerDaily, TechFlash, and Microsoft StartupZone.  Some of my favorite articles were FilltheFunnel (hint – iPhone screenshots) and MarketingProfessor (hint – what they like, what they don’t like – much of which is on the product roadmap.)

On a phone call with the Gist team last week, I reminded them that they only get to “open up to the world once”.  The company has been operating under a “closed beta” since we invested as they simultaneously built out the product functionality while insuring that their architecture scaled up to handle a huge amount of data (which it is already.) 

I’m super impressed by the Gist team – this is a gang that knows how to build and ship software.  At my first meeting, they put the date of 9/15/09 on the board for the launch of the service.  Over the last 60 days, they’ve been obsessed with performance, functionality, the first time user experience, and software quality.  I think they should be incredibly proud of what they’ve launched.

While this is still a very early step in the business, it’s an important one.  The Q4 roadmap is very full and – if the last six months is an indicator – will be filled with many steady releases of new functionality to the service. 

I use Gist every day and have found it to be immensely helpful when tightly integrated into my work and information flow.  I encourage all of you to give it a try and give me as much feedback as you are willing to give as we try to extend it to be useful to all business professionals.

My friends at Rally Software continue to grow like crazy.  As the Agile software development methodologies goes mainstream, Rally continues to lead the market in providing Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) software.

One of the things Rally has been doing as part of “bringing Agile to the masses” is the Rally Agile Success Tour.  As a recent attendee at one of the events said:

"I thought this would be a Rally sales pitch… It was most definitely not that."

If you are an Agile practitioner or interested in learning more about Agile, the Rally Agile Success Tour has stops in Boston on 9/17, Seattle on 10/1, Chicago on 10/15, and London on 10/29.  The cool thing is that rather than hearing a sales pitch, you’ll hear real customer stories from the likes of AOL, Constant Contact, Sermo, BMC, Microsoft, Boeing, and Getty Images.

When I invested in Rally in 2003, I was betting on the notion that Agile would go mainstream within a reasonable period of time.  It has and I’m super proud of the company the Rally gang has created.

My partner Seth wrote a short post earlier today about Trada titled Are you a PPC expert? Read on…  We funded Trada last year and Seth and I have an ongoing (and often entertaining) debate about “stealth companies”.  Well – Trada is one the edge of no longer being stealth – here’s a hint:

Trada is building the first crowdsourced marketplace for Pay Per Click marketing campaigns. On one side of our marketplace, advertisers create and fund PPC marketing campaigns for products or services they want to promote on the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. On the other side of the marketplace, PPC experts like you (we call them Optimizers) select campaigns they’d like to work on and begin creating ad groups, ads and keywords, just as they would in Google AdWords.

If you are are a PPC marketing expert click here to find out more and sign up.  Especially if you are Google AdWords Qualified or SEMPO Institute trained.

In January, I made a seed investment in a company called Standing Cloud.  My premise was that as “cloud computing” proliferated, it’d be a total mess for the typical application developer and ISV.  Over the past six months a small team of super talented long time software developers and system architects have been exploring a wide variety of cloud services, OS instances, and popular open source software packages to understand where the “extremely broad painful problem that no one is addressing” is going to be.

Dave Jilk, Standing Cloud’s founder, and I are going to hike Mount Bierstadt as part of our annual tradition of climbing a 14er together (this will be #4).  We’ll have each other trapped together for 5+ hours to consolidate our thinking on what we’ve learned so far this year and which particular angle to position Standing Cloud on the launch pad.

In the meantime, one of the other Standing Cloud founders – Joel Wampler – wrote a guest post on ElasticVapor titled Fixing Major Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities in the Cloud.  If you are interested in this type of thing, it’s a good hint about the types of things that Standing Cloud is uncovering every single day.  For example:

“Last week, a Linux kernel vulnerability that allows for local privilege escalation through a NULL pointer dereference was announced. Many of the major Linux distributions are still working to provide updated kernels, and a few already have. Once updated kernels are released, applying the patches should be straightforward. But for systems running in the cloud, additional complexities and delays may arise.

Most providers of on-demand cloud servers require the use of custom kernels, which are tuned for the provider’s specific virtualization implementation. These custom kernels significantly change the upgrade path, and may even affect the short-term workarounds provided by the upstream distribution.

For instance, the Ubuntu bug report for this issue states the following:

Ubuntu 8.04 and later have a default setting of 65536 in /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr. When set, this issue is blocked.

However, if a system is running Ubuntu 8.04 on Amazon EC2, the underlying kernel is likely based on a Fedora Core 8 Xen kernel. This is one of the kernels Amazon provides to those who create boot images for their service, and most such images use this kernel regardless of the distribution running on top of it. Thus the default setting of 65536 cannot be relied upon; and worse, this proc setting does not even exist in the Fedora kernel, so there is no way to repair the image to match this workaround.”

Lots more coming soon – get ready for it.  In the mean time, I hope there are no clouds on my hike tomorrow.