There are some things I wish would just go away forever. Business cards are one of those things. I stopped carrying them several years ago and simply give people my email address (brad@feld.com) as my primary contact data. But at the end of every day I have a handful of cards to deal with. Sometimes it is one or two; often it is a big pile.

Yesterday I was at the Xconomy Big Data Conference in Boston. I was the lead off keynote speaker so I decided to spend my 30 minutes doing a rant on Big Data that I started off with the line “Big Data is Bullshit.” It was fun for me and I hope useful for the 500 people in the audience.

I ended up with 20+ business cards from people who I talked to in between sessions. During the afternoon, I took a photo of each of them with my iPhone, emailed the photo to cards@fullcontact.com, and then tossed the card in the trash. I now have a photo of my card on my iPhone and due to the magic of the FullContact CardShark API the data was automagically turned into a vCard and a Google contact. I got emails back with each card, clicked one button on the email, and voila the contact data was in my Gmail Contacts data.

My friends at FullContact talk about how they do this in their post If Only CardMunch Were An API… Oh Yes We Did!. When CardMunch first came out I was a happy user. I struggled some with quality, but put up with it because it was better than the alternative. I stopped using it about six months ago due to reliability and the overly tight integration with LinkedIn at the exclusion of other approaches.

@mattdelliott and @travis_todd created a replacement for me (and for you) at HackDenver in 6 hours of codings. Literally all you do as an end user is:

• Take a photo of a business card (two photos if it’s a two sided card)
• Email the image(s) to cards@fullcontact.com
• Wait a few minutes for the reply email

Boom.

I’m super impressed with the progress MobileDay has made in the past six months. We are a seed investor in the company whose goal is to fix conferencing calling. Their approach is “one touch into any conference call from any conference call provider.”

The current MobileDay iPhone app is excellent – I use it multiple times a day. If you make any conference calls, give it a try and tell me what you think and what we can do better.

Also, take a look at their new one minute overview of the product and give me feedback on whether it makes sense and what they can do better.

MobileDay – Never Dial Into Conference Calls Again. from MobileDay on Vimeo.

Today, Return Path launched three new products and reframed its business as “email intelligence.” Matt Blumberg, Return Path’s CEO has an excellent post up titled Email Intelligence and the new Return Path.

Return Path is an extraordinary company that I’m proud to have been involved with for the past 12 years. At our board meeting last week, Matt gave me and Fred Wilson our 12 year anniversary gift – a pair of red Return Path-branded Adidas sneakers. I still vividly remember the phone call Fred and I had where we cut a deal to merge two nascent companies – Veripost and Return Path – in what became Return Path. We cut a deal in 10 minutes – I offered up a 50/50 merger and Fred suggested he wanted a little more since Return Path had raised 3x the money Veripost had. I responded with “how about 55/45″ and Fred said “it’s a deal.”

Twelve years later Return Path is company with over 300 people, major offices in New York, Boulder, and the Bay Area, and other offices around the world. It has created and leads an entirely new category we call Email Intelligence. In 2008, after plenty of forward progress as well as some twists and turns, we finished divesting several older lines of business and focused the company entirely on a new category we created called “Email Deliverability.” As we grew, we expanded the definition to the point where the word “deliverability” only covered a subset of what we did, hence the creation of the category of “Email Intelligence.”

Matt says it extremely well in his post:

“Our solution to these problems is email intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. Marketers need all of these to understand their email performance beyond deliverability. They need it to benchmark themselves against competitors, to gain a complete understanding of their subscribers’ experience, and to accurately track and report the full impact of their email programs.” 

I’ve been investing in and around email since my first email-related investment in 1994 in a company very creatively named “Email Publishing” which was the very first email service provider. Since then I’ve had a number of investments in email companies including Critical Path, Postini, and SendGrid. I’m psyched with the success and leadership of Return Path to date, love working with everyone at Return Path, and look forward to continuing the journey as we work to ensure that inboxes contain only messages that users want.

The gang at Orbotix is running a video competition called “Show Us Your Balls” for crazy things people do with the Sphero. There are a bunch of fun awards, including a month’s supply of bacon.

If I win, I expect I’ll be giving the bacon to my friends downstairs at Gnip.

I met Andy Swan at Lindzonpalooza in San Diego this year. Andy towers over me (he’s 6′ 9″) and I’m always attracted to people who make me (at 6′ 1″) feel short. Among other things, he’s got a super creative blog and is a successful entrepreneur, so we had a great discussion. We also talked about weight loss, which I was focused on because I was squarely in the middle of my Retrofit experience (where I’ve lost a solid 20 pounds in the last six months.) Recently Andy sent me a note saying he’d lost 40 pounds with just Fitbit – I asked him to write a blog post about his story. Here it is – it’s inspiring.

It had been 6 months since my knee surgery where they replaced my busted ACL (wakeboarding).  I hadn’t weighed myself since, but I distinctly remember seeing “299.2″ on the scale in pre-op.  That was a new all-time high, and “300″ seemed really high, even for a guy standing 6 ft 9.  Just as the anesthesia started to kick in I thought to myself…. “well, this could go one of two ways.  Either you get sedentary and fat while your knee heals or you take it as a wake-up call and start kicking ass.”

I decided to start kicking ass.  I woke up from surgery incredibly optimistic and with absolute certainty that the year post-surgery was going to be BETTER than the year prior.  Funny how obstacles can motivate.

Fast-forward 6 months of no official “rehab”, but a lot of weight training and gradual but intense increases in movement. I was as strong as I was 15 years ago as a college basketball player, and my knee felt great.  Ya!

But…. I still felt big.  Too heavy.  Too soft in the middle.  This was a problem.  I’d worked really hard.  Ugh.

Then I went out to San Diego and chatted with Brad Feld.  Naturally, I looked through the companies he had invested in.

Interesting.  The fitbit tracker keeps track of your movement during the day (how?!  Who cares!).  The fitbit scale is wifi-enabled and keeps track of your weight.  Both sync online and work with MyFittnessPal, which I could use to keep track of my calories.

Tracking input.  Tracking output.  Tracking results in “real-time”.  This was a perfect storm of awesome for a guy that really loves excess in all directions– and knows that what gets measured gets done.

I bought both with expedited shipping.

Instant obsession.  3 months later, I still feel completely incomplete if I haven’t burned more calories than I’ve taken in.  I’m fixated on “doing more”.  20,000 steps is a good day.  10 miles moved is awesome.  Partly to lighten up, partly so I can eat more and drink more.  It works.