The sun does eventually start to set up here.  Amy took a bunch of beautiful pictures tonight.

Good night.

If you liked my post titled The Three Constituencies, you should read Stan James followup post titled Attention to Dollars, And Other Exchanges.  Stan is the founder of a cool new company named Outfoxed that is a result of work he did for his masters thesis.  And yes – he’s also in Boulder.

NewsGator announced that Goodman and Carr – one of the leading law firms in Canada – has deployed NewsGator Enterprise Server.  The nifty thing about this implementation – which is detailed in the case study that just went up on the NewsGator web site – is the tight integration between NewsGator Enterprise Server and Microsoft Sharepoint.  Yum: NGES + Sharepoint = Chocolate + Peanut Butter.

Alan Shimel – Chief Strategy Officer for StillSecure, blogger, and now podcaster interviewed me and Scott Converse today.  Scott is the founder / CEO of ClickCaster, a Boulder-based podcast creation and hosting company (Alan uses ClickCaster for his podcast.)  Scott has been around the block (eWorld anyone?), is a great entrepreneur, and a fun guy to hang with.  ClickCaster has made a ton of progress since I first met Scott a year ago – definitely worth a look if you are into podcasting.

I love books.  I just finished reading for the night (and polished off another Edward Abbey book – Hayduke Lives! – not as good as The Monkey Wrench Gang – but still really good.)  I went to put it in the “Read Books Bookshelf” (which happens to be the color red) and realized that it’s completely full (don’t think single bookshelf – think wall of books.)

I stared at the wall for a minute and then realized I had a similar predicament at home in Boulder.  We are completely out of bookshelf space throughout the house (and there’s plenty of it.)  Every few years, I decide that I’m going to give all my books to the library, but then I try and get rejected (the last time I tried, the Boulder Library told me that I could bring them in “a box at a time and they’d decide which ones they want – but they usually want less than 10% of the books” – screw that.)

I’ve decided that when I finish a book, I’ll drop it in the mail to a person that it makes me think of.  Rather than have them sit in boxes collecting dust, I’ll gift them to my friends on an ad hoc basis.  It’ll be my “virtual library” – I’ll have my books spread all over the place.

I was recently introduced to Dogster by Jeff Clavier.  My skeptical gene kicked in big time when I first heard about it (a social network for dogs – c’mon) but then I went and played with it and got to spend some time with Ted Rheingold (not surprisingly the “top dog.”)  Woof – Ted totally gets it!  I put up short profiles for my dogs – Denali and Kenai – just to see what would happen.  So far it’s been a much more interesting experience than my MySpace page.  But then again – I like dogs more than I like people.

While Dogster and its sister site Catster are pretty “vertical verticals”, you can’t ignore 185,000 dogs, 78,000 cats, a whole lot of pageviews, and a lot of very fetching community content.

Senator Ted Stevens – the senior ranking Alaska senator, longest serving Republican in the Senate, and king of Alaska pork – is regularly on the front page of the Anchorage newspaper (usually praising him for the great things he does for Alaska.)  He made news of a different kind last week concerning his statements about net neutrality.

According to bLaugh, the Stevens development team is currently working on “an Internet Cerfboard.” 

As the stock market continues to flounder around (mostly the wrong direction) and some people in the middle east continue to try to destroy each other, I woke up this morning pondering failure.  I thought of another “classical entrepreneurial lesson” that we made at Martingale Software – lack of focus.

When we started Martingale Software in 1984, our original vision was “to write software for the new Apple Macintosh.”  That was pretty broad, so as we sat around in a classroom somewhere at MIT (because it had a nice big blackboard that we could scribble on, plus it made us feel grown up), we decided to narrow our focus.  After many hours (or was it minutes?) of discussion, we decided we would write “graphics software for the new Apple Macintosh.”  Once we landed on this, we immediately started designing stuff, well before we had our Apple Lisa (a requirement for writing software for the first Macs.)

We quickly got distracted.  One of my early mentors – Gene Scott (who also happened to be our investor – he put up the initial $10,000 for Martingale) – was the founder and chairman of Scott Instruments – a voice recognition software company in Denton, Texas.  Scott Instruments created the VET/2 (Voice Entry Terminal for the Apple II) – one of the first functional speech recognition systems (Gene’s son David was a research pioneer in this area.)  Scott Instruments asked us to write an application for the VET/2 for the Macintosh – we couldn’t resist so we had our first contract.

Of course, this had nothing to do with our vision for Martingale.  I’m sure we rationalized this by thinking something like “we’ve got to eat”, but since we lived in a fraternity and food was regularly available, this was a hollow rationalization.

Several months later, through some random introduction, we met a local investment management company (probably the 1980’s equivalent of a small hedge fund – I want to say they were called Harbor Capital, but the particular neurons that would remember that have been destroyed.)  They wanted us to do some spreadsheet / graphics stuff for them.  Ok – graphics – a little closer.  But – they used PCs.  So – we rationalized again, went out and bought a Compaq Luggable, and did some more consulting work.

Between school, our “extra curricular activities”, and our two contracts, we never wrote much graphics software for the Mac.  While we eventually figured out how to get a program on the Lisa written, compiled, built, saved on a floppy disk, and running on the Mac, our “graphics software” was never much more than a very simple window / menu system.  We never shipped it.

The contracts enabled us to “be in business” for a while, but they had nothing to do with the business we set out to create.  While the work enabled “survival”, our complete lack of focus (among many other things) contributed to our ultimate demise.  Now – we could have repositioned Martingale as a customer software company – or any number of other things – but we continued to hang on to the idea that we were going to build a graphics software company. 

While survival was nice (and fun for a while), at some point you have to decide what you are going to focus on.  If you don’t, as a Brazilian friend of mine once said – pounding his fist into his palm – “our lack of focus will fuck us” (say that three times fast with a Brazilian accent.)

Chris Sacca linked to this video of an unreal hockey fight between Russia and Canada in 1987.  Egads.  Where’s Jack Bauer when you need him to break things up?