A long time ago (high school, college?) I remember reading a Scientific American magazine cover to cover that was about the brain (blue cover – picture of the brain on it.)  While I don’t remember anything that I read (and – whatever it was – it’s probably irrelevant today), I was completely fascinated by it.

When I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s, “Artificial Intelligence” was the rage.  Cognitive Science (which has morphed into Brain and Cognitive Science) was also picking up speed at the time as MIT had a great collection of people thinking about neuroscience, biology, and psychology.  For whatever reason, I never engaged in it, and my interest ended up being a simple surface level fascination that I never went anywhere with.

Several years ago, my first business partner – Dave Jilk – started talking about some amazing research about how the brain works that was going on at CU Boulder by a guy named Randy O’Reilly.  Dave and Randy started a company called eCortex earlier this year.  I’m an investor and regularly talk to Dave about it when we get together – I understand very little of the underlying technology, but love the problem they are going after.

Randy just published an article in the 10/6/06 Science titled Biologically Based Computational Models of High-Level Cognition.  Our friends at the Daily Camera summarized it nicely – the brain is both analog and digital and O’Reilly – who is a product of the analog school of thought – suggests that “scientists trying to model the brain would be best served incorporating both schemes.”

If you are into this type of stuff, O’Reilly and eCortex should definitely be on your watch list. 

I’ve been getting a few fun toys in the mail to help with my marathoning efforts.  A while ago Anthony Pigliacampo sent me a Gel-Bot from ventureDESIGNworks.  It sat on my desk for a while before I started using it.  Now that I’ve torn the packaging off of it and run with it a few times, it’s clear that it’s an intensely clever product as it combines a traditional water bottle with a gel dispensing thing.  Sunday’s run was a three gel run – I wish I’d had this with me so I didn’t have to stop, tear the tops off the gel packs (with my teeth), make a mess as I tried to slurp the gel out of the gel packs, and then crumple up the sticky package and put it back in my fanny pack.  They’ve also got a clever Press-Bot – imagine turning your Nalgene bottle into a french coffee press.

Ok – not really – but Dick (FeedBurner’s mostly hairless CEO) did a nice pithy short interview with Manoj Jasra for WebProNews.  I adore working with Dick and his team at FeedBurner – it’s been one of the funnest investments I’ve ever made.  If you want to get a feel for what’s behind the curtain, you can almost hear Dick talking during the interview.  Oh – and he does drop a few hints about what’s next.

Congrats to Susan Mernit at Yahoo for completing her first half marathon. 

I had a long, miserable run on Sunday for about the same length of time (3:15).  I almost bailed at 4 miles – I was tired, my left knee is inflamed and probably a little infected from my fall earlier this week, and I was up in Keystone at 9000 feet.  My friend Paul joined me at mile 10 or so – when Renee and Amy dropped him off, all I could do was shake my head and say “man – this sucks.” 

Sometimes the runs are great, sometimes they aren’t.  But – they all require that you put one foot in front of the other.  Just like (metaphorically) so many other things in life.

NDA’s (Non-Disclosure Agreements) seem to be floating around this weekend.  I guess whoever leaked the rumor of Google’ acquisition of Youtube hadn’t signed one.  I got the following question from a reader:

We have a partner that we want to work with. They have both overlapping technology but also crucial technology and knowledge that would take a great effort and time to acquire. We know for sure that this company has recently been or is in the process of being acquired. (by a top 10 media & technology company). Our partnership has never entered into a formal agreement but we are now at a point where we want it to be formalized. They want us to sign an NDA to continue the process, which in any other case would be totally normal. However, things have changed slightly and we’re not dealing with a startup anymore but a major media & technology company. Is there a way we can agree to sign an NDA and at the same time protect ourselves from the lawyers from their acquirer if (potentially) our technology, product or business models is conflicting with theirs? They don’t know that we know the details of the acquisition.

Feeling lazy tonight, I passed it on to Jason who provided the following answer.

Let us start by saying that you should definitely consult your attorneys on this.  That being said, here are some things to consider.  Since you already have a relationship with this company and you both realize that you have some overlapping technology, it wouldn’t actually seem unreasonable for you to explicitly limit the NDA to your partner’s company and not its successors.  This shouldn’t tip any hat that you know about the potential acquisition, as it would be a standard thing to ask for given your current relationship.

Where you may run into a problem is if your partner has their attorney review the NDA in light of the potential acquisition.  They’ll want the NDA to run to the acquirer.  In fact, them signing an NDA without running to an acquirer would not be wise for them to sign, but in our experience, most companies do not use legal counsel to review NDAs, so you might have an easier time at this than you think. 

Now if this isn’t possible, then your best fallback position is to limit information pertaining to the NDA to information given to you by certain individuals of the company (so that acquirer employees aren’t covered) and to keep the time limit as short as possible.  This is clearly a sub optimal solution, as the acquirer is still acquiring the rights under the NDA, but at least it is limited post merger.

On Wednesday, the IRS announced what it called “relief” extending the “transition period” of compliance with 409A through January 1, 2008 (unless you are a public company and you are involved in a back dating scandal, then you are still hosed.)

What the IRS really means (as translated by my trusty sidekick Jason) is “We still can’t figure out how to implement this puppy, so we are telling y’all to keep complying the best you can (in good faith) and we’ll get back with you fine folks once we figure out what we meant in the first place.”

Bottom Line:  Act as if 409A is alive and well.  Refer to our prior posts if you are curious about our take on it.  We continue to hope that someone important in Washington DC will wake up one day and realize how completely absurd 409A and kill it.  Oh well – it’s good to have fantasies.

Andy Sack – the CEO of Judy’s Book – has started writing about his experience of evolving Judy’s Book.  One of the really “exciting” (substitute your favorite word here for this euphemism, including “challenging”, “stressful”, “painful”, “complicated”, etc.) things about being an entrepreneur (or an early stage investor) is the continuous reassessment of what you are building.  Andy’s writing as he’s living it, which is very cool.

About six months ago, we had a board conversation where two things were clear: (1) Judy’s Book understood how to continue to grow using the “local only” strategy they were using and (2) the cost of doing this didn’t translate into a compelling business (e.g. we could buy content and traffic (measurement: a “unit”), but the marginal value of each incremental unit purchased was not positive in the long run.)  Overall, while Judy’s Book was making steady progress, it was unclear that the long term economics of what we’ve been calling “local only” worked.

So – Andy and team started a deliberate process to figure out where to evolve Judy’s Book.  Fortunately, they have spent very little of the capital they raised so they have plenty of time and flexibility.  You can get a sense of where it’s going at the Judy’s Book Deals site, although what you see is only about 20% of what will be rolled out by the end of the year.  For example, Expert Advice rolled out this week and the monetization underpinning should be shortly.  Of course, if you like toolbars, you can always grab the new Judy’s Book Dealbar (Firefox or IE).

Look for more from Andy as he walks through his team’s thinking, what they did, why they did it, and where it’s going as they build on “local only” and move beyond it to something we think is much more exciting in the long run.

Two weeks ago, NewsGator released NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  This is the product that resulted from NewsGator’s acquisition of Kevin Cawley’s company that created SmartRead and SmartFeed.  NewsGator Go! is now a full featured Windows Mobile reader that tightly integrates with NewsGator Online Service, including full synchronization.  If you are a Windows Mobile user, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever seen for reading feeds on a Windows Mobile device – hats off to Kevin (and – oh – check it out.)  If you want Greg Reinacker’s (CTO of NewsGator) view of how this evolved, he’s got a great post up about The story of NewsGator Go!

Greg and Kevin have been spending a lot of time working on mobile related stuff the last couple of years, starting with Greg’s original html mobile reader for NewsGator that came out in 2004.  Three of the key attributes of mobile readers that we’ve learned about are (a) only reading a subset of your feeds (e.g. I only have 20 feeds that I want on my phone – I have 700 feeds that I subscribe to in FeedDemon / NGOS), (b) intelligent formatting for the device while preserving all of the publishers content, and (c) full online / offline synchronization of read / unread states.  (a) and (c) are built into NewsGator’s platform and Kevin has done a great job of taking advantage of them, while working through many of the thorny issues surrounding (b).

Kevin has a post up on his blog with some of the features he’s already working on for the next release.  They include enclosure support, scheduled sync, viewing clipped articles, subscribe / remove feeds, compression, emailing articles, some navigation / readability improvements, and integration with NewsGator Enterprise Server (which was recently released for FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Inbox.)

Todd Langer – who makes the very cool Functional Innovations PAST (Posture, Aerobic, Strength, and Total Body Integration) balance products sent me a link a to the Boston Globe article about the efforts of a California company – Allerca – to create a hypoallergenic cat.  Ironically, I’ve never been allergic to cats – they seem to be allergic to me.  I once had a cat called Tiny (who was huge) that – after a few minutes of sitting on my lap, would randomly bite my forearm – not a love nip – but teeth deep into skin and muscle.  When I got divorced, I offered my ex-wife her choice of either the left half or the right half of Tiny – or – if she preferred – the front half or the rear half. 

Now – I find out from Allerca that the molecule that caused most human cat allergies is “Fel d 1”.  That pretty much explains everything.