Mine speaks English.  But – when Amy and I spent a month in Paris last spring, we noticed that all the dogs spoke French.  My friends at Dogster and Catster noticed this as well – their sites are now available in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Korean.  Ouah Ouah.

When Snap Preview came out, I tossed it up on both Feld Thoughts and AsktheVC the day I noticed it.  About a week ago it started to annoy me.  While it has shown up on plenty of blogs (Snap claims over 40,000 already), I just can’t figure out the value.  I noticed that Fred and Bijan both took it down, so I followed suit and just disabled it.  Maybe I’ll try again on their next iteration, but for now I’m Snap free.  In addition, in two weeks I’m going to put up another widget from one of my portfolio companies that is a lot cooler and I think they’d clash.

On the eve of 24 Day 6, I decided to read the most recent 24 novel – Declassified: Cat’s Claw.  It was the best one yet and is great brain candy if you are a 24 fan.  It happens way in the past – back when Chris Henderson is running CTU and before Jack and Teri split up.  Kim’s a little younger, but still the same old Kim and gets into some serious trouble that she’s not even aware of from beginning to end.  Yum.

Earlier this week eBay announced it was buying StubHub for $310 million.  My partner Ryan McIntyre – who was an early angel investor in StubHub (congrats Ryan – dinner next time is on you) has an excellent post titled StubHub: the value of vertical specialization. 

While building a horizontal technology is often the starting point for many entrepreneurs and VCs, we continue to experience the incredible power of vertical specialization.  This is distinct from “going after a vertical market” (say selling products to law firms, or manufacturing firms, or financial services firms) which is another classic approach of entrepreneurs and VCs (I can’t tell you the number of times in the past 10 years I’ve heard “we are doing X and are going to dominate vertical market Y and, after that, dominate vertical market Z.” Much of this emerged from the Geoffrey Moore bowling alley thesis from Inside the Tornado but was also a standard strategy of many of the successful software companies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Vertical specialization is different.  Service Magic took the notion of a generic buyer / seller marketplace and applied it to an ecosystem around home ownership (contractors first, then home buyers / real estate agents, and finally mortgage financing.)  Stratify took a horizontal enterprise search technology that was awesome but difficult to sell (“hey Mr. CIO – do you want to buy some horizontal enterprise search?”) and applied it to the business of electronic discovery, building in awesome company in the process.  Granted – you could say that each company went after vertical markets (which is an element of vertical specialization), but the key is that they took a horizontal technology and applied it very clearly to a vertical market and then built out a robust business around that, rather than customizing a generic application for a vertical market and then expanding into the next vertical market after they had some success.

Vertical specialization doesn’t work if your underlying horizontal technology doesn’t work.  So – when you hear someone talking about how they are doing “vertical search applied to market X” or a “vertical social network for category Y”, dig deeper and find out how they are actually doing it and whether the underlying technology will work at scale.

Will Herman wrote a super post on The Leadership Power of Great Public Speaking.  I’m a closet introvert, but I know the value of being a great public speaker (and am very comfortable – both as a public speaker and working a room.)  Mitchell Ashley – one of the execs at StillSecure – wrote about their holiday party on his post How to Work a Room and the brilliance of Alan Shimel and his extrovertedness. I love Alan and can imagine the party even though I wasn’t at it.  As both Mitchell and Will point out, a lot of it is in the delivery.

Q1 will see lots of fun features in the NewsGator Online Service.  NewsGator Today was released last week – if you are an NGOS (NewsGator Online) user, click on the NewsGator Today folder at the top of your folder list.  NewsGator has a longer description of how this works on their post The Debut of NewsGator Today.

I couldn’t agree more with Tom Evslin’s post titled Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investment Required.  If you are the founder of a company with the description “Web 2.0” somewhere in your executive summary then click now and read slowly.  It also compliments the current “Web 2.0 Bubble / Deadpool” meme that seems to be going around.

NewsGator and Motorola’s Good Technology Group (acquired by Motorola in Q406) announced a partnership that will extend NewsGator’s enterprise RSS technology (“behind the firewall RSS”) to mobile users on all the platforms that Good supports.  That’s a Good (and NewsGator) way to get your RSS wherever you want it and adds nicely to the NewsGator Mobile product set.

The 24th annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference is happening on February 20 – 22nd.  In addition to showcasing a bunch of the emerging growth companies in the Rocky Mountain region, VCIR will feature keynotes from Greg Maffei, President and CEO of Liberty Media and Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association.  In addition to a couple of great parties and skiing (all day Thursday), there’s also a new poker event on the night of the 20th.  The last few years of VCIR have been great – I’ve heard that this year’s lineup of companies is superb – so if you are a venture capitalist living outside the Rocky Mountain region that needs an excuse to ski (or if you just want to come see my smiling face), come join us.