Roger Fillion has a great, detailed article in today’s Rocky Mountain News on Todd Vernon’s experience pitching his company – Lijit – at the recent Venture Capital in the Rocky’s conference.  If you missed the conference (or the pitch), here’s Todd’s first slide (that Roger builds his article around.)

I thought Roger did a super job of getting inside Todd’s brain in this article.  I also thought that Todd’s pitch on Lijit was one of the best at the conference.  I recognize that I’m biased because (a) I’m a long time friend of Todd’s, (b) I’m an investor in Lijit, and (c) he compares me favorably to Paris Hilton.  But – if you are an entrepreneur looking to pitch your new company, this is a great example.

Fred Wilson pointed me (us) to a video from his friend John Mahoney (CTO / co-founder of Instant Information – one of Fred’s portfolio companies) titled Practical RSS.  It’s an excellent seven minute overview of what RSS means from a user’s perspective.  John did an outstanding job both explaining it and creating a high quality video.

This is a rant – feel free to ignore if you don’t care about Microsoft.

What do Vista, CRM, Sharepoint, and Outlook have in common?  Yes – Microsoft. 

I’m using three of these every day (I dumped CRM.)  I’ve been a PC / Windows user forever – always keeping a Mac nearby, but rarely using it (I like to turn it on once a week just to watch it update all it’s software automagically.)  I enjoy the Microsoft upgrade cycle (of which we are once again starting a big one with Vista, Office 2007, and all the Server 2007 products that are coming.)  I’ve always benefited financially from this (as I’m usually involved in companies that play around the Microsoft ecosystem).  My inner nerd gets to learn lots of new things (or – at least do the old things in slightly different ways.)

This time around, I’m amused.  I thought this upgrade cycle would normalize and clean up a bunch of stuff that I thought time and money could fix.  I was wrong.  The four different products appear to have been written by four different companies.  Vista is what I expected, CRM is a massive disappointment, Sharepoint is a pleasant surprise, and Outlook is just perplexing.

Let’s start with Vista.  It’s a beautiful upgrade from XP.  It feels more stable.  I use Firefox so I haven’t really had spyware problems for a while, but I feel more secure, if only because I’m not getting a security update three times a week and my machine crashes less.  However, so many things that worked fine under XP either got moved, changed, are missing, or I can’t find them.  And then there are just stupid things like how the Snipping Tool – which I find indispensable – crashes and restarts whenever you exit it (I’d snip a picture of the error, but I can’t since – well – it’s trying to restart itself and I can’t run two instances simultaneously.)  Seriously, did anyone test this?  I’m sure the next three service packs will fix this stuff, but was this really a five year OS build?

I had high hopes for CRM.  I have several portfolio companies that use it and one portfolio company that implements it.  It integrates with Outlook and, well, how hard could CRM be?  Version 3.0 was virtually unusable for us.  The implementation was fine and the Outlook 2007 integration even seemed to work (after a rushed patch), but there were several fatal flaws, such as lack of synchronization of the company field with Outlook (munging a bunch of data) and some data scrambling issues (you know you are in trouble when contacts show up three times in your local Outlook and you don’t know why.)  Finally, the UI is completely different than – well – the other Microsoft products. Huh?

I expected Sharepoint would be uninspiring.  Like CRM, we have several portfolio companies that use it and one portfolio company that implements it. I’ve made fun of it for a long time as one of the products that Microsoft had massive distribution for since they gave it away (at least for a while) with every EA agreement. No more – I’ve been using Sharepoint for a month and I love it.  We were using Jotspot for our internal Wiki previously – there have been no changes since they were acquired by Google and – while I expect a new, polished version to be out at some point, I am a Sharepoint fiend for now.  Oh – Sharepoint seems to synchronize better with Outlook / Exchange than CRM – isn’t that weird.  Yeah -the user interface is completely different, but I have figured out how to automatically run the IE engine for it inside Firefox so it’s just another tab in my browser.

And then there is Outlook.  The two windows on my 30” monitor that take up most of the space on my computer are Outlook and Firefox.  I live in Outlook.  I can make Outlook do things it probably shouldn’t be able to do.  Lucky me – I get to figure it all out again with Outlook 2007.  At least I’m not suffering from the miserable performance that some of my friends and colleagues are (I guess I have a computer that likes Outlook 2007.)  But why doesn’t the main screen have a nifty new ribbon that makes it hard to find all the features? 

Now, before you tell me “just switch to a Mac”, I tried.  Really hard.  It rejected me.  I’m not unhappy, just amused.  The opportunities seem endless, especially now that I’m getting to Live with a new degree of freedom across all my computing infrastructure.

Rant off – I feel better.

David Cohen has been appropriately nudging me to write my counterpoint to his Big of Bullshit: Widgets post.  Lots has been said about widgets over the past six months, including the ultimate counterindicator article The Year of the Widget? from Newsweek (nothing against Newsweek, but whenever something like this shows up it often means we’ve hit the apex of the phenomenon.)

Lest you think Widgets are new, let’s take a short walk back in history.  Do you remember Active Desktop?  Yup – a nice Windows feature dating back to IE 4.0 that never caught on.  I bet Microsoft has a patent floating around somewhere for this, even though it would be a bogus one because of prior art.  How about DoDots (The Web without a browser) – one of our failed investments.  Similar time frame, incredible technology, clearly ahead of its time, and misunderstood (e.g. a random quote I found in an old usenet archive when poking around – “I never understood their business plan. DoDots was creating software that allowed people to embed internet-based applications on the desktop — sorry, but isn’t that a web browser?”)  Oh – and in case you happen to think Microsoft invented this – think again – they were floating around MIT / Project Athena when I was there in the mid-1980’s (anyone remember “Widget Athena Front End”?)

In the spirit of “everything old is new again”, I give you widgets as a great example.  When Konfabulator came out in 2003, I loved it.  Yahoo ended up buying it (it’s now Yahoo! Widgets) – shockingly Microsoft, Apple, and Google now have similar “widgets” (or “gadgets” or “dashboard thingys”).  All basically the same – now just an extension of the operating system.

In 2004 when I started blogging (and became a “publisher”), I discovered this really interesting thing where I could include stuff on my blog using script type=”text/javascript”.  Some folks used script src=”…” and others just gave me a smart link back to their web service.  Eventually embed’s appeared (thank you Youtube for making this radically popular.)

Like Fred Wilson, I’ve gone through a cycle of putting up and taking down widgets.  I’ve gone through my hunger for more than just dynamic information – I love the social stuff that makes me a publisher that can connect with my actual community of readers.  I got excited about TypePad’s widget implementation, fell in love with MyBlogLog, was psyched about everything FeedBurner did with widgets, and even was intrigued with Widgetbox.

I knew I was in trouble when I started getting notes from entrepreneurs saying “we are going to be the FeedBurner of widgets.”  Then – in a matter of two weeks, I got about a half dozen emails / executive summaries of things that looked like Widgetbox (yes – a couple of them got funded.)  Then – suddenly, everything I saw led with “widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets widgets.”

Enough history – so in David’s words, “is this widget thing big or bullshit?”  This time around, it’s clearly big as an “application container for publishers” but it’s not so clear that all of the derivative businesses make sense.  If you create any web-based services, you need to provide a “widget-like” application container.  Fortunately, this is trivial (in general) although it’s still much harder than it needs to be to incorporate these into all the different types of publisher sites (e.g. just try to integrate your widgets into Microsoft Spaces.) The problem here is one of standards – or lack there of (ad-hoc or otherwise) – right now it is chaos and some folks are trying to tame this.  However, the monetization strategy for taming this is thin, especially given the half-life of the vast majority of widgets (e.g. very short) combined with the overall utility of most widgets (e.g. very small.)

As an investor, I’ve looked at and decided not to invest in “widget management systems.”  However, all of the companies I’ve invested in that provide web services to publishers (including NewsGator, FeedBurner, Lijit, ClickCaster, and Me.dium) are “widgetizing” their services.  FeedBurner is an obvious platform in my universe for this (given their broad relationship with over 350,000 publishers) as they have demonstrated with their integration of Headline Animator with Stats, SpringWidgets, and Lijit Search.

While there might be room for one or two “widget management systems”, there certainly isn’t the need for 23 of them.  In addition, the ability to actually build a real business based on a packaging and distribution system around the application container widget is unclear to me.  So: widget=big; widget-derivative-business=probably-bullshit.

The blog “She Dreams in Digital” has an excellent, short article titled Me.dium Takes Social Bookmarketing One Step Further that does a nice job of explaining Me.dium.  As my friends list continues to grow, the power of Me.dium grows with it (it’s a quiet Saturday morning – Amy is on Netflix, probably rearranging her queue, Kimbal is on Google searching for nebuchadnezzar (Kimbal – please tell me you are watching The Matrix), and Seth is on the Pepsi site seeing how fast he can type.)  If you want to take it for a spin, use my invite code.

I got a note from David Cohen earlier this week that we’ve just passed through the 100 applicant mark for the TechStars program this summer in Boulder.  Our goal was 100 so we’re delighted.  If you are interested, there’s still plenty of time to apply (applications close on March 31.)

The New York Times had a great article early this week titled Fine Dining With a Hippie Past.  It highlights the recent revolution in the Boulder fine dining scene.  When I moved here in 1995, the casual dining scene was outstanding (think Santa Monica, but more casual) but there were only really two “serious” restaurants – Flagstaff House and Q’s.  In the last few years, a number of new great ones have popped up including The Kitchen (owned by Me.dium CEO Kimbal Musk), Frasca, and Mateo.  Earlier this week I had breakfast at Radda Trattoria.  Yum.

Lest you think the old standards aren’t good, we had an excellent dinner at Flagstaff House celebrating Ben Casnocha’s 19^th birthday last night.  Now – if the St. Julien would just admit defeat and completely reboot Jill’s we’d have the chance at yet another great upscale place.

NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop and it radically changed the way I read my RSS feeds – again.  NewsGator Desktop came out of requirements from one of the NewsGator Enterprise Server customers who needed a rich desktop notifier as part of their implementation.  Voila – generalize an enterprise based feature to an app that spans all the NewsGator consumer and enterprise products.  Iterate quickly, add some stuff like Keyboard Shortcuts (duh), and you’ve got something pretty amazing.

I subscribe to 734 feeds.  Until a few weeks ago (when I started using NewsGator Desktop), I fired up FeedDemon once a day, spent 30 minutes going through all my unread items, forwarding and clipping as appropriate, and then not looking at my feeds again until the next morning.  This was efficient, allowed me to get a feel for everything that was going on and spend time with the things that I had clipped (either to think about, blog about, or do something with.) 

Of these 734 feeds, there are 50 of them that I want to see whenever someone posts.  These are the bloggers and news sources that I find most relevant and interesting to me.  Historically, this didn’t work with my approach so I punted and just read everything at one time.

With NewsGator Desktop, I set up a “location” that only has these 50 or so bloggers in it (“location” is one of the incredible hidden features of NewsGator – it makes me crazy that we haven’t done a better job of surfacing it since it is so powerful.)  I now have a notifier that pops up every 15 minutes (that’s about the right periodicity for me) that shows any posts in the past 15 minutes from this list of 50.  I scan through them quickly (there’s that nice Keyboard Shortcuts thing again), open up any that I want to read in more depth, and mark all as read.  They get automagically synced with NewsGator Online so I don’t see the read ones again.

I solved three problems with this – I get to see the high interest blogs throughout the day as they get written with a similar interaction I have with email, once I’ve read them they go away so I don’t have to look at them again (cutting down on the overall time I spend in the morning with them), and when someone writes something interesting that has real time relevance, I can react to it.

I’ve been doing this on all my computers for three weeks.  The novelty has worn off and it’s now part of my use pattern. 

One of the great things about the exponential growth of web-based content (both professional and user generated) is that it enables you to quickly get deep insights from amazing people that were previously hard to find.

Two examples beat me over the head this morning.  I wrote about Lijit search yesterday – today Stan James (Lijit’s CTO) keeps the rhythm going with his Not All Links Are Created Equal post.

Earlier this week, I was part of a Silicon Flatirons roundtable at CU Boulder Law School that Phil Weiser and I have organized in the spirit of the Union Square Ventures Sessions.  We spent a few hours with an awesome group of people discussing the implications of Sarbanes Oxley on innovation and entrepreneurship.  The intro video was Sam Zell’s 2006 Holiday Card (MMVI) which is a damning indictment on the pox that is Sarbox (except of course – to the accounting industry – which loves it and the fees it generates.)  I wanted to show it to Amy this morning and didn’t know where to find it so I hoped on Youtube, searched for Sam Zell, and found his 2005 Holiday Card (The Theory of Relativity) which is even better!

I then poked around for another 37 seconds and found the “Year End Gifts” site which has videos of all the cards going back to 1999 (The Emperor Has No Clothes) – which of course is completely brilliant and prescient.

Just add a “.com”, Tom
Front your name with an “E”, Lee
Start auctioning toys, Roy
And set yourself free
Pay on the come, son
Don’t need to make money, hon
Just set up a site, Mike
And price yourself right.

We end the morning with a presentation from David Rubenstein – the co-founder and managing director of The Carlyle Group explaining The Similarities & Differences Between The Tech Bubble Burst of 2000 & The Current Private Equity Markets: Are We On The Verge of A PE Bubble Burst? thanks to a short article from Dan Primack titled LBO Boom = Tech Bubble? (ok – I saw this a few days ago but just got around to blogging it.)  With leaders of private equity firms on the covers of every major business magazines and Sam Zell selling Equity Office in one of the largest PE deals, is someone trying to give us a message?