I’ve had the pleasure of working with Nick Bradbury at NewsGator the past few years. Nick created one of my all time favorite pieces of software – FeedDemon – which I use ever day as my RSS feed reader for Windows.
Nick wrote a great thought piece titled Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader? It’s a nice follow up to the announcement yesterday that all of NewsGator’s client RSS readers are now free – including FeedDemon.
When Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder and CTO – first talked to me about NewsGator, he told me that he wanted to create software to enable everyone on the planet to read RSS feeds, anywhere, anytime, on any device. Since I didn’t know what an RSS feed was when he first told me this in 2004, I wasn’t sure what to think of this. We hung out together for a while and I quickly got sucked into his vision.
Whenever I go back and look at my post from June 28, 2004 titled Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? I get this warm tingly feeling inside. I’m incredibly proud of what all the people at NewsGator have accomplished and the progress we’ve made in creating a real company over the past 3.5 years.
As part of our next strategic move as a business, all of NewsGator’s RSS client software is now free. This includes Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon and Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire – both NewsGator products. It also includes NewsGator Inbox (for Outlook) and NewsGator Go! (for many mobile clients, including Windows Mobile, Blackberries, and iPhones.)
Greg did a great job of explaining why we did this in his post titled NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free! so I won’t repeat what he said. Nick Bradbury also nailed it in his post titled FREE Demon? Yes, FeedDemon is Now Free! Jeff Nolan underscores a main point in NewsGator Client Apps Want to Be Free that the goal is an acceleration of our current market leadership position in the enterprise with these products. Today – millions of people use NewsGator products every day – by this time a year from now I hope to be able to say "tens of millions of people use NewsGator products every day."
Now that the clients are free – there’s no reason not to try them. I encourage you to wander over to the NewsGator site and download away! Feedback – as always – is welcome and encouraged. And – to all the NewsGator users out there that have helped us build and evolve these products, thank you!
Yes – more Feld Job board. I just finished up a board meeting in San Francisco for a new company that I’ve invested in (they are launching next week – you’ll hear more on Monday.)
We’re looking for two rock star software product managers. The company is releasing products at a torrid pace (multiple times a month) and is iterating rapidly as it builds an aggressive leadership position in its segment. Yeah – I know – all happy talk – but it’s wild and amazing stuff.
The company is currently about 20 people going to 40, and has a huge vision. The CEO is a star who has co-founded several successful companies. Everyone I’ve spent time with in the company is great.
If you are in the bay area, have lots of experience as a software product manager, and are ready for a new startup, send me a note, a resume, and a list of products you’ve been involved in and I’ll forward it on.
Now that one of our favorite IRS regs – Mr. 409a – has been around for a while, it’s still causing plenty of confusion, wasted time, energy, and money. The final regulations – issued in April – are to become effective on January 1, 2008. However, one 9/10/07, the IRS announced that they were extended the compliance deadline a year – it’s now 12/31/08 instead of 12/31/07. Thanks Uncle Sam – that’s nice.
The whole thing is still stupid for small companies where there should be some sort of exemption. Since this doesn’t seem like it’ll happen, it’d be nice if the IRS and the Financial Accounting Standards Board could get together and let the accountants be able to either accept the 409A valuation as part of FAS 123 or – even better – let the FAS 123 valuation be used for the 409A valuation.
Yeah – that would be too easy, logical, and would make the auditors job more straightforward, which would mean less work and billings for them.
Since you are going to get charged for it anyway, I suggest you send your auditors a copy of your 409A valuation report whenever you get them (many of our companies get them quarterly – once you get a rhythm established, it seems to be the least expensive and lowest risk approach to this absurdity.) By sending the 409A valuation report to your auditor whenever you get them, you can at least ask the question "do you support this valuation" on a regular basis. Most auditors won’t give you a straight answer, but at least they can’t say "hey – you never showed us the 409A valuations" during your annual audit when their FAS 123 valuations are coming out significantly different than your 409A valuations.
I don’t invest (or know all that much about Bio or Life Sciences), but I like to follow Adam Rubenstein’s Colorado Life Sciences Deal Flow blog just to know what’s going on in the entrepreneurship scene around life sciences in my back yard.
I was pleased to see Adam’s simple description of Lijit and why he’s using it on his blog. Adam nails it and makes a good blog even more useful.
I’m getting dressed and about to head out to Boulder Open Coffee Club. It had been happening at Vic’s on Broadway, but they recently shut down. Today’s is now at The Cup (1521 Pearl) from 8am to 10am. The owners – Chris and Wendy – are great folks, it’s a superb venue, and the food is always great.
As I was rolling through my feeds this morning, I noticed a few interesting Boulder-related things. It starts with Vic’s, and L’Absinthe, and The Reef, and Prima – four restaurants in One Boulder Plaza that abruptly shut down at the end of 2007. This isn’t a huge surprise to me – they were all chronically empty. The excuse of "no foot traffic" falls flat on me since they are two blocks away from the Pearl Street Mall. Something else was wrong, including rents that are probably much too high. Oh well – less short term choices for food and a reminder that the restaurant business is a bitch.
Then I noticed Gwen Bell’s post on ColoradoStartups that she’s Thrilled to be Back in Boulder. We’re thrilled she’s back also – especially since she’s going to be a regular writer about the Boulder entrepreneurship scene on ColoradoStartups.
As I type this on my Vista machine, I realize that my "switch to Mac experiment" has failed miserably. Oh well – at least the Mac is prettier than my Lenovo. Ross also has configured all my Vista machines to be more Mac-like so at least I can feel like a cross-dresser. Plus – I get a magic Linux Alt-click and drag enhancement.
Tara – who is one floor above us in Lijit’s office – is having fun talking about the sports bloggers that are using Lijit on their sites. Lijit is not just for nerds and mommy bloggers – sports bloggers (my favorite is We Suck at Sports are happily adopting Lijit in droves teams. Of course, all proud Colorado members of the Red Sox nation need to pay attention to Sox & Dawgs.
We end our day at the Denver Boulder New Tech Meetup at the CU Boulder Law Wolf Law Building. I’m having dinner with Mike Locatis – the CIO of the State of Colorado and we are going to swing by and hang out at the Tech Meetup first. Robert Reich of Me.dium has done an amazing job organizing this event series which just gets better every week.
And you thought I was going to talk about what’s going on at CES or Microsoft’s acquisition of Fast Search & Transfer for a whopping $1.2 billion.
How about a portable turntable scratch pad for playing Guitar Hero.
Or even better – using a real guitar to play something that looks like Guitar Hero.
Nah – I think I’ll just stick with my Internet Connected Refrigerator that has an iPod port and a tablet PC connector. My veggies stay fresher when they are listening to Nirvana.
I love when we find magic technology that just does what it is supposed to. That – plus a handful of amazing people – are the underpinnings of the investment we just led in Memeo. My partner Ryan McIntyre – who joined the board – has a detailed post up titled Foundry Group Invests in Memeo.
I’ve been searching for brainless backup and sync software for a long time. I’ve never been happy. I am now. I’m using Memeo to keep five Vista machines (going on seven) in sync and it just automagically happens. Oh – and my server is a Mac – how fun is that?
We did a couple of other investments in Q4 of last year that we’ll be writing about soon, along with what we are up to at Foundry Group. In the meantime, if you use a PC or a Mac and have any digital data on any of your computers that you care about (say photos, music, videos, movies, or even Word docs), give Memeo a try and tell me what you think.