Today Microsoft announced that they have agreed to acquire Danger.  Congrats to the gang at Danger who have created a dynamite set of products with a significant and passionate user base.  Hats off also to my Mobius partner Greg Galanos who has been involved as an investor / board member in Danger from the very beginning.

I’ve been wandering around telling people that 2008 is the year that all of the consumer Internet innovations we’ve been blessed with exposed to will be finding their way into the enterprise.  The Denver Post has a nice article titled Work, connected by social networking that describes (albeit at a high level) Alpine Access’ implementation of HiveLive.

Knowing HiveLive well (I’m an early personal investor), they are a great example of how this is going to play out.  One of our portfolio companies – Rally Software – has been using HiveLive to power their Agile Commons community for over a year (if you are a practitioner of Agile software development, take a look.)  HiveLive has taken many of the innovations of social networking and reconfigured them in a way that is ideally suited for collaboration inside and across enterprises – and has done it using a SaaS model that is easy to quickly and affordably implement.

Look for a lot more examples of this in 2008.

I love Mental Floss (both the magazine and the books I refer to as "mental floss.")  I was proud to see that I’d made the list of 6 Curious College Donations.  My CU Boulder Bathroom joined Andrew Carnegie’s lake at Princeton, P.T. Barnum’s dead animals at Tufts, Frances Crick’s attempted brothel at Cambridge University, W.K. Kellogg’s horse shows at Cal-Poly Pomona, and Bob Gibson’s science fiction collection at the University of Calgary.

I spent the morning and early afternoon running the Sedona Marathon.  That was easily the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done.  But I finished.  That’s me and Herb (who thoroughly kicked my ass) rejoicing together.

5:47.  A new personal worst.  There was nothing pretty about it, but I got it done.  I was in decent shape and before I saw the course thought sub-5:00 would be pretty straightforward.  We drove the course the day before and I started thinking sub-6:00 was a better goal.

It was an out and back course.  Yes – that’s a three mile downhill before and a three mile uphill after the halfway mark.

This is an even more exciting chart.  Note the amount of +/- 10%-15% grade.  I haven’t seen the final times, but my understanding is the winner was around 3:00 (last years winner was 2:55.)  Herb nailed it at 4:14. 

Something happened between 18 and 20 and my left knee blew up.  I’ve had a tight IT band for the past few weeks and have been being careful on it.  I must have stepped on a rock funny because suddenly I had real pain in my left knee.  I struggled on for a mile or so but was reduced to a walk at mile 20.  At this point a sub 5:00 was long gone so I was just determined to finish.  Which I did.

Herb’s wife Terry did the half marathon (her first) and came in right on schedule at 2:28.  After showers and ice, we all went out for mexican food, tequila shots, and beers.  I expect I’ll be in bed by 9:00.

My next marathon is in eight weeks (4/13/08) in Washington State (Whidbey Island) assuming my knee is ok.  I’m focusing my training (and diet) on getting comfortably sub 5:00 for this next one as 5:47 is way too long to be running.

Andrew Hyde has a fun post and some pictures up at Colorado Caucus where he describes his experience last night.

This was so predictable.  As I mentioned in my post from a few weeks ago titled Can I Have Some More Crack Please?  I am not a macroeconomics guy.  I don’t watch the market nor do I watch TV news.  However, I do get WSJ.COM alerts (mostly for my own amusement to see what they think is worth emailing out alerts about.)

Here was today’s:

Feb. 5, 2008

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 370 points, or 2.9%, as investors’ anxiety about a possible recession flared following a bleak reading on the U.S. services sector and cautionary language about the economic outlook from a Federal Reserve official. It was the worst performance of the year so far for the blue-chip average in both point and percentage terms. Other major benchmarks also sold off dramatically. The S&P 500 Index plummeted by 3.2% and the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 3.1%.

I guess the crack high has worn off and it’s time for another hit.  Rate cute anyone?

Or Arabic, or Chinese, or Dutch, or German, or Greek, or Italian, or Japanese, or Korean, or Portuguese, or Russian, or Spanish?  Last night my Ross-my-IT-guy enabled translation of this blog into those languages via Google’s page translation service. 

I have no idea how well the translations work (since I don’t speak any of those languages), but if you are curious about how he did this, he blogged about Using Google Translation on your site.

I must have Microsoft / Yahoo / Google on my mind this morning.  Micah Baldwin has written a delicious scorpion / frog parable about M/Y/G.  Until four minutes ago, I thought The Scorpion and the Frog was an Aesop fable, but now due to the beautifulness and truthfulness of all things wikipedia, I now know that it’s the basis of the plot for the Star Trek: Voyager: Scorpion.  You – dear reader – might remember it from Natural Born Killers or The Crying Game.

I’ve been chewing on what to say about the Microsoft / Yahoo merger and its impact on entrepreneurship and – more specifically – Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.  I was finally gearing up to splat out some of my thoughts on paper, but after reading Marc Andreessen’s brilliant post titled Silicon Valley after a Microsoft / Yahoo merger: a contrarian view, I don’t have to.  While I don’t agree with 100% of the things Marc says, he covers all the ground I would have an just saved me 30 minutes of writing.