This is the third year in a row that Rally Software has won the Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Project Management Tools category.  The Jolt awards are one my favorite nerd awards handed out by Dr. Dobb’s Journal. 

If you are a software developer and have the word "agile" in your vocabulary, you should take a serious look at Rally’s products.  I’ve been an investor in the company almost since inception and am tickled whenever I think about the amazing job the team at Rally has made in nailing the next wave of application lifecycle management.  When Rally was starting out in 2001, there was a lot of "Agile what?" from people.  Now Agile and software development – and Rally – are rapidly becoming synonymous.

Rally just issued its 2008.1 release which – among other things – includes new integration connectors for IBM Rational ClearQuest, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, and Seapine TestTrackPro.  Who says you need to replace your software tooling to really go agile?

Maybe. 

The upcoming en banc session of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit happening in May is an important one.  Brad Stone of the New York Times has a nice short summary of what is going on here in New Patentable Idea: A Way to Invalidate Vague Patents. 

The End Software Patents Coalition has launched.  Look for a lot more from me in the near future on this as my efforts to abolish software patents intensifies.

Dear all my friendly neighborhood web developers out there.  Please don’t ever ask me for my Google login and password again.  Instead, please implement the Google Contact API.  While you are at it, please consider implementing the Windows Live Contacts API.  I went looking for the Yahoo one (it’s probably in the Mail stuff somewhere) also but gave up and figured I’d just point you to the MyBlogLog API which has plenty of fun, juicy data available.

That’ll keep you busy for a while.

I’m at TechStars for a Day watching my partner Ryan McIntyre give a presentation on Excite where he was a founder.  Each time he gives this presentation, it reminds me of the very first web spider – at least that I’m aware of.  Can you name it?

It’s the World Wide Web Wanderer (also known as W4 – which created the Wandex index.)  The creator was Matthew Gray which was one of the co-founders of NetGenesis – my first angel investment.  Matthew was one of the gang (including my close friend Raj Bhargava – now the CEO of StillSecure) who showed me the web (and Freshman Fishwrap) for the first time at an Athena Cluster in the Student Center at MIT in 1994. 

Ah – nostalgia.  Matthew has some great old stats up on his old MIT page, including a summary of web growth.  According to Wandex, on 6/93 there were 130 web sites.  130.  A year later on 6/94 there were 2,738.  By 6/95 the web was up to 23,500 and by 6/96 it was 230,000.  Oh the way we were.

It’s amazing what has occurred in the past 15 years.

Today’s Tech-Support Nightmare is priceless.  How many times have you had this particular customer support exchange?  LOI <g> WTF can’t speak sentence complete grammar bad.  We used to have the Pepsi Generation.  Now we are going to have the texting / SMS / Facebook generation.  W00t.

In 2000, we moved into a large office office in Superior, Colorado that at the time we fondly called Hotbank.  Incubators were all the rage and creating one seemed like a good idea at the time.

Over the years we’ve shared space over the Old Chicago pizza joint and Superior Liquors with a number of different companies.  One of the companies that started out in the space about the same time as we did was Veripost (which merged with Return Path in 2001.)  At the end of 2002, StillSecure moved back in, moved out, and then moved back in again in 2004.

In 2005, we turned the lease in the space over to Return Path and StillSecure.  At that time each of them consumed about a third of the space.  We stayed in our offices (about 10% of the space) and had a few other companies – including Collective Intellect and Slice of Lime – hang out with us.   

At some point Return Path and StillSecure kicked us out because they needed our space.  We moved to downtown Boulder in mid 2007. 

Several months ago, Return Path and StillSecure realized they had grown to the point where the space was too small for both of them and one of them needed to move out.  However, both wanted to stay.  The solution – I tossed a coin yesterday to choose who got to stay in the space.

We did two out of three.  StillSecure flipped first and the coin came up Return Path.  Return Path then flipped and the coin came up StillSecure.  I flipped the tiebreaker – which came up StillSecure.

I’m really proud of all the people at Return Path and StillSecure – it’s been a blast to be close to them as they have each grown into substantial companies.  Flipping the coin to decide who got to stay in the space was a nice karmic closure for me.

The newest blog post up on the Foundry Group web site is titled What Is "Thematic Investing?"  In this post, we try to describe more deeply what we mean when we say "we are thematic investors" or "we like horizontal stuff."

"Our themes tend to be horizontal in nature and are often based on an underlying protocol, standard or market trend that we believe is on the cusp of widespread adoption that has the potential to drive a cycle of innovation and company creation for at least a five to ten year period. We try to focus on themes and their underlying technologies that are ready to be rolled out to consumers or the enterprise and are well beyond the science-experiment phase.

To make this concrete, some examples of themes we are excited about presently and historically include email, RSS, the implicit web and human-computer interaction (HCI). Because themes are inherently horizontal, they have often have applications in the consumer and enterprise markets and can be delivered in myriad ways, whether it is via a web site, SaaS, a gadget, an appliance or good old-fashioned downloadable client or server software."

We don’t limit ourselves only to our themes, but we use them to guide much of our thinking.  One of the themes we are working on that we don’t cover in the post is called Glue – which is shorthand for "web application infrastructure."  Look for more on this from us soon.