After some rumors a few weeks ago, it’s now official.  AOL has acquired SocialThing.  I’m immensely proud of the Matt, Ben, and Brian.  As one of the members of the TechStars 2007 class of companies (and the first one to have an exit), I have a long list of entertaining stories that I’ll save for the closing dinner when we roast everyone.  In the mean time, I give you David Cohen’s memory of events and some of the history of how SocialThing came to TechStars last year. 

Frank Gruber – who has known the SocialThing team since they demoed at TECH Cocktail Boulder last spring (which Frank co-hosts) – also has some good thoughts up from his perspective inside AOL.

Guys – congrats!  Everyone in TechStars and the Boulder entrepreneurial community is proud of you.  And AOL – congrats to you also; you just added some really great ingredients to the mix.

Finally, as a special bonus, SocialThing won the Boulder 2008 IQ Award last night for Consumer Internet company.  And – I’m having lunch with Matt and his parents today.  Life is just never dull around here.

I’m one of those guys that can’t resist downloading a piece of software to try it out.  I buy every gadget, download everything that comes my way, and create an account on every web service I notice.  I’ve told Ross (my IT guy) never to come back from a trip to Best Buy without buying me something to play with.  Yes – I have poor impulse control.

I’m finding that a lot of the stuff I’m trying is sticking with me these days.  I still have a wide range of things that go into the discard pile (which – if it’s a physical device – means I give it to Ross as a gift after playing with it for a week or so.)  But – a surprising amount is useful.

As I think more about our Digital Life and Human Computer Interaction themes, I realized it might be fun (at least for me) to start writing about some of the experiences (good and bad) I’m having with "tech" as a typical early adopter.  I’m sure those of you out there that are gadget freaks early adopters will have fun suggesting new toys and helping me out with the ones I’m having problems with.

So – look for the trials and tribulations of my gadgets in my new Tech I Use category.

My friend Mitchell Ashley has started a really powerful new blog titled BreastCancerForHusbands.  I’m at the age where several of my friends have now fought with breast cancer – fortunately no one close to me has died from it. 

Mitchell’s wife Mary Ellen has breast cancer and he’s decided to blog about his experience with it.  Mitchell is a brave writer and speaks his mind clearly – he’s not afraid of talking about the ups and downs.  He also doesn’t pull any punches, as is evidenced by his post Don’t Be An Edwards Dumbass, Support Your Wife.

Highly recommended reading for anyone with a friend or family member struggling with any kind of cancer.  Mitchell – thanks for being brave enough to blog about this stuff.

August is theoretically a slow month.  Um, yeah.  As I pondered what I’ve got in front of me the next few weeks, I thought I’d share the things you are invited to come to and play with me.

Thursday 8/14 @ 5:30pm: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado party on top of the Foundry Roof Deck.

Saturday 8/16 @ 8am: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Annual Give Back Event at Foothills Community Park.

Monday 8/18 @ 6pm: The 2008 Boulder Sushi Regurge Open sponsored by Lijit.  Contact Micah Baldwin for more info.  There are only seven sushi restaurants in downtown Boulder – surely you can find us.

Tuesday 8/19 @ 6pm: Gnip office warming party in Boulder at Gnip’s new top secret location on the east end of Pearl Street.

Wednesday 8/20 @ 10am: TechStars Demo and Investor Day.  There are still some general admission seats left.  If you are an angel or VC investor and interested in a floor ticket, email me and I’ll get you set up.

Wednesday 8/20 @ 6:30pm: Boulder TECH Cocktail 2.  I assure you this will not be dull. 

Saturday 8/23: Mesa Falls Marathon in Ashton, Idaho.  Root for me.

Tuesday 8/26 @ 9:00am: 2008 Technology Roundtable as part of the DNC.  I’m a panelist along with a bunch of people that are much more serious than I am. I guess they invited me to lighten things up. 

Yeah – that feels like enough social events.  I think I’ll then go hide under a rock until after Labor Day weekend is over.

There’s lot of good Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado stuff going on.  The other day I wrote about the EFCO Annual Give Back Event that is happening on Saturday (please come join us.)  Today, New West announced that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

Tomorrow (8/14) at 5:30pm, Application Experts is announcing that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and is having a rooftop party on the Foundry Roof Deck to tell anyone that’s interested why you should care about EFCO.  A bunch of TechStars folks with be there along with me and my partner Jason Mendelson – come join us for a beer.

The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado is having their first annual "give back" event on Saturday 8/16.  If you are an employee of a company that is an EFCO member, you and your family are invited.  EFCO is doing this in conjunction with the Intercambio-KGNU Friendship Fun Run.  The logistics follow:

August 16 at Foothills Community Park (at Broadway and Violet, Boulder)
8 AM & 9:15 AM Adult 5K
8:45 AM Kids’ 1K
11 AM to Noon – Intercambio Strategic Planning Session  
Noon – Celebration Family Picnic

For some background on Intercambio, I asked Lee Shainis, the Executive Director, a few questions.

• Who is Intercambio?  We are an innovative, efficient and independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization founded in 2001 that works to build respectful communities and broaden opportunities for immigrants through language education, cultural exchange and friendship. 
• What does Intercambio do? We provide affordable and flexible English classes for over 1,000 adult immigrants each year, taught by over 350 trained volunteers at immigrants’ homes, other nonprofit agencies, and at public buildings.  We also offer community resource information and workshops as well as intercultural exchange through community social events such as potlucks, fiestas, camping trips and park clean-ups.  Over 1,800 people attend our intercultural events each year. 
• Why is this important for our community? In recent years, immigration has sparked a great deal of fear and discomfort in our society. Immigrants are striving to feel more confident and successful in their surrounding communities, but language barriers, fear, and lack of cultural understanding are severe obstacles. Intercambio provides a sustainable solution to these challenges and addresses the root causes by bringing together individuals from different backgrounds for an ongoing period of time with the objectives of learning from each other, building understanding, and creating a more inclusive community in which people of all cultural backgrounds feel better able to communicate, participate, and contribute.  We are transforming the way immigrants and non-immigrants are able to communicate with each other, while fostering intercultural friendships that lead to deeper cultural understanding.

Come join us for what should be a fun and interesting morning.  Register for the fun run and – if you are interested in volunteering to help with the event – please email Brandon Rattiner.

As the TechStars 2008 companies gear up for Investor Demo Day, many of them are asking me to write about them on this humble blog.  I’m really proud of what they all have accomplished this summer – it’s pretty remarkable to look at them now and compare them to where there were at the beginning of the summer.  Many of them are launching (or have recently launched) so I’ll start talking about them as individual companies.

The Ignighter team – in addition to coming up with a new approach to online dating – have provided endless laughs throughout the summer (note to self – always include at least one team of comedians in the program each year.)  The first time the Ignighter guys did the now infamous "elevator pitch" exercise, I was confused and simply responded "Oh – you have a group sex site." 

The Ignighter guys (and everyone else in the room) took this in stride and I found out later that they were secretly almost pleased with the misconception.  I made it clear to them that this wasn’t a good thing and that I thought it was important to deliver the message of their site more clearly. Over the course of the summer they worked really hard on it and now it’s a novelty when someone’s mind goes to group sex when he/she hears Ignighter’s elevator pitch.

Ignighter is launching this week and their first fun launch event is a group date between Obama and Clinton supporters in NYC. If you’re going to be in NYC and want to attend or learn more about the event, RSVP here.  They promise me there won’t be any political sex scandals that emerge from the event.

Eric Norlin has a good post up titled Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme.  In it he addresses the question "Is enterprise 2.0 bullshit?"  Eric doesn’t think it is, nor do I.  However, there is still a lot of difficultly getting real alignment on what it means, what is unique about the enterprise characteristics, and why anyone should really care.

I’ve seeing an interesting and predictable phenomenon occurring.  Corporate IT has gotten energized about implementing "social computing" and "all that Web 2.0 stuff."  The analyst crowd is writing about all the different Enterprise 2.0 categories and starting to extensively position products in pretty matrices.  Several big software companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are making major pushes into this "category."  Loads of startups are emerging in every segment.  TechCrunch even has an a new property called TechCrunchIT.

Early adopters are doing what they always do – pilots, proof of concepts, workgroup deployments.  White papers are appearing.  Web conferences are happening.  Inevitably an "Enterprise 2.0 Conference" (or several derivatives) will appear.

But Eric and I think something is missing.  What is going round and round as Enterprise 2.0 is a subset of something bigger.  For example, we are in the beginning phase of new issues surrounding the entirety of identity computing and the web.  We are now in a land where people have multiple online personas – their "work self", their "home friend self", their "secret second life self", their "hidden porn login self", and their "this is what I wish I was like self".  While "identity management" has been an endless "IT problem to solve", this isn’t really "identity management" anymore – it’s "I consume and generate a shitload of data in different contexts that are persistently stored out in the open for all to see – how do I deal with that?"

I could give another dozen examples of the subset issues contained in what we are trying to explore with Defrag.  I expect Eric will keep banging away on them on his blog.  And – more importantly – I hope you’ll come join us at Defrag on November 3rd and 4th in Denver as a group of really interesting and smart people attack some of these issues and try to make sense of them.  If you register this month, use the code "brad1" and get $100 off your registration fee.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the AEA survey that ranked Boulder as the #2 CyberCity in the US.  I suggested that this was misleading since #1 was "San Jose/Silicon Valley", which is not actually a city.  If you’d decomposed "San Jose/Silicon Valley" into the various cities that actually make up Silicon Valley, they would have been #1 through at least #5 and Boulder would have been #6.

Ever since I’m moved to Boulder in 1995, the "what do we need to do to be more like Silicon Valley" meme pops up ever regularly.  I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, have lots of friends and colleagues there, and have made (and continue to make) lots of investments there.  It’s a special and unique place. 

Over the years, I’ve asserted that Colorado has no business trying to "be like" Silicon Valley.   There are lots of things that Colorado can learn from Silicon Valley and a lot of them are happening / being created in Boulder right now.  However, it’s a great example of the cliche of "applying best practices" (where Boulder is learning from and applying the best practices of Silicon Valley) rather than strict emulation.

This came up in an interview with me on ColoradoBizTV that just went up today. I have a three minute riff on why "Boulder, Denver, and Colorado in general ebbs and flows with Silicon Valley envy and that’s an error" and why "the Boulder entrepreneurial scene is as healthy as it’s ever been."