I have been looking forward to this day for a while.  I’ve always been obsessed with following any news or blog mentions of any of the companies I’m an investor and the people I work with.  For the past few years I’ve satisfied my obsession with an extensive set of Google Alerts (via email), Yahoo Alerts (via email) and Technorati Alerts (via RSS).  Occasionally I’ll add something else to the mix usually through RSS (such as a FriendFeed or Summize keyword feed.)  My email rules shunt everything to my "daily" folder so I only have to look through it once a day (when I read through my RSS feeds.)

Last week I deleted all my alerts.  I was able to do this because Filtrbox – one of the TechStars companies from last year – is now finding much more than 100% of the information that my alerts were picking up, including 100% of what I got from the alerts.  I’d been running the two in parallel for about six months and saw the lines cross about two months ago, but went ahead and had both run just in case.  I’m now confident that I won’t miss any of the alert stuff.

Dealing with Filtrbox is so much easier and more pleasant.  I enter my keywords into one UI instead of Google, Yahoo, Technorati, and others.  I get a daily email digest of everything Filtrbox found.  I have a history of all the data so if I want to go find an article from a month ago, I can easily find it in Filtrbox.  And I get a bunch of cool data visualizations.

I’ve watched Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team evolve Filtrbox from its starting point last summer at TechStars.  I’m blown away – they’ve really nailed it.  Ari and Tom took a deliberately "slow and steady" approach – making sure they really built something deep and robust before releasing it to the world.  They accomplished this – and it’s ready for action.

As a special bonus for all you Olympic fans (like me), they’ve put together an Olympic Blog Widget that is customizable and pulls from their data sources.  Guys – super cool.

When I work with software all day long, I sometimes forget that there are seriously cool and amazing things in the world that people build, like hadron colliders.

Yippee – the criticism of the software patent stupidity is starting to heat up and some really smart people are making both useful arguments about the issues and interesting proposals about the solution.  In addition, there are some general articles starting to appear that explain that while patents (and property rights) have an important role in our society and in encouraging and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship, there are some well understood problems that emerge from patenting small components of complex systems – especially when the vector of innovation is steep (like – for example – with software or the Internet.)

James Surowiecki has a great short article in the New Yorker Magazine titled The Permission Problem.  In it, he gives a great example of what Columbia law professor Michael Heller calls the "anti-commons" in his book The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.

"In the second decade of the twentieth century, it was almost impossible to build an airplane in the United States. That was the result of a chaotic legal battle among the dozens of companies—including one owned by Orville Wright—that held patents on the various components that made a plane go. No one could manufacture aircraft without fear of being hauled into court. The First World War got the industry started again, because Congress realized that something needed to be done to get planes in the air. It created a “patent pool,” putting all the aircraft patents under the control of a new association and letting manufacturers license them for a fee. Had Congress not stepped in, we might still be flying around in blimps."

The anti-commons is a great reference point for what has happened with software patents.  Simply put, if too many people own individual pieces of a valuable asset – especially if those pieces are overlapping and vaguely defined (e.g. software) – you can end up with gridlock instead of innovation.  Surowiecki explains:

"When something you own is necessary to the success of a venture, even if its contribution is small, you’ll tend to ask for an amount close to the full value of the venture. And since everyone in your position also thinks he deserves a huge sum, the venture quickly becomes unviable."

So – we have (a) Google Sued For Patent Infringement For Keeping Track Of How Many Ads People Click On.  At the same time, we have (b) U.S. Patent Office Rejects All Ninety-Five NeoMedia Patent Claims.  For those of you uncertain about my perspective, (a) is bad.  (b) is good.  Hopefully (b) motivates the folks at Google to fight like hell to invalidate silly patents, rather than take a "let’s retrench and patent everything in sight" position.

Finally, I read an article by Timothy Lee on Ars Technica last week titled Patent Office finds voice, calls for software patent sanity.  We need smart people to step up, shout from the rooftop about how fubared the software patent system is, and provide real alternatives.  I’m optimistic that this is finally starting to happen.

Allen Stern has a great interview up with Jon Fox, the co-founder of Intense Debate.  Jon and Intense Debate were part of the first year’s crop of companies from TechStars and are going great guns right now.  They create the comment replacement system that I use on my blog – if you are a blogger and haven’t tried it yet, wander on over to Intense Debate and take a look.

Jon covers a lot of ground in his interview, but I especially like his answer to Allen’s last question: "What tips do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?"

Jon: I would say two things. First, find yourself a mentor, or at least a friend in the business that can help to get you hooked in. If you don’t know anybody yet, reach out to a handful. My experience is that these people are generally more than willing to help, and happy to bring someone new into the mix.

Second, don’t be afraid to just dive in. I realize not everyone can do this, but it’s really hard to go half way into the startup lifestyle. Recruiting a team, raising money, building a product, etc all require lots of time and effort and you really can’t do it only on the weekend. It’s a bit scary at first, but once you get in it’s tough to believe you’ve lived any other way.

As the second year’s group of TechStars’ companies gear up for investor day in a few weeks, it’s fun to ponder how far some of last year’s companies have come.

I have seen my lifetime supply of slides like the following:

My good friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum – has a thoughtful post up this morning titled Simplification of Things, Part 1 of Some.  In it, he shows us a better way to communicate what this slide doesn’t.

Alex Muse has a long, detailed post up about How [He] lost $20,000,000+ in 18 months.  It’s the story of his experience with LayerOne – the first version and the second version.  It’s a useful story on failure that harkens back to 2001 with a nice redemption twist at the end.

Tim O’Reilly tweeted a link to an article titled How To Concentrate which was originally published in 1930.  It is excellent and worth reading slowly (presumably while you are concentrating.)

Amy often tells me that I have "Amazing Powers of Concentration."  If you are a Pink Floyd fan, you will get the subtle reference to a line from Nobody Home.  The line is actually "And Amazing Powers of Observation", but Amy is generously applying it to my actual skill.  Entertainingly (as in circus trick) I have a second amazing power – that of "total recall of the last thing someone said to me while I was concentrating on something else."  I use this very effectively in my marriage.

I’ve never really understood the phrase "I’m thinking."  It’s too abstract for me.  I like to think I think all the time.  So "I’m thinking" doesn’t feel like it applies to anything.  For example, when "I’m running", it’s pretty clear what I’m doing.  "I’m thinking" – not so much so.

However, "I’m concentrating" definitely means something to me.  I have different levels of concentration such as:

• Extended: I’m working on something that takes many months to do like – say – raising a new venture capital fund or running a marathon in every state in the US.
• Intense: I’m working on something that takes longer than 15 minutes to do.
• Deep: I’m working on something that takes a few minutes to complete but requires a lot of mental horsepower to figure out.

As I read through the How To Concentrate article, I realized that many of the things applied to my ability to have amazing powers of concentration.  The article is a short one.  Read it – it should only take a few minutes.  The sections are titled:

• "Concentration is the Most Important Intellectual Habit of Man."
• This ONE THING I Do
• Aids to Concentration
• Periodical Relaxation
• Mental Freedom
• The Proper Environment
• A Definite Schedule

Consider each section and what you have done to set up your life so you can have amazing powers of concentration.

And post #2 is up (I guess post #1 went up yesterday and I missed it since I only read feeds in the morning.)  Post #2 is titled Gross and Net Returns and – while it describes them – it has an excellent spreadsheet that go through the assumptions Fred and his partner Brad Burnham made on how they would invest their first Union Square Ventures fund.  Fred uses this model as the basis for describing the math of Gross and Net Returns.

Excellent stuff Fred.  Keep ’em coming.

Fred Wilson has an excellent post up today titled Venture Fund Economics.  It appears to be the first of several posts he’s planning to write on this topic.

"When I write about venture fund returns, there are always comments and questions that lead me to believe that the economics of a venture fund are not well understood. And since most of the readers and commenters on this blog are people who work in the startup ecosystem, I think its important that the economics are better understood. So I am planning on some posts on this topic in the coming weeks."

Everyone that is interested in venture capital in any way should read this post (and presumably the subsequent ones.)  I’ll try to remember to point them out when they appear.