Brad Feld

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And It’s Only Wednesday

May 13, 2009
Category Investments

It’s been a busy and exciting week so far.  The best part is that Amy arrived home from her two week trip to Africa yesterday evening.  I picked her up at the airport and got to spend the night with her before heading back out to Glue on my way to San Francisco on my way to Boston.  The weekend starts Saturday at noon for me when I get back in Boulder and I expect to be enjoying it thoroughly.

Today, we announced our investment in Cloud Engines, which makes the Pogoplug (available for sale now).  My partner Ryan McIntyre is joining the board.  When Ryan first mentioned Pogoplug to me, he said “it’s a Slingbox for your hard drive.”  I thought about it for a moment before asking “so you mean I can get 1TB of cloud storage for a one time payment of under $200 (the Pogoplug and a 1TB hard drive)?”  Ryan responded verbosely with “yes” to which I responded “done.”  It’s another chunk of special magic software packaged in a little plastic box.

My good friend David Cohen – the founder/CEO of TechStars – also announced today that he has raised a $2.5m startup seed fund.  David is an awesome seed investor and he’s pulled together an stunningly great group of investors to contribute to the fund.

Glue continues today.  RockyRadar has a nice wrap up of day 1 in their post titled Glue Conference Ponders the Right Questions to Ask about the Future of Computing Architechture.  I mentioned to Eric Norlin yesterday that I was really psyched to see the range of super smart people from around the country at Glue; Eric really knows how to put a conference like this together.

Occipital – one of the TechStars 2008 companies – released RedLaser – an iPhone app that can read barcodes.  You use your iPhone to take a picture of the barcode; RedLaser uploads it to Occipital’s servers that then do the magic graphic manipulation / interpretation stuff.  The app then does an automatic lookup of the barcode on the appropriate service (Google Product Search or Amazon for now, but more coming).  Again – magic happy stuff done by software.

OneRiot (where I have a personal investment) was all over the news yesterday with their real time search engine.  They now include Digg and Twitter results.  MG Siegler has a good comparison of different real time search approaches up on TechCrunch in his post Real-Time Search-Off.  No winners yet, but look for this to evolve really rapidly. 

Yesterday we announced that we’ve invested in Medialets and at the end of last week we announced that we have invested in Gist.  But you probably knew that.

Ok – enough for now.  Jumping on the plane to go to San Francisco and play at Zynga.  Then experiencing a Virgin sleep for the first time to go to Boston for some MIT stuff, a bunch of meetings, and maybe a few more interesting things.