I haven’t been reading that much lately (only 27 books so far this year) so I had a nice weekend chewing on a handful of them as I tried to catch my breath from a few weeks of constantly moving around.

The first – and most enjoyable – was Bricklin on Technology .  I’ve somehow managed to end up with three of them – I know that Dan Bricklin sent me one and Amazon sent me one, but I don’t know where the third came from.  Dan told me about this book a few months ago when I saw him in Boston at the TechStars for a Day event.  He’s done an outstanding job of combining his essays on computing with updated thinking along with a bunch of great history.  There are a dozen chapters – each are a “mini-book” within the book.  My favorite was Chapter 12: VisiCalc (which is – not surprisingly – the history of VisiCalc) but the other chapters are all great and include things like:

• What Will People Pay For?
• The Recording Industry and Copying
• Leveraging the Crowd
• Blogging and Podcasting: Observations through Their Development
• Tools: My Philosophy about What We Should Be Developing

I first heard of Dan Bricklin in 1979.  I had bought an Apple II with my bar mitzvah money (and some help from my dad).  When VisiCalc came out, we bought one of the first copies; we still have the original 5.25” disk in the brown vinyl VisiCalc binder (our copy was the one featured in the Triumph of the Nerds video series – that’s another long story.)  Not surprisingly, Dan and his partner Bob Frankston were early heroes of mine.  I even bought a copy of TK Solver when it came out.

I finally met Dan in 1995 when he was starting to think about the company that became Trellix.  I think we were introduced by Aaron Kleiner, but I can’t remember.  Yes – I was really excited the first time we met!  I ended up helping out in the very early days of Trellix through the point that Dan raised a $200k seed financing from CRV.  I’ve always loved the way Dan’s brain works and Bricklin on Technology is a bunch of it in one portable package.

I was at MIT on Thursday and Friday last week.  One of my favorite things to do when I’m there is browse in the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square.  I ended up picking up a handful of computer books that I read (well – I read some and skimmed some) this weekend.  They are:

Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices : HCI for beginners.  If you are interested in HCI or gestural interfaces but haven’t thought much about them, this is a quick, easy read. However, it’s really simple and there is a ton of important stuff missing from it.  One fascinating insight – the bathroom has become a test bed for gestural interface technology (ah – my heart flutters).  C.

Semantic Web For Dummies (For Dummies) : Alex Iskold from AdaptiveBlue would be proud of me.  Like most of the Dummies books, it was filled with filler (probably 50% of it could have been chopped) but it had plenty of useful examples.  I didn’t learn much from it as I knew most of it but I was searching for something suitably “beginner” aimed at a software developer.  I’d give this one a C+.

A Semantic Web Primer, 2nd Edition (Cooperative Information Systems) : This one was a little more serious.  Again, it was aimed at beginners, but I thought it was much more logical, much better structured (how ironic), and more insightful than the Dummies book.  It’s also more like a textbook so it presents the same concepts in a more serious nature.  I give this one a B.  As a result, I’m still searching for a great “beginners Semantic Web” book.

I think it’s time for some mental floss.

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.

I’m at the Glue Conference today.  The room is packed with a bunch of great folks, including a large contingent of locals (thanks guys – especially the BDNT crowd!)  So far we’ve heard from Josh Elman (Facebook) on “Gluing together the web via the Facebook Platform” and Aaron Fulkerson (Mindtouch) on “What is Web Oriented Architecture?”  Andre Durand (Ping Identity) is up now talking about “How Identity Makes the Future Internet Possible”.  Great stuff so far – follow along at #gluecon OR #glue.

Earlier this morning we announced our investment in Medialets.  My partner Seth Levine who joined their board talks about it more in his post titled Medialets as does Medialets on their blog in Medialets Raises $4m Series A Financing.  Remember FeedBurner?  Think FeedBurner, but for mobile apps.  If you make an iPhone app and want to be happier, email me and I’ll set you up.

But wait.  There’s more.  Be patient young jedi and all will be revealed.

My partner Jason Mendelson (an ex-lawyer) has a dynamite post up titled Quick Ways To Get Fired as a Lawyer.  While some of my best friends are lawyers (or ex-lawyers), I’ve encountered most of the stupid lawyer tricks that Jason enumerates in his post. 

The big ones (immediate termination) are:

1. Screw around with redlines.
2. Endorse the chief competitor.
3. You provide little leadership and wait for someone else to come up with the answer.
4. You provide advice to the CEO adverse to the company’s interest. 

The medium ones (you’ll lose us over time) are:

1. Be lax in your advice and get it wrong. 
2. Being inefficient, getting lost in the woods, billing for small stuff that doesn’t matter.
3. Bait and switch.  You bring in the client, but you never show for board meetings, phone calls, etc. and send junior folks in your stead.
4. Not knowing who your client is.
5. Letting summer associates run wild on the account. 

But my favorite is “Being annoying.”  Jason enumerates these in more detail – if you are an entrepreneur or a lawyer the post is worth a close read.  If you are a comedian, it’s probably worth it also as you’ll get more ammunition for your standup routine.

Now this is rap I can relate to.

Zynga rocks.  My friend code on iPhone Mafia Wars is 1901 3272 26.

Jean-Gabriel Morard – formerly of SugarSync – has a great post up on GigaOm titled Why Sync Is So Difficult.  It was one of the things I read before my run yesterday and it was in my head the entire time.  Jean-Gabriel’s main points are:

• Push sync is deeply asynchronous
• Sync matches different data models
• Sync messes with third-party applications
• Sync is hard to test

I sent the URL to Hong Bui, the CEO of Memeo (one of our investments) who responded with “Great article. I agree. Our approach is zen-like, on one use case at a time.”

I’ve been thinking about sync for a long time. I fondly remember when “replication” first appeared on the scene with Lotus Notes around 1985.  I was fascinated with the idea then and remain fascinated with it today.  It remains a perplexing unsolved problem at the core of both our Glue and Digital Life themes and I expect there will be plenty of talk about it at the Glue Conference in Denver this week.

We have four investments that care deeply about sync: Gist, Gnip, Memeo, and NewsGator.  And – we’ve got a new one that we’ll be talking about later this week that turns the notion of sync – and cloud computing – completely on its side.

Now – before you say “yes, but cloud computing solves the need for sync”, thing about what you are saying.  Go back and read Why Sync Is So Difficult.  Try again.

Each month my friends at Foodzie send me and Amy a “blogger care package” to taste and review.  My friends Joanne and Fred Wilson also get one – Joanne blogged their reviews earlier this week.

Amy’s in Africa so I just ate everything myself in one sitting.  I generally have poor impulse control (sort of like Hiro Protagonist) so I didn’t feel like waiting until Amy got home next week.  Here’s how it went down in my house.

I started with My Husband’s Nuts.  The packaging is priceless – notice the wink.  

I ended up with Onion Garlic nuts (um – yeah – whatever) which were good even though I don’t like and am allergic to onions (nope – I didn’t die).  I followed the nuts with the Devil in an Apron Caramels which were awesome for getting rid of the onion taste.  I then stared for a little while at Effie’s Homemade Oatcakes, decided I didn’t feel like trying them, and let them sit on my counter for a few days.

Huge mistake.  The Oatcakes were the best – just fantastic!  I never thought a cracker could taste so good – it’s definitely the sugar + salt thing that rocks it.  The right order to eat them in is Nuts, then Caramels, then Oatcakes.  So – my votes are:

1. Effie’s Homemade Oatcakes wins the taste of the month crown.
2. My Husband’s Nuts wins best package and gets a special bonus for introducing sexual innuendo into my day.
3. Devil in an Apron Caramels wins the what you do if you just had My Husband’s Nuts and don’t have gum, mouthwash, or toothpaste nearby award.

I can’t wait to see what the Foodzie’s send me in June.  Hint – that Mocha Double Chocolate Chunk Mini Bundt Cake for Two from The Great Spirits Baking Company looks awesome.  Just sayin’.

It blows my mind how many people think they can treat entrepreneurs and other investors poorly and think that it won’t come around to negatively impact them some time in the future.

I had two interactions last week with companies around a particular VC investor.  I’ve worked with them in the past and had a crummy experience.  I have a “fuck me once” rule where I’ll always give someone a second chance, but I’m wary and – if I have a second bad experience – I’m done.

When this VC came up in the first conversation, I couched my feedback with the appropriate disclaimers (e.g. “it might have just been me.”)  Interestingly, several other people around the table expressed much stronger negative feelings about this particular investor.  I noted that.

When this VC came up in a discussion later in the week, I stated my feedback and echoed the feedback I had heard from earlier in the week (keeping the names of the people involved appropriately confidential.)  Interestingly, the negative feedback was reinforced by another person in the meeting.

Now, I’m sure some people out there think I’m a dunderheaded lummox who occasionally takes leave of his senses, makes a mistake, or let’s someone down.  But – when I do – I try really hard to own up to it and apologize for it.  In both of these cases the VC in question behaved poorly and trashed at least five direct relationships.  There were at least a dozen key people involved in the various discussions that this VC will interact with again in the future.  My guess is that a dozen people have little to no interest in engaging with this VC.

Remember – the smell of shit can linger for a long time especially if you don’t clean it up.

Earlier this week Dave Lavinsky, who writes the Growthink Blog, interview me on How to Raise Capital as a First Time Entrepreneur.  Other than me doing a crappy job of answering the first question since I was distracted by something going on in my office, I thought Dave put together a great interview.  His post also summarizes three important points he drew out of me:

1. Your VC firm is your partner
2. Angel investors are the friend of the first-time entrepreneur
3. Don’t look for investors who are not a good fit

If you are a first time entrepreneur, wander over to Dave’s blog and have a listen.