I’ve introduced two new devices into my personal human instrumentation experiment.  In addition to my Zeo, I am now carrying around a FitBit and using a Withings scale.  I’ve discovered the mild embarrassment associated with having a scale mis-tweet your weight by 10 pounds too much (e.g. “Brad – you gained a lot of weight recently – everything ok?”)  But I suppose that is part of the experiment.

The comparison on the Zeo and FitBit sleep data is fascinating.  Take a look.  Zeo from last night first.

Now the FitBit from last night.

The Zeo breaks things down into four categories: Wake, REM, Deep Sleep, and Light Sleep.  The FitBit only has two: Active and Asleep.  My FitBit time setting is wrong (it has me going to sleep at 9:17 but I went to bed at 11:10 – I’ll need to figure out how to fix that).  But both have me in bed for a little over 9 hours, although the FitBit thinks I was only asleep for 8:17 of it.  The Zeo has me asleep for 97% of the time; the FitBit has me at a Sleep Efficiency of 95%.

I need a few more nights of comparative data to completely understand the differences, but I thought I’d toss up a baseline to get started.    Oh – and I slept in this morning – I felt kind of crummy and decided to just sleep to try to shake off whatever was creeping up on me.

• #filtrbox
• #ari newman
• #entrepreneurship
• #pi window on business

Jon Hansen from PI Window on Business had so much fun with me a few weeks ago that he asked me to do another interview – this time on the dynamics around foreign investments.  We covered plenty of ground, including what country, state, and local governments do to slow down investments, along with a bunch of my own philosophy around why I only make VC investments in the US and Canada.  Buried deep in the interview is my track record making VC investments in European companies (hint: not pretty).

Entrepreneur Magazine made a swing through Boulder recently and did short interview videos with a bunch of the Boulder entrepreneurs.  If you aren’t exhausted after listening to an hour of me (or if you punted), take a quick two minute tour with Ari Newman of Filtrbox. 

Ari finishes strong with a great line – “If you aren’t doing something you love, life’s too short – there’s an opportunity cost.”  As a special bonus, Matt Galligan – the man who manages to be everywhere – is hanging out over Ari’s left shoulder.

I love having steel balls.

Amy and I discovered Mark Castator about a year ago.  He’s a Boulder based artist that does amazing stuff with steel.  Here’s a few other things in our house in Eldorado Canyon.

The metal painting on the wall is by Mark Cesark who is an Aspen based artist (and another Mark) who we’ve fallen in love with and are collecting aggressively.  The steel towers by the window are Castator’s.

  
The next time you are in my office feel free to ask to see my big steel balls – I’ve got some there also.  Yeah, all of this kind of reminded me of Pete Schweddy.  Sorry.  Oh – and please remember the legal disclaimer on this blog.

How to be a Jewish Star.  I feel like some potato latkes this morning.

When I was a kid, everyone said that Hanukkah was better than Christmas since we got eight gifts.  My view was that we got eight shitty little gifts while all my friends had a giant gift orgy on Christmas.  At some point I stopped caring completely.  Really, I don’t care.  Really!  Well not really.

Last week I complained about how miserable I was with AT&T.  I love my iPhone, but the AT&T service (both data and voice) is abysmal here in Boulder.  All my Blackberry friends on Verizon are happier, so I decided to try a Droid on Verizon.  After 24 hours I bailed and went back to my iPhone – the Droid just isn’t ready for prime time IMHO.

Thaddeus Arroyo, the CIO of AT&T Services, is on the National Center for Women & Information Technology board with me and saw my tweet (apparently via Facebook) whining about AT&T.  He reached out to me immediately and asked if he could help in any way.  I sent him a long note which has resulted in a call tomorrow with the senior regional area support executive.

So – I’ve got my issues and can clearly articulate them, but I’m looking for a longer list.  If you are a Boulder-area AT&T / iPhone user and you are having trouble with voice or data, please leave a comment here with some details for me to share.

I got an email from my friend Rob Shurtleff of Divergent Ventures this morning that said “So I looked at your bookshelf for ideas. It is a bit like walking into a library without an idea of what I want to read.  So here is the challenge, we are driving to Yellowstone for 4 days of hanging out at old faithful before xmas.  I would like to grab a few books on my iphone for the drive 12 hours each way.  How about putting up two lists:  The Ten Non Fiction books you really should read and The Ten Fiction books.”

I’ve read 72 books so far this year – I’ll probably be around 90 given my typical book a day rhythm when I’m up in Keystone.  So I’m only going to list the top five non-fiction and top five fiction (ok – approximately five) from this year since that’ll be less than 20% of what I’ve read.  Here you go – you can’t go wrong with any of them if you are a reader.

Non-Fiction

Zeitoun: New Orleans + Katrina + Muslim American + Heavy Bad Stuff

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else: Successful Ad Exec finds himself in the dumps later in life.  Fixed by a job at Starbucks.

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves: The Financial Crisis of 2008 unfolding in great detail.

Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska: Actually, in really remote Alaska.

Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital: The story of General Georges Doriet and the start of the venture capital industry.

Fiction

The Scorpion’s Gate and Breakpoint: Brilliant contemporary spy vs. spy stories by Richard A Clarke.  Yes – I realize this is two books – read them in order.

The Player of Games: An Ian Banks classic.  Particularly interesting if you are addicted to Zynga games.

The Orpheus Deception and The Echelon Vendetta and The Venetian Judgment: David Stone is my favorite new mental floss writer.  Three books – read them in order.

Daemon: Easily the best cyberthriller I’ve ever read.

Supreme Courtship: Anything by Christopher Buckley always makes the list.  Especially poignant given my Supreme Court visit this year.

One of my recent obsessions has become “human instrumentation.”  I’ve always been really interested in the data that I generate (sleep, fitness, diet, medical) and in the past six months have started buying every personal measurement product or device I can find that is integrated with the web.

One of my favorites is the Zeo.  We looked at investing a while ago and I got to play with one of the alpha prototypes.  It was cool but we just didn’t get there on the investment, even though I loved the product and had a great impression of the founding team and what they were up to.  We keep a list of “companies we hope we regret not investing in” which means (in English) that we are huge fans and will do whatever we can to help, even though we aren’t investors.  Zeo is on that list for me.

But – back to my sleeping skills.  Last night I set a new personal ZQ of 137.  Here’s my sleep graph from last night.

Light green is REM – I had four REM cycles last night (I usually have one or two) and during the week my score is usually between 50 and 70.  The red wake up spikes are bathroom trips (three last night – eek – getting older) and the last one on the far right is when Amy came in to the room at 11am to make sure I was still alive.

I just got a Fitbit and I’m starting to use it also so at some point I’ll do a comparison of the Zeo vs. Fitbit sleep data.  In the mean time, I think the Zeo is a great present – definitely consider it for any friends who either (a) love data or (b) have trouble sleeping.  I get some kind of affiliate thingy if you clicking on that link above, so if you do buy a Zeo, help me fund my endless toy habit.

As 2009 heads into the home stretch, I’m feeling techno-restless.  I’ve got two big end of year projects that I’m working on that will keep me in front of my computer a lot, along with a pile of new toys that have shown up in the past few weeks that I’m playing with.  So – yesterday I decided to start trying to use new stuff and see if I would switch.

I thought I’d start with some Googly stuff so I grabbed Amy’s new Droid to play with Android and downloaded the Beta Chrome browser.  24 hours I’m back to my iPhone, but I’m sticking with Chrome.  Here’s my reaction to both so far.

In theory, the Droid is a great idea.  AT&T service in Boulder has been terrible all year and it doesn’t really seem to be getting better.  I’ve really settled into using the iPhone comfortably for a data device, especially in reach of Wifi, but the dropped calls (and call quality) are maddening.  I know Verizon is happier here and I figured the number of folks saying positive things about the Droid meant the software would be “close enough” to what I’m used to on the iPhone.  After one day of fighting through the email client, the marginal keyboard, the terrible on screen keyboard, and generally feeling a massive loss of “speed” as I tried to jam through email, I gave up on it.  The screen is beautiful, but the hardware isn’t anywhere as nice as Apple’s.  I guess I’m just going to suffer through AT&T’s service for a while until they eventually either improve it or I give up or Apple opens up the iPhone.  At least for now.

Chrome is a whole different story.  I’ve been a Firefox user for at least four years and – while I generally really like it – I’ve noticed it getting slower and slower with each major release.  I’ve tried Chrome a few times in the past and always found it snappy, but the lack of plugins – most notably bookmark sync – but others that I use all the time like Glue – caused me to sick with Firefox.  Well – the Chrome beta now has bookmark sync and extensions – and it just kicks ass.  It is so much faster than Firefox, both with Google specific stuff as well as general web pages.  I’m now firmly in Chrome.

So – Google got one out of two switches from me today.  Not bad – we’ll see what new toys next week brings.

Speaking of the metaverse, we had a great TechStars summer program this year.  The companies that graduated from the program are starting to announce their financings and two announced this week.

SendGrid Raises $750K For Email Deliverability Software: I love these guys.  If your company sends transaction outbound email to your end users (e.g. confirmations, alerts, notifications) you can either (a) do it yourself and build all the infrastructure / support around it or (b) outsource it to SendGrid.  I’m a huge fan and really excited about their investor group led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC and FF Angel.

ReTel Technologies, Inc. Raises $1M Seed Financing: , which is an advanced surveillance video analytics company, was one of the companies profiled in this summer’s video series on TechStars called The Founders.  Funny, smart, and willing to travel the world for video surveillance, ReTel closed a great financing led by Jeff Clavier at SoftTechVC with participation from Hyde Park Angels, FF Angel, Maples Investments, eonBusiness and Zelkova Ventures.

And, while we announced our investment in Next Big Sound at the end of September, it was picked up in TechCrunch and listed several of our co-investors including Alsop Louie and SoftTechVC.

Wait, there’s more.  The Everlater financing, led by Highway 12 Ventures, was also announced about a month ago.

Guys – congrats – you rock!  And there’s lots more coming.  If you want to follow along on your iPhone (assuming AT&T is connecting properly), there’s an app for TechStars.