I have a new Windows 7 computer at my loft in Boulder that I’ve been working on for the past 24 hours.  It’s the same exact configuration as my desktop (except for Windows 7 instead of Vista) and “my IT guy Ross” images all the machines the same so I get the same base config.  The amount of configuration in the image is substantial – it probably cuts out a full day of install, wait, download, configure, reboot shit.

I still find that piles of things don’t work quite right.  I can’t remember my password to the automatic password sync system I use, so I have no passwords.  Firefox isn’t set up the way I want it.  Outlook isn’t set up the way I want it.  Snipping Tool still crashes when I close it.  I can’t get to the shared drives in my office because I’m on a different ISP (Comcast) and things weren’t set up quite right.  And the list goes on and on.  And I’m really good at this!  Gronk.

I’ve been obsessing about user experience lately.  Human Computer Interaction and Digital Life are big themes of ours – an underlying premise of both of these themes is that the computer and technology should fade into the background.  And the premise of our Implicit Web theme is that the computer should do the work for you, figure out what you really want, and get smarted about this over time.

I got an email this morning from my long time friend and business partner Dave Jilk that made me smile.  Dave was my co-founder at my first company – Feld Technologies – and is now co-founder/CEO of Standing Cloud, a new company that we funded at the beginning of 2009.  The email – which is Dave’s review of his experience with the Pogoplug – is uniquely Dave as his goal was to, in his words, “make it hard on myself and do a more complicated configuration immediately.”  I’m proud to say that Dave’s conclusion was “Awesome setup.  Nice OOB experience.  IP-fu.  No blood.  Joe Bob says check it out.” (nice Joe Bob Briggs reference Dave.)

At this risk of over-pimping Pogoplug (since I just wrote about it yesterday in Pogoplug Getting Props from My Favorite Gadget Nerds, here’s the email (republished with Dave’s permission):

“I received my Pogoplug yesterday and installed it.  Since everyone raves about how easy it is, I figured I would make it hard on myself and do a more complicated configuration immediately. I wanted to keep my "Cloud drive" setup in my basement, and I happened to have a Linksys wireless bridge (WET54G) lying around (don’t ask).  So I connected the RJ45 cable into that and fired the bridge up.  Then I connected a USB hub to the Pogoplug USB port and just put a USB key in the hub to try it out.  I did not really expect this configuration to work the first time – will the bridge IP addresses confuse the Pogoplug? Will I have trouble with the initial setup given that I’m using a hub?  When, after all, was the last time I connected *anything* to a computer and had it work the first time?  But no, it installed trivially, without any problems.  You don’t even have to type in the long id code they give you – it just connects. I then downloaded the "Windows drive" software onto my laptop and opened it up, and that worked immediately as well (I found this almost creepy.  I’m running Vista.  I should at least have to reboot, right?)

All that didn’t take very long, making the experience mildly unsatisfying.  So I went back downstairs, unplugged the network cable while the Pogoplug was running and reconnected it to my Sonos music player, which can act as a wireless bridge also; and I added a USB hard drive to the hub.  This couldn’t possibly go well – the Pogoplug is going to get a new IP address.  Yet when I refreshed the browser window, there was the new drive. It took me a moment to figure out how to refresh the Explorer window to show the new drive – you have to go to the Pogoplug system tray icon and select "Reload" – but it worked fine once I found it.  Each device shows up as a top-level subdirectory of the Pogoplug drive.

The only thing I really found confusing is that the Pogoplug comes with a power cord and also has a power plug directly on the device.  It looks like the plug should come off (there is an arrow), but after a number of tries it did not slide off. I was afraid of breaking it, so I posted a question to the forum, which had an answer this morning: it’s just sticky, push hard. Probably they should have a sticker on the device that says this.  One other minor complaint, to use the forum you have to create a *separate* user account, which is annoying.  After all, I’m probably never going to use the forum again, given how simple the device is, so really the initial account setup should also set me up to use the forum.

Awesome setup.  Nice OOB experience.  IP-fu.  No blood.  Joe Bob says check it out.”

Nice.

We are super psyched about our investment in Pogoplug.  Generally, I hate self-referential tech analogies as a way of describing a product, but in Pogoplug’s case it’s easy: “Pogoplug is a Slingbox for your hard drive.”  Our big insight about Sling as an investment was that it was “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.”  Similarly, Pogoplug is “a bunch of magic software packaged in a cool plastic box that just works.”

While it’s easy to pimp our own investments, it’s better when others do.  I came home from vacation to Tim Wolters (co-founder Collective Intellect; previously co-founder/CTO Dante Group) post on Pogoplug (yes – I stuck one in his hand after we talked about it.)  He was skeptical, but nails the use case and asks for my favorite “on the roadmap” feature – automagical data sync.

In April, Todd Vernon (co-founder/CEO of Lijit; previously co-founder/CTO Raindance) also had a great Pogoplug review.  Todd is a consumer electronics junkie (he makes me look tame) and is notoriously hard on products and companies.  Praise from Todd is high praise indeed.

And – to top it off – Om Malik referred to his new Pogoplug as “My MacBook Air’s Second New Best Friend.”  He then went on to interview Brad Dietrich, Pogoplug’s CTO, on How Pogoplug Works.

Hell – my dad even likes his!  And – yes – all of my data is now on a drive attached to a Pogoplug sitting in a cabinet in my house, available to me from anywhere at anytime.  It’s conceivable that I’ll even get Amy to like it.

D7 starts Tuesday.  As usual, the speaker list is killer.  But, I can’t go as I have a board meeting in LA on Wednesday and I’m keynoting the IdaVation Conference in Boise on Thursday. 

My solution – the new All Things Digital iPhone app.  It is built with the latest version of the NewsGator iPhone Media App Framework and is spectacular (look for a refresh of the Brad Feld iPhone app soon, along with a few other fun ones.)  In this version, the five buttons on the bottom row of the app are configurable so I simply moved D7 to the first position and will click on it periodically throughout the day when I have free time to see what’s going on. 

D7 in my pocket – for free.  Any time I want it.  Cool.

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.

Now this is rap I can relate to.

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

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’.

Yesterday Gist announced that we led a $6.5m Series A financing.   Gist is right in the cross section of our email theme and our implicit web theme.  To better understand this, spend three minutes and watch the video below that explains the cerebrum communicator.

I first met T.A. McCann, the founder/CEO of Gist, at the Defrag Conference.  We helped Eric Norlin create Defrag because we wanted to go hang out with a bunch of smart people and talk / learn about the Implicit Web.  At the beginning of Defrag last fall, T.A. sent me a tweet that he was looking for a running partner during the conference. We ran both days, sweated together, and got to know each other.  I started playing around with Gist shortly thereafter and was immediately hooked.

I look forward to having the Internet directly connected to my brain.  Until then I’ll settle for Gist.  In the mean time, is anyone up for a run at the Glue Conference next week?

• #iphone
• #zynga
• #mafia wars

I’ve always loved computer games.  My Apple II screen had burn marks in it from Olympic Decathlon, Choplifter, Castle Wolfenstein, and Ultima.  Recently, I’ve become addicted to several of Zynga’s games online, especially Mafia Wars (I’m level 52 – friend me on Facebook and join my Mafia) and Scramble (I think I’m better than I actually am so it’s endlessly frustrating.)

Zynga’s been cranking on their iPhone apps so most of my Scramble action is now on the iPhone.  However, last night Zynga released Mafia Wars on the iPhone and it has immediately moved to third place on my “things to do on my iPhone other than email and call Amy.”

I got a note from Fred Wilson this morning that he’d beat me to the punch on posting about Mafia Wars on the iPhone.  Yeah Fred – whatever – you are on the east coast and I’m on the west coast today so time was on your side.  Help me neutralize the threat of Fred’s dominance in Mafia Wars by joining my iPhone Mafia – my player ID is 1901 3272 26 – recruit me for your Mafia (I’m level 5 on the iPhone already.)