Our portfolio company Rally Software absolutely creamed their first quarter plan – I’m pleasantly stunned by their positive performance.  They are leading the adoption of Agile software methodologies into software development organization. 

While that is exciting, I keep hearing stories – especially from Rally Software customers – about how they are using Agile in other parts of their company.  Ashley at GroundFloor Media has a great post up titled PR and software development may have more in common than you might think… about how GroundFloor is using Agile methodologies in other parts of their organization.  If you are interested in another example, Matt Blumberg (Return Path’s CEO) wrote about Agile Marketing a while ago.

Looking for hint about Gnip?  Jud’s got one sitting on his desk.

Zynga has started launching its games on MySpace as part of the MySpace apps program.  Texas Hold’em Poker is up and is currently the #1 game AND the #1 application.  If you are a MySpace dude (or dude-ette), feel free to friend me as I’m completely unloved on MySpace (especially when compared to Facebook.)

Scoble just put up a one minute video with Todd Vernon, the CEO of Lijit.

Scoble has Lijit’s search wijit up on his blog in the right side bar.  Go give it a try and see what’s going on at SXSW – at least through Robert’s eyes.

Todd just wrote a great post on why Lijit will increase your page views.  He’s got examples, data, and even conclusions.  Plus he uses fancy new phrases like "second click" and "third click." 

Right now, when people search your blog, their second click is usually the back button in the browser to go back to the Google (or other) search page to click through to something else that search brought up.  Why not keep the second click on your blog instead?

If you are a blogger, don’t be left out in the cold.  Reclaim your second click (and all the ensuing traffic.)  Get Lijit now.  You are minutes away from search happiness.

This is the third year in a row that Rally Software has won the Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Project Management Tools category.  The Jolt awards are one my favorite nerd awards handed out by Dr. Dobb’s Journal. 

If you are a software developer and have the word "agile" in your vocabulary, you should take a serious look at Rally’s products.  I’ve been an investor in the company almost since inception and am tickled whenever I think about the amazing job the team at Rally has made in nailing the next wave of application lifecycle management.  When Rally was starting out in 2001, there was a lot of "Agile what?" from people.  Now Agile and software development – and Rally – are rapidly becoming synonymous.

Rally just issued its 2008.1 release which – among other things – includes new integration connectors for IBM Rational ClearQuest, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System, and Seapine TestTrackPro.  Who says you need to replace your software tooling to really go agile?

In 2000, we moved into a large office office in Superior, Colorado that at the time we fondly called Hotbank.  Incubators were all the rage and creating one seemed like a good idea at the time.

Over the years we’ve shared space over the Old Chicago pizza joint and Superior Liquors with a number of different companies.  One of the companies that started out in the space about the same time as we did was Veripost (which merged with Return Path in 2001.)  At the end of 2002, StillSecure moved back in, moved out, and then moved back in again in 2004.

In 2005, we turned the lease in the space over to Return Path and StillSecure.  At that time each of them consumed about a third of the space.  We stayed in our offices (about 10% of the space) and had a few other companies – including Collective Intellect and Slice of Lime – hang out with us.   

At some point Return Path and StillSecure kicked us out because they needed our space.  We moved to downtown Boulder in mid 2007. 

Several months ago, Return Path and StillSecure realized they had grown to the point where the space was too small for both of them and one of them needed to move out.  However, both wanted to stay.  The solution – I tossed a coin yesterday to choose who got to stay in the space.

We did two out of three.  StillSecure flipped first and the coin came up Return Path.  Return Path then flipped and the coin came up StillSecure.  I flipped the tiebreaker – which came up StillSecure.

I’m really proud of all the people at Return Path and StillSecure – it’s been a blast to be close to them as they have each grown into substantial companies.  Flipping the coin to decide who got to stay in the space was a nice karmic closure for me.

Go to https://mbeta.newsgator.com/d on your cell phone via the browser.

Download the appropriate client for your phone (if it’s missing or doesn’t autodetect, please leave a comment here and my friends at NewsGator will work on tuning it.)

Run the app.  If you have a NewsGator account, you will log in and automagically see your feeds.  If you don’t have a NewsGator account you will be prompted to create one and then you are off to the races.

I just tried it on my Dash (Windows Mobile) and it worked flawlessly.

Once all the kinks are worked out, this will move to https://m.newsgator.com/d

God these guys are good.

Two interesting NewsGator posts today.  Activity Scoring in NewsGator Online talks about a new feature in NewsGator Online that incorporates the massive amount of attention data that NewsGator is collecting daily. 

Next is Nick Bradbury (the programming maestro who created FeedDemon) talking about The Joys of String Allocation.  Even maestro’s write code that – if optimized – can generate over 1000% performance improvement.

My friends at FeedBurner surfaced today with a post titled Hello? Hellooooo?  In it, they explain what they’ve been up to post-acquisition by Google.  Two words – technical integration.

It’s hard.  I’ve talked to Dick Costolo – FeedBurner’s CEO – a couple of times about it in general terms.  They are basically rewriting FeedBurner to work on Google’s architecture.  The leverage they get out of this is enormous, but they have to rewrite a bunch of stuff to get there.

The brilliant thing about the FeedBurner service is while there hasn’t been many new features since the Google acquisition, it’s continued to work flawlessly over the past few quarters.  This is a testament to the quality of the service in the first place.

These days, whenever someone tells me that "scaling is no big deal" or "after that, we just need the money to scale things up", I just burst out laughing.  The deep dark hole of post acquisition integration is often deep and dark.  When it works, it can be a beautiful thing.