If you are curious about the progress our investment in Zynga is making, Inside Facebook has a good blog post up titled Looking for the next big thing?  Social gaming startups heating up.  Zynga was founded last summer and has had incredible acceleration since it began (hint – the reach numbers are low – we should easily break 1m dailies by the end of this week.) 

It’s fun to be an investor in a company that has more money in the bank than the day it was funded.  Fortunately, the company knows where to invest it to accelerate its growth even faster.

Scramble anyone?

Today Microsoft announced that they have agreed to acquire Danger.  Congrats to the gang at Danger who have created a dynamite set of products with a significant and passionate user base.  Hats off also to my Mobius partner Greg Galanos who has been involved as an investor / board member in Danger from the very beginning.

One of the great things about startups is that you get to "start from scratch" and create whatever culture you want.  You don’t get handed a 275 page how to act like a BigCo employee manual on your first day of work immediately prior to your two week orientation at a conference center in Iowa City.

My friends at Lijit have a great sense of humor which is driven top down by the CEO Todd Vernon.  I was inspired to post this after waking up to my twitters and seeing that Ari Newman had twittered that Lijit wins for best maint. page.

One of Lijit’s publisher evangelists, Tara Anderson, has a great series up on her blog where she profiles each Lijit employee.  Here is a photo of me hugging one of my favorite cactuses (or is it cacti?)

And then there is the official Lijit Rock Band – Hamswords.

Remember – it’s your company.  Laugh a little.

Intense Debate just did another release and wrote up some of the features in their post Comment System Makeover.  They are on a regular release rhythm (about twice a month) and pushing a lot of new features and performance enhancements.

In an effort to be recursive, please leave me comments on your experience with Intense Debate as a user as they are looking for as much feedback as they can get (both good and bad is helpful.)  And – if you have a blog, while you are adding Lijit as your search capability, give Intense Debate a try as your comment replacement system.

In his post titled Feed Archaeology Charlie Wood writes about the little known NewsGator Archive Service.  NewsGator has archived all the RSS feeds that its users have subscribed to since it started.  Since it only archives feeds that users subscribe to, there isn’t a spam / splog problem in the archive.

If your blog magically disappears (like Charlie’s did (due in his case to a server that died) you can easily recover it from the NewsGator Archive Service.  In addition, if you use FeedBurner for your feed, your readers might not even notice.

For the nerds among you, here is the one command (assuming you have curl installed) that Charlie needed to recover his blog content.

curl https://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/archivesvc.asmx/GetFirst \ -d xmlurls=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fmoonwatcher \ -d numItems=100 -d sortAscending=TRUE -u uname:pword

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Nick Bradbury at NewsGator the past few years.  Nick created one of my all time favorite pieces of software – FeedDemon – which I use ever day as my RSS feed reader for Windows.

Nick wrote a great thought piece titled Why Use a Desktop RSS Reader?  It’s a nice follow up to the announcement yesterday that all of NewsGator’s client RSS readers are now free – including FeedDemon.

When Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder and CTO – first talked to me about NewsGator, he told me that he wanted to create software to enable everyone on the planet to read RSS feeds, anywhere, anytime, on any device.  Since I didn’t know what an RSS feed was when he first told me this in 2004, I wasn’t sure what to think of this.  We hung out together for a while and I quickly got sucked into his vision.

Whenever I go back and look at my post from June 28, 2004 titled Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? I get this warm tingly feeling inside.  I’m incredibly proud of what all the people at NewsGator have accomplished and the progress we’ve made in creating a real company over the past 3.5 years.

As part of our next strategic move as a business, all of NewsGator’s RSS client software is now free.  This includes Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon and Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire – both NewsGator products.  It also includes NewsGator Inbox (for Outlook) and NewsGator Go! (for many mobile clients, including Windows Mobile, Blackberries, and iPhones.)

Greg did a great job of explaining why we did this in his post titled NewsGator’s RSS clients are now free! so I won’t repeat what he said.  Nick Bradbury also nailed it in his post titled FREE Demon? Yes, FeedDemon is Now Free!  Jeff Nolan underscores a main point in NewsGator Client Apps Want to Be Free that the goal is an acceleration of our current market leadership position in the enterprise with these products.  Today – millions of people use NewsGator products every day – by this time a year from now I hope to be able to say "tens of millions of people use NewsGator products every day."

Now that the clients are free – there’s no reason not to try them.  I encourage you to wander over to the NewsGator site and download away!  Feedback – as always – is welcome and encouraged.  And – to all the NewsGator users out there that have helped us build and evolve these products, thank you!

When I was a doctoral student at MIT, my advisor was Eric von Hippel.  I’ve had my fair share of mentors in my 42 years – Eric has been one of the best.  I still remember during the first lecture of 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process – the first class I took from Eric – hearing Eric rant about how "users are the real source of innovation." 

When Eric first started talking about the notion of user-driven innovation in the late 1970’s, it was a completely novel idea.  Over the past 40 years Eric has build an incredible body of research as well as a large network of academics and practitioners who follow and extend his battle cry.  Of course, a great instantiation of this concept that we work with every day is open source software.

When Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures first introduced me to Peter Semmelhack – the CEO and founder of Bug Labs – during one of my trips to NY several years ago, I was immediately intrigued.  Fred and his partner Brad Burnham had the courage and the vision to take fund Peter’s idea to create an open computer electronics platform.  I remember walking in the rain with Peter and saying "aha – today’s Heathkit."  I got excited and tossed a little of my own money into the financing.  Among others I introduced Peter to Eric who hit it off immediately. 

Fred has an extensive post up on Bug Pricing and Availability and Engaget has some pretty pictures.  One of the modules being released is the von Hippel Module – a module named after Eric that adds interfaces and I/O ports for further hacking of the base Bug module. 

I’m really pleased that Peter has chosen to honor and memorialize Eric’s work by naming one of the Bug modules after him.  Peter and gang – keep it up – I can’t wait to get my new toys.

Lijit released another version of their blog stats.  With each release, the chocolaty goodness of Lijit gets tastier.  I’ve now got a fancy summary page, real time geolocation from Quova (and fun Google Map and Earth integration), a top posts report from integration with AideRSS, and lots more data on my readers and the searches they do.

Oh yeah – stats are the bonus part of the equation.  Lijit’s blog search (and re-search) continues to improve with every monthly release as they tune their proprietary algorithms and eliminate their usage of Google Custom Search (which is nifty, but doesn’t generate publisher focused relevance very well because of its dependence on pagerank.)

2006 was FeedBurner’s year to be the bloggers best friend.  It was an awesomely rewarding experience (and investment.)  I know my friends at Lijit are going to do everything they know how to do in 2008 to make it their year to be the bloggers best friend.

If you are a blogger and aren’t using Lijit for search and stats, give it a shot.