The Boston Globe has a great "Office Invasion" series on their web site.  If you are into Guitar Hero or Rock Band, take a look at the Harmonix office and some of the interesting folks that work there.

Last week NewsGator announced that it had raised a $12m round led by new investor Vista Ventures and existing investors Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead.  Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder / CTO reflected on the progress from the first $1m investment that Mobius made and Jeff Nolan’s talked about our excitement of getting Lisa Reeves (formerly from SAP Ventures – now at Vista) involved.

I’ve been an investor (via Mobius Venture Capital) from the very beginning of NewsGator.  I wrote a post titled Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? in June 2004 shortly after making a $1m seed investment in the company (mostly in Greg Reinacker and his vision.)  Reading back through it makes me feel simultaneously nostalgic and intensely proud of what the now 75+ people at NewsGator have accomplished.

NewsGator has a variety of products built on top of the RSS platform technology they have created.  We’ve seen great adoption of the NewsGator Enterprise Server (over 100 of the Fortune 2000 are now customers), are seeing rapid growth in our new NewsGator Social Sites product (integration of NewsGator Enterprise Server with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007), and have been blown away by the market success of the NewsGator Widget Framework (over 50 customers added in 2007.)

We took a "go heavy on building the technology" approach at NewsGator and it has paid off nicely.  The expertise within the company around RSS technology is humongous.  We’ve started (but have not limited ourselves to) a Microsoft view of the enterprise and as a result have extremely deep links into SharePoint, Exchange, and Active Directory (along with some of the best Microsoft .NET developers on the front range.)  And we’ve been able to attract incredible product talent to the team which has resulted in an awesome portfolio of integrated products on various platforms including Windows (FeedDemon), the Mac (NetNewsWire), Outlook, and Mobile (name a platform, we’ve got it.)

Lisa Reeves – who comes from the world of enterprise software – understands the potential of a company like NewsGator.  In a universe where many VCs are saying things like "we are only interested in consumer Internet" or "we only want to fund companies with a pure SaaS model", Lisa saw past the nonsense of such limiting thinking and focused on the potential of the overall business.

As a huge believer that the consumer Internet innovations that we’ve seen take front and center stage over the past few years are now ripe for application to the enterprise, I’m rabidly excited about the prospects for NewsGator.

Wanna see a cool hack?  Fire up Lijit Live 3D.  This is semi-real time view (there are some delays built in to prevent you from getting nauseous) in Google Earth of the geolocation of searches going on across the blogs that have installed and are actively using Lijit search.

The geolocation data is coming from Quova – another investment of ours.  Lijit told me the integration was trivial, which is great feedback.  Seeing this on a 30” screen at 7:30 in the morning is mesmerizing.

Update: There is a 2D version up that is equally entrancing.

Having run Lijit on my site for about six months, I’m seeing a fascinating increase in page views.  About 5% of my daily uniques do a search.  Each search generates another 5 page views.  So by using Lijit search I increase my daily page views by 25%.  I’m encouraging my friends at Lijit to quantify this across the system (and make it explicit for each publisher) – a 25% increase in page views just by putting the Lijit search wijit on a blog is powerful.

If these numbers hold across the system, Lijit’s motto can change from “we make blog search suck less” to “we increase your page views.”  If you are a publisher (e.g. blogger), give Lijit a try.

My affection for the amazing games from the gang at Harmonix crosses several boundaries, including the well revered financial one.  As an angel investor in Harmonix, I bow down and worship before my entrepreneurial rock gods.

I’ve been waiting patiently anxiously for Harmonix’s new game "Rock Band" (preorder your copy on Amazon: Rock Band – Xbox 360 or Rock Band – PS 3 and help feed this blogger.) 

I’ve seen the Youtube videos and the demo reel.  But the real test was the Boston Globe review which was printed today at Rock Band passes test with real musicians – and amateurs.  They should have hired me to write the headline – it would have been "Rock Band Rocks."

November 20th is almost here.  Amy is going to thank me for that PS 3 I bought recently.  And – no Ross – I still can’t get you a prerelease copy.  You’ll just have to wait.

I’m a small investor in Shelfari.  I read a ton and thought it would be fun to play along with them at home and both a user and an investor.  About a month ago I started noticing increasing chatter about Shelfari spam during the invite process in my RSS search feeds on "Shelfari."  I regularly passed them on to Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari.

I hate spam.  I’ve been an investor in two companies that are aimed at making email safer for humanity – Postini and Return Path.  While I’m a small investor in Shelfari, the increasing noise level around Shelfari invite spam bothered me, and I told Josh.

Josh listened, paid attention to the problem in his spare time (37 seconds a day), responded regularly to my emails, and a few weeks ago (within a few days of me increasing my "hey – this is getting worse" messages) promised a fix.

The fix is here and Josh wrote an extensive post titled Invitation design that describes the root causes of the problem and walks through their changes. I just tried it with my Gmail address book and I think the changes likely fix 100% of the issues. Josh’s explanation – both of the UI problem as well as the reasons it wasn’t obvious to Shelfari that it was an issue – is an excellent example of using blogging to communicate what you are doing as a company.

Shelfari wasn’t intentionally spamming (as they were starting to be accused of) – they were just intensely busy and weren’t focused on a problem that emerged as their user base grew geometrically.  By addressing it out in the open, they should earn extra karma credibility points.

My investment in Shelfari has been a lot of fun. Josh Hug and his team are monsters – they get stuff done incredibly quickly. Plus I get to play with my books virtually.

In addition to the Shelfari web service, they’ve got widgets up on Facebook and MySpace.  Now they’ve got and OpenSocial implementation as well.

If you are looking for real examples of OpenSocial, here’s another one.  Demo starts at minute 5.  Josh – you look very serious – time for a smile.  Nice belt btw.

Each day, consumers conduct more than two million online searches for user manuals and self-support information on products ranging from consumer electronics to kitchen appliances. Many of these searches end in frustration, because this information can be difficult to find. In our house, we have a “manual drawer” which quickly turns into a “crap drawer” that – not surprisingly – never has the actual manual that I’m looking for (picture gnomes stealing underwear.)

A new company, OwnerIQ, solves this common and frustrating problem by collecting and organizing user manuals and other self-support information online, making it easy to find.  Jay Habegger, from Colorado now living in Boston, started OwnerIQ (he sold his last company, Bitpipe, to TechTarget in 2004).  Earlier this summer, OwnerIQ closed a $2 million Series A round led by Atlas Venture which included a number of Boston angel investors and some unnamed dude from Colorado. 

OwnerIQ aggregates user manuals around specific product types and gives you the ability to store – in a personal online filing cabinet – all of your manuals.  Voila – time to clean out the “manual / crap drawer” and repurpose it for something useful, like the thousands of different napkins Amy buys that we never use.

To monetize this idea, OwnerIQ is pioneering the concept of Ownership Targeting, providing brand advertisers with highly customized programs to precisely target consumers based on products they already own.  Ownership Targeting takes the guesswork out of identifying likely purchasers and enables advertisers to influence consumers throughout a product’s ownership lifecycle.

I’ve gotten to know Jay over the past year through our work together at the National Center for Women & Information Technology and several of the companies I’ve been an investor in were very satisfied partners of Bitpipe.  I’m looking forward to watching Jay “do it again.”

Today’s guest blogger is my partner, Jason Mendelson.  I’m immensely proud of Jason, my partner Chris Wand, Stratify’s CEO Ramana Venkata, his excellent management team, and all the great folks at Stratify for their fantastic work in creating the market leading eDiscovery company.

Today, Stratify and Iron Mountain announced they have entered into an agreement for Stratify to be acquired by Iron Mountain for approximately $158m in cash.  Stratify is a Mobius Venture Capital portfolio company that Chris Wand and I have had the pleasure of serving on the board for the past several years.  We’ve really enjoyed the journey that we’ve shared with Ramana Venkata, the CEO and the rest of his capable management team. 

Stratify has revolutionized the way that attorneys deal with the eDiscovery process.  For those of you fortunate enough to not know what “eDiscovery” is, think about all the millions of pages of paper, and hundreds of GB of email and files that lawyers comb through when one party sues another.  What used to be a completely manual process that resulted in spiraling costs and sometimes marginal quality, has now been partially automated by technology.  This process has been dubbed “eDiscovery.” 

Stratify’s best-of-breed patented technology uses statistical algorithms to “read” documents – in any form, in any language and automatically group like items together, discarding duplicates, segregating out irrelevant data and creating computer-generated named folders where similar-subject matter documents are stored.  Also included in their platform are analytics to study relationships between documents, emails trails and a host of other capabilities that make anyone who sees them wish for a more stringent document retention policy. 

Iron Mountain Digital and Stratify have had a burgeoning partnership, whereby Stratify eDiscovery solutions were offered in combination with those from Iron Mountain, the trusted name in information management.  It’s a natural partnership that the company holding and protecting  information assets for enterprises is acquiring the technology and expertise to make them actionable – giving  their customers the ability to analyze and leverage information in valuable ways. 

We were the only institutional investors in Stratify and therefore we played an even larger and more active role in supporting the company’s efforts than normal.  Whether it was sitting around drawing on a white board developing mock ups of screen shots, or tagging along on early sales calls trying to sell to lawyers who had never heard of the term “eDiscovery” it was a great experience.  In fact, it was fun.  It’s even more rewarding that the company became such a huge success.

Today marks a great step in Stratify’s ambitions to make enterprises’ unstructured information actionable, one vertical at a time.  I look forward to saying that “I knew them when,” as they join the Iron Mountain platform to create even a larger and more dominant footprint.  Congratulations to Stratify and Ramana with special mentions to Meena, George, Sanjeev, Steve, David, Joy, Parveen, Allyson, Rob and Wendy.  Also we wouldn’t be where we are today with the incredible assistance of Peter Falvey and Michael Barker at Revolution Partners and Jon Gavenman of Heller Ehrman / VLG.  You were all a true pleasure to work with.  Congratulations too, to Iron Mountain for their brilliant decision to join forces!

BusinessWeek has a web slideshow running called Big Tech Buyouts.  It profiles the founders of 10 Internet companies that have been acquired this year.  Three of them – FeedBurner, Sling Media, and Postini – are companies we were investors in.  Everyone appears to be smiling.

Notice the abundance of gray hair (or in Dick Costolo’s case, no hair.)  I realize this is shameless brogging, but it’s fun sometimes.  And I’m really proud of these guys and the companies they helped create.