I’ve declared my SharePoint fanboy status in the past – most recently in my post titled SharePoint Magic.  Gone are the years where I’d tease my friends at Microsoft about giving away SharePoint by including it in EA contracts – the thing has evolved into a critical piece of software for me and my organization (oh – and a really big piece of business for Microsoft.)

Today, NewsGator and Microsoft announced a partnership around SharePoint.   As part of this, NewsGator announced general availability of the new NewsGator Social Sites product.  NewsGator Social Sites is tightly integrated with both SharePoint and NewsGator Enterprise Server (which you can also buy as a hosted product – ala NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand.)

Jeff Nolan – who recently joined NewsGator to run corporate development – has a concise post about the NewsGator Social Site Launch along with a handful of screenshots.  When I have some time, I’ll put up a more comprehensive explanation of how I use this stuff to manage the mass of stuff that flows through my computer.

If your company uses SharePoint, you have to take a look at this stuff.  And I’m not just saying that because I’m a NewsGator investor.

Wallstrip turned one yesterday.  Howard Lindzon – the founder – celebrated by playing with guns.  I’ve found Howard (and Lindsey) to be consistently hysterically funny and a good excuse to use words that end in the letter y.  As part of the official press release, Howard suggested in his forecast for the next year:

“Over time, guns, booze, gambling, Internet and sex will continue their out performance. It may not be fair and may not seem right, but those that invest in these themes will be continually rewarded.”

Even though I don’t play the public markets, these dudes brighten up my day a little bit every time they end up in my FeedDemon newsreader.

If you go deep into the Feld Thoughts archive bin – way back to December 5, 2005 – I wrote a post called It’s The Trust, Stupid.  I still like that post, especially since it shows off my yoda like haiku writing non-ability.

It’s the trust, stupid
Pay attention people
Relevance it is

“Attention” has continued to be an abstract concept that is frequently talked about by a subset of the tech crowd.  Due to the short attention span nature of our industry, it has largely been supplanted by talk about Facebook, which seems to have most of the current attention (pun intended.)  However, for those of you that have forgotten, there is still this thing called the Web out there that has a lot of interesting data – much of which is a mess.

Nick Bradbury – the creator of FeedDemon (still the best client side RSS aggregator on Windows – by a million miles) – has been working on figuring out how to deal with “attention” for as long as I’ve known him.  I remember a Gnomedex several years ago where Attention.XML was all the rage even though I couldn’t wrap my mind around how it would actually work.  If you had recorded our conversation from then and played it back to us, it probably wouldn’t make any sense to you, unless you were a martian.

Nick and his buddies at NewsGator have continued to pound away at this.  Yesterday they announced that three of NewsGator’s client side products – FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NewsGator Inbox will support APML.  In case you aren’t familiar with APML, its an acronym for “Attention Profiling Mark-up Language.”  While it’s another in the long line of ML’s – I expect Nick’s involvement to move this from a generally abstract concept to something that lots of people can actually use.

Some day my computer will actually do all the work for me.  And I won’t have to double-click this silly mouse thing so much.

Praise to my friends at Lijit for pledging 1% of their equity to the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.  Lijit is the seventh company that has formally announced their participation in the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado this year.  There are seven more that have joined but not yet announced – look for these announcements over the next few weeks.

If you are part of the leadership team of a startup in Colorado and are interested in finding out more about the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, drop me an email.

Network access control (or NAC as the security world calls it) has become a huge technology buzzword recently. Everyone in networking and security is screaming about NAC – with Cisco and Microsoft leading the charge.

NAC is used to test computers before they are allowed on a network to make sure they’re up-to-date on patches, anti-virus, and hotfixes.  StillSecure, one of my investments, has had a lot of success with NAC because they were an early entrant and with great technology (they’ve won practically every NAC review published over the past three years.)   

This week StillSecure did something no other security vendor has been willing to do – they released a free NAC product called Safe Access Lite. Alan Shimel – StillSecure’s Chief Strategy Officer and master blogger referred to it as “Laid Back NAC.”  NAC vendors don’t usually do real evals because of changes to the network they often require, or they don’t have enough faith in their product to put it out for anyone to use!

IT Infrastructure is an area in which we’ve had a lot of investing success.  StillSecure is a company we’ve had cooking for several years and this is the year that its growth has really accelerated.  I’m exceedingly proud of the StillSecure team, their perseverance, and their innovation – both in the product and they way they approach their market. 

Now you can get your NAC either in as a “laid back” version or a full commercial “tighten down the battleship” version.

Today EchoStar announced that is has acquired Sling Media for $380 million in cash.  My partner and 2007 travel buddy Ryan McIntyre is smiling tonight as he crawls into bed and reflects on another great deal on the heals of his successful investment in Postini (acquired in July by Google for $625 million.)  I’d recommend that he snuggle up to a Slingbox, but I’ll restrain myself.

Ryan has written a nice essay on the story of his experience with Sling Media.  The Sling team – led by Blake Krikorian – has created a great company and a superb set of products.  I knew I was in love when I turned over my first Slingbox and noticed a little sticker with the phrase “Lebowski” on it.  Sling packed an incredible amount of innovative software (and a tiny bit of hardware) into a plastic box that was mostly filled with air.  The magic was in the software (dynamic video-stream-optimization technology called Lebowski) which reinforced our view that “it’s all about the software.”

Guys – awesome job.  EchoStar – you guys just made a really smart purchase.

Stan James just wrote a post titled Explore the world of blogs around you which describes the new Lijit Blog Explore feature.  I’ve been calling this feature “bubbles” and if you look at the image below you’ll see why.

Pretty colors, eh?

Try it.  Go to my blog and click on the “Explore” button on the right hand side in the Lijit Wijit.  Then – click on the little bubbles and navigate around my social graph. 

Stan explains the orange (fans of) / green (friends) / blue (follows) colors in depth and how Lijit figures these relationships out.

The Lijit registration process and setup is simple – they just got a great call out on Ouriel Ohayon’s blog post titled Execution is the key #7: the magic funnel.”

If you aren’t yet Lijit, it’s time to try it.  Social graphs aren’t just for Facebook users.

One of the great things about blogs is that it makes it easy for anyone (that has a blog) to express things – both good and bad.  While mainstream media seems to be endlessly focused on “bad stuff sells newspapers”, people like to express (and consume) a full range of their experiences.

Bloggers regularly talk about their positive experiences.  I obsessively subscribe and read search feeds (across NewsGator Search, Technorati, Google, and Yahoo) for all the companies I have an investment in.  I’ve found this to be an awesome way to keep a pulse on what’s going on in my world.

Today I noticed a great post by a guy named Chris Spagnuolo titled Tearing up the spreadsheets…our move to Rally Software.  I’ve very proud of the team at Rally – they are creating a superb company that builds SaaS-based software to help manage Agile software development.  When I made the original investment, I got questions from other potential investors that included “what’s Agile” and “software tools will never live in the cloud.”  Today, a large number of companies are using Rally’s software to manage their software development process.

Chris’s post has detailed and thorough praise of Rally’s product and describes his company’s path to adopting it.  It’s a great example of unsolicited customer feedback (and praise) and comes to us via the power of blogs.  A decade ago entire teams of marketing people were tasked with finding, writing, and publishing “customer success stories” and “customer testimonials” – now all you need to do today is delight your customer and their enthusiasm will show up on the web.

Thanks Chris!  Even though we’ve never met and I have no idea who you are, I appreciate the time you took to write up your Rally story.  And – if you ever need anything regarding Rally, just drop me an email.

I love to invest in companies that are developing broad horizontal technologies.  Many of them – such as NewsGator, FeedBurner, and Rally – can be applied to many different vertical markets. 

I personally revel in the tension between engineering, product marketing, and sales.  It’s challenging to sell a horizontal product in an emerging market, especially to enterprise buyers.  You need a special type of salesperson – one who doesn’t constantly say “I can’t sell that” but instead knows how to ask his early adopter customers “what is your pain around [problem category X]?” and then figures out how to repurpose the horizontal technology to solve this pain.

In a well functioning early stage team, this tension between engineering, product marketing, and sales results in customer driven vertical market segmentation.  Rather than having a top down sales effort to “go after the following five vertical markets”, the use cases evolve and the ripe vertical markets become clear.

NewsGator recently demonstrated this in the healthcare segment.  In their discussion of The Power of Enterprise 2.0 for Healthcare Delivery they talk about how The National Health Service of the United Kingdom’s Orkney division implemented NewsGator’s Enterprise Server and Traction TeamPage’s blog/wiki product to address their internal communication shortcomings.

As a result, NewsGator is now talking about other healthcare organizations (yeah – there are a few of them) that could use a comparable solution.  Suddenly, the sales organization at the horizontal technology supplier has a vertical market to focus on. 

Now, a traditional enterprise sales (or marketing) executive could say “of course you want to target health care organizations – that’s one of the biggest verticals around, after finance, insurance, manufacturing, government, … ” (you get the idea.) However, in advance of real customers, all the startup is doing is guessing at what people are going to do with the horizontal technology.  Imagine going to a typical health care organization and saying “would you like to buy some enterprise RSS.”  Not very effective.

I hate spending bucks early in the life of a company (and market) to try to create vertical market demand.  However, there comes a time when it becomes obvious you have enough customers in a market segment that you can start to get vertical with your selling efforts while continuing to extend your “horizontal platform technology” into new and exciting areas, such as NewsFriends for Facebook or a reader for the iPhone.