I got the following email from a smart entrepreneur friend I respect a lot.

I subscribe to your blog’s rss feed and read it regularly. I have a suggestion to make – it would be great if you could put a simple explanation of the many different products/technologies you plug, when you plug them.

I have to admit that I have NO idea what you are talking about or why I would be interested about 80% of the time you mention something. For example, Me.dium (which based on the stupid name, I would have no interest in exploring on my own based on your mention 🙂

Not sure if I’m your target audience or not, but I thought you should know that most of your references are opaque to at least one reader. So, while I am aware of many companies you are involved in, and the fact that you like them, I couldn’t tell you or (more importantly) anyone else, what they do.

While I don’t really have “a target audience” (I’m regularly fascinated by the spectrum of folks that read this blog), the fact that my company references are opaque to a smart, tech entrepreneur means that there’s probably some subset of you who are saying “thanks for the company pimping, but so what.”

I’ll try to do a better job of explaining why I (and you) should (or might) care.

Me.dium had a release over the weekend – if you are a Me.dium user make sure you get the latest Firefox plugin.  If you aren’t a Me.dium user, feel free to bypass the private beta by using my magic invite code.

Phil Butler at Mashable has a nice blog post on the update.  There are plenty of under-the-hood changes – especially around performance and scalability (the really hard mysterious stuff), but there are a bunch of neat UI enhancements on the Firefox plugin (including one that I really wanted – moving my logged in friends to the top of the friends list.)

My friends at FeedBurner have been cranking.  Last week they released an updated version of FeedFoundry – their heavy duty feed management service for large multi-feed commercial publishers and blog networks.  As part of this release they announced a couple of new customers including NPR and Circuit City.  To see more, check out the FeedFoundry screencast.

On Friday, FeedBurner announced that they are now managing all the feeds across the AOL Network.  Yes – they are using FeedFoundry for this – and join an extensive list of other established companies including Dow Jones Online, Geffen Records, and USAToday.

When I invested in FeedBurner in 2005, I’d heard that several of the major media companies had said “we’d never outsource our RSS to anyone.”  I wasn’t sure they knew what “an RSS” was and was quickly proven correct when several of them became FeedBurner customers within the next six months.  AOL took a little longer but I know the gang at FeedBurner is proud to count them as a publisher.

I’m FeedBurner publisher 699 (start date 4/8/04.)  Three years later there are 388,095 publishers (AOL makes 388,096.)  Wow.

As Judy’s Book has shifted from a Local Search site to a Deal site, several interesting vertical search opportunities have emerged.  The first one is online coupons – and the folks at Judy’s Book have rolled out a vertical site called CouponLooker.

Dave Naffzinger has a great overview of CouponLooker.  While the web is full of “coupon sites”, no one does the hard work to search across them, dedupe them, rank them, and make it easy to find online coupons for specific items.  Oh – and the coupons expire quickly so keeping the database fresh and current is non-trivial.

Of course, what would a vertical search site be without a widget.  

Nope – taxes (or extensions) aren’t due then this year.  However, the deadline for voting for the Engaget Home Entertainment Device of the Year is 11:59pm on Sunday, 4/15.  If you love your Slingbox as much as Ryan and I do, please vote.

Longtime angel investor Bill Payne has a new book out called The Definitive Guide to Raising Money from Angels.  I read it last week and it’s excellent – if you are looking to raise an angel round it’s worth ever dollar of the $37 that Bill charges for it.

I first met Bill in the mid-1990’s when we were both working with the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurial Leadership – I was an entrepreneur-in-residence and he was an executive-in-residence (both fancy titles for “consultant.”)  We worked closely with Jana Matthews in her “Learning Programs for High Growth Entrepreneurs” project, were deeply involved in the YEO / Kauffman Foundation relationship, and helped with the launch of the original Entreworld site (now eVenturing.)

Bill has been an angel investor in a handful of companies that I have been involved in (both successes and failures.)  I’ve always found him to be a thoughtful, helpful, and decisive angel investor.  He knows when he can help and when he can’t – and jumps in with both feet when he can. 

I’m glad Bill has spent the time putting together a book on his thoughts and experiences regarding angel investing.  So much of the stuff out there is garbage and many of the “experts” are really promoters looking for a quick buck on the back of an entrepreneur.  While there are loads of excellent angel investors, Bill is one of the few credible thinker / writer who is also an active angel investor.

On Monday StillSecure announced their Cobia Unified Network Platform (UNP).  Alan Shimel (StillSecure Chief Strategy Officer) and Mitchell Ashley (StillSecure CTO / GM Cobia) have blogged extensively about it.

I’m a huge fan of John Zagula and Richard Tong’s book “The Marketing Playbook” – especially their notion of a Platform Play.  I use this approach with many of my portfolio companies – StillSecure is one of them.

StillSecure’s historical products form the base of this platform play.  While security software is a fast moving and very fragmented market, StillSecure has built a security software platform business with Strata Guard (IDS/IPS), VAM (Vulnerability Management), and Safe Access (Network Control).  These are best of breed products that have won many awards and have rapidly growing customer bases.

Cobia builds on this product family.  About a year ago Raj Bhargava (StillSecure’s CEO) started talking to me about the idea of the convergence of security into the core of the network.  Historically there has been a huge amount of focus on security at the edge of the network with the latest incarnation being end point security (which StillSecure’s Safe Access addresses extremely well.)  

The traditional approach ends up with a proliferating number of single purpose devices that are needed (proprietary and otherwise) to secure a network.  This is silly – there are two approaches to this cutting down the number of individual devices needed: SaaS and converging multiple functionality on a single device.  While some people talk about SaaS being a tough one in the security domain, our portfolio company Postini has had superb success with SaaS for Email Security.  

StillSecure has taken the second approach with Cobia: today’s hardware is powerful enough that converging multiple functionality onto one device – especially that which combines networking and security. To support this thesis, unified threat management (UTM) systems have become a huge market in security.  These devices combine firewall, VPN, gateway AV, anti-spam, content filtering, IDS/IPS, etc. in one box.  Why stop there?  The basic networking functions such as routing, switching, DNS, DHCP in addition to newer networking functionality such as wireless access points and VoIP can run on the same platform! 

Cobia is envisioned as the platform that will allow you to run any number of combination of these on one appliance. My friends at StillSecure have been hard at work on this product for the past year and have released the first beta.  The initial response from technical folks that have looked at and played with the platform has been outstanding.  If you are involved in managing your network infrastructure and want to play around with the software or contribute to the Cobia community, we’d love you to come take a look, give us feedback, and participate.

Earlier this week, TechStars announced that it is joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCo) and is pledging 1% of its equity to EFCo.  As a co-founder of both EFCo and TechStars I couldn’t be more pleased.

EFCo is an exciting project and TechStars is the sixth member company, joining the founding member companies Collective Intellect, Me.dium, NewsGator, Rally Software, and Tendril.  We have several other companies in the final process of joining which we hope to announce in April.

So there is no confusion, the equity being contributed by TechStars is of the actual TechStars organization, not the companies that participate in the TechStars program.  TechStars does receive 5% of those companies, so each of the companies that participates in the TechStars program will indirectly be participating in the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, yet the cost associated with the program is being borne by the investors in TechStars.

If you are the founder of an angel or venture backed company in Colorado and are interested in finding out more about the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, drop me an email.

In a shameless plug for my portfolio company Rally Software, they have once again won the “Oscar equivalent” for their industry segment – the Jolt Excellence Award in the Project Management Category.

I’m not a big “award guy”, but even this one had me chanting “threepeat” since it’s highly unusual to win a Jolt award two years in a row.

Rally is the market leader in providing agile software development tooling.  If you write software for a living and either are using (or want to use) an agile methodology, take a look at Rally’s products.  If you are still programming in Cobol using the waterfall methodology, well, eh – never mind.