Lest I neglect another one of our portfolio companies, Klocwork also received an Infoworld 2007 Technology of the Year Award for the App Dev category (for Best Source Code Analyzer.) Congrats guys.
Well – that’s a nice way to start the year. I just saw that Infoworld chose NewsGator Enterprise Server 1.4 as their 2007 Technology of Year for the Data Manager – Best Enterprise RSS Manager.
A few of my portfolio companies are looking for superstar Java developers. If you think you fit the bill, send me an email with your resume and I’ll forward it on. Serious Java developers only.
Ok – this is superbly cool (at least I think so.) WebEx just put up an “activity map” showing the real-time location of all the active WebEx conferences. This uses the Quova GeoPoint technology and is a very visual real-time example of how this works.
Several of the bright bulbs at Judy’s Book put together a Holiday Store Guide for online shopping. They’ve got detailed shipping info by store (do you do your shopping on 12/21 – there are still a bunch of places you can get expedited shipping), return policies (c’mon – you know you are going to get some crap you want to return), and the best holiday deals. Since I’m jewish, I get to avoid all the nonsense with a big, fat “bah humbug”, but at least I’m funding a company that is helping shoppers around the Internet this holiday season.
A few weeks ago I launched a new blog called Brad Feld’s 50 by 50 to document my trials and tribulations of running 50 marathons by the time I’m 50 (I’ve done 8 and I just turned 41.) I decided I wanted to segment my daily running stuff from Feld Thoughts as many of you don’t care about my running obsession. I’ll still occasionally post here about major events (e.g. completed marathons), but I’ll save my daily runs, running thoughts, experiments with running technologies, fears, and scatalogical running experiments for my running blog.
If you want to follow these exploits, you can subscribe to the Feld Running feed. Simultaneously I’ve set up a FeedBurner Network for Marathoners – if you are a marathoner, blog, and want to join the network, just email me.
My running blog is hosted on YourRunning – a website for runners that is run by Enthusiast Group. I’m an investor in Enthusiast Group and it’s been a blast work with Derek and Steve to figure out the best approach to a “bloggy-like” network for “enthusiasts.” YourRunning is the third site that we’ve launched – joining YourClimbing and YourMTB.
Enthusiast Group is hiring – both an advertising / marketing online specialist as well as new enthusiast-in-chief’s for upcoming sites, including birding, skateboarding, body building, road biking, and horses / equestrian. If you are interested, drop Steve an email.
I’ve become obsessed with “Networks” – I’ve learned an enormous amount from coordinating the FeedBurner Venture Capital Network and the Colorado Entrepreneurs and Technology Network. Look for lots of interesting things to come to this in the next few months, including some “Intelligence Amplification” stuff that my friends at FeedBurner aren’t even aware of yet (heheh.)
While the FeedBurner Network concept is a “user-organized” network approach (although in this case the “user” is a single publisher coordinating a network of other topically similar publishers), there are now many other well known blog networks that are being driven by commercial publishers. Nick Denton and Jason Calacanis started this off with Gawker and Weblogsinc respectively, Mike Arrington and Om Malik followed with highly visible “new tech networks” TechCrunch and GigaOm, and many others have joined in the fun.
FeedBurner just released a list of 22 networks that cover 1,500 feeds and over 5 million subscribers that are using FeedBurner’s advertising services in some way. While some of the ad activity is in the feed, an increasing amount of it that FeedBurner is providing is on the actual site, and the link between the feed and the site is rapidly increasing in importance and relevance (and – voila – FeedBurner ties it all together.)
As a special bonus to publishers around the world, FeedBurner just revved their Publishers Tips blog to help any and all publishers get more out of their feed.
I know I sound like Brad-portfolio-company-fan-boy today. That’s because I am!
A few months ago NewsGator released a Windows Mobile feed reader called NewsGator Go! I’ve been using it on my T-Mobile Dash and it’s fantastic. Today, NewsGator Go! for J2ME just went Beta. If you have a Blackberry, Palm Treo or Tungsten, Sony Ericsson (P800, P900, P910), Nokia, Motorola (V400, V551, V600, RAZR), Samsung, LG, or other Java phone, you can now run the NewsGator on it. It automagically syncs with your NewsGator Online account (and any other NewsGator products you are using.) Kevin Cawley – one of the big brains behind much of the NewsGator mobile stuff – has a nice post up about it.
My current configuration is FeedDemon on my PCs, NetNewsWire on my Macs, and NewsGator Go! Mobile on my Dash. The Bones in Motion guys just sent me a KRZR ao I’ll give NewsGator Go! for J2ME a try on that this weekend. It’s all tied together on the back end with NewsGator Online, although we are working on testing NewsGator Enterprise On-Demand (also in beta.)
So – we’ve now got a wide range of mobile platforms covered – Windows, Java, and HTML – with sync to our online platform and enterprise products – with spiffy high-performance readers on each client.
I just gone done with my quarterly week off the grid. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays – Amy and I spent it chilling out in Keystone. I had a little trouble disconnecting – finally shutting off all of my computers on Wednesday morning. Even though lots of folks took the long weekend off, a few of my portfolio companies pushed out some neat new stuff.
There were a couple of others (FeedBurner in Russia anyone) but those were the ones that caught my attention as I got caught up from my self-imposed electronic exile.