I love simple, descriptive tag lines (or mottos) for companies.  My first company – Feld Technologies – has a very clear motto – “We Suck Less.”  I was at Newmerix yesterday looking at some of their new stuff.  Whenever I’m asked about Newmerix, I describe them as a “software quality assurance / change management suite for packaged applications.”  The long version – on the Newmerix web site – is:

Newmerix offers an integrated suite of program management, functional testing, and change control software to manage your PeopleSoft application lifecycle. Newmerix’s Automate! software suite helps you:

• Stay current with PeopleSoft patches, bundles and upgrades
• Comply with regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley
• Improve PeopleSoft application quality and minimize affect on business operations
• Control PeopleSoft application change processes

They’ve recently come out with a change management product for SAP (guys – time for a minor website upgrade.)  As we devolved into a discussion about how difficult it is to deal with managing packaged applications, Niel Robertson – the CTO – blurted out “managing packaged applications is a pain in the ass.”

My suggestion for the new Newmerix motto: “We make managing packaged applications less of a pain in the ass.”  If you work for a big company and have to deal with Peoplesoft and SAP patches / upgrades / customizations / migrations and this motto resonates with you, send me an email and I’ll get you connected with the Newmerix guys.

The first public stuff about one of my fun new investments has started to emerge.  Me.dium – which is based in Boulder and funded by Spark and Appian – got a few writeups including one in GigaOm (Medium Makes Web Browsing Social) and David Cohen’s Colorado Startups (Me.dium – Social discovery in real time.)  Both do a nice job of introducing the concept, including the challenge of having your Me.dium “aha moment” which – once you have it – you’ll totally get it.  Bijan Sabet – a partner at Spark and new VC blogger – also has a quick post on it.

Me.dium’s still in private beta, but feel free to apply if you are interested in seeing what it’s about.  I’m bfeld in case you want to invite me to your network.

As I pried my eyes open with toothpicks this morning due to my fatigue from yesterday’s lousy run, I looked forward to another week.  Monday’s usually bring lots of fun little tidbits since people crank out a long thoughtful blog on Sunday night and the local papers usually run their major tech interest stories Monday morning.  A couple of my friends / investments showed up.

• Me.dium: Matt Branaugh of the Daily Camera profiled Me.dium – one of the Boulder-companies I’ve invested in that is going after my poorly named “dynamics of information” problem (a free blog post and mention to someone that comes up with a better name for “dynamics of information.”)  I’m having a ton of fun with Me.dium – I just made myself “visible to all” so anyone that installs it can see where I’m surfing at any moment in time.
• Being 25 Again – Sort of: Scott Converse – the CEO of ClickCaster – has a long rant on what it’s like to be in your 40’s and starting up a new company.
• Fred’s Kids and His Slingbox: Fred Wilson’s family is a consumer of products from companies I’ve invested in.  They love their hand-me-down Sidekicks, rock out to Guitar Hero, and will soon be enjoying TV via their Slingbox.

I can’t wait for Halloween.  I have some surprises for my friends that I’m going to see on Tuesday.  Plus – I expect I’ll get to overload on chocolate and not feel guilty.

On Friday, I did a podcast with David Cohen and Kimbal Musk on angel investing.  David and I have done a few angel investments together (Solidware Technologies and ClickCaster), I’ve got a long history of angel investing (over 50 since 1994), and I’m an investor in Kimbal’s new company Me.dium (part of my “dynamics of information” theme.)  Plus – we did the podcast at The Kitchen – my favorite restaurant in Boulder – which happens to be owned by Kimbal and was previously the location of some of my “for-profit philanthropy” in the form of a previously failed restaurant called Triana (once hot – now not.)  So – there was plenty of “angel karma” in the room as we talked.

David’s show notes do a good job of summarizing the podcast, as does Scott Converse’s post Is Angel Investing good? (Scott is the CEO of ClickCaster.)  My favorite line is that some angel investment is like “for-profit philanthropy.”  Fortunately – a number of the angel investments that I’ve done – including several with my good friend Will Herman – have been successful – making all the for-profit philanthropy ones nice tax writeoffs.

If you are an entrepreneur looking to raise angel money, or an angel investor, or someone considering being an angel investor, I recommend a listen to the podcast.

CNET has an article titled Putting blogs to work for Wall Street about one of my investments – Collective Intellect.  I imagine Don Springer – Collective Intellect’s CEO – either smirked or grimaced when he saw the subhead “Collective Intellect has a goal: Make bloggers work for The Man.”  Don, his partner Tim, and the Collective Intellect team have been working on part of the “dynamics of information problem” as applied to public company information.  It’s hard and intriguing stuff that they are well suited for after their tour of duty at WebMethods by way of the acquisition of their first company – Dante Group.

If you haven’t tried Judy’s Book in a while (or ever), take another look.  The “morph” is in progress to the place for smart shoppers.

Whew – I just finished getting my daily feed dose from FeedDemon.  I have a daily routine for when I’m home – get up at 5am, try not to wake Amy up (I failed today), make a cup of coffee, get a bowl of fruit, go downstairs, feed the dogs, sit down at my computer, fire up Outlook, Firefox, and FeedDemon, Open-in-tabs my “News” folder in Firefox, and then read for an hour (or so).  While I’m at it I usually write a few blogs.  By 6:30 I’m done for the day with this stuff – I shut down FeedDemon (and don’t open it up until the next day), and then go get ready for a run.

Normally I’m able to get my email inbox cleared by 6:30 as part of this routine.  Today it’s 6:30 and I haven’t tackled it yet.  There were a flurry of interesting posts to read in FeedDemon and a surprisingly good set of articles in the NY Times, including a generally negative review of Daniel Libeskind’s new Denver Art Museum (I think the museum is brilliant and am completely in love with everything about it – demonstrating my complete inability to be an “architecture critic.”)

A number of the entrepreneurs I work with wrote some good stuff today (actually most of it is from yesterday – why is everyone most prolific on a Wednesday – hmm?).  Following is a short summary in case you are interested:

• Attention is Meme Sex: Stan James of Lijit tantalizes us about sex (I mean attention.)  My favorite line is “Chatting with a friend about YouTube is a case of consensual idea-exchange, analogous to consensual sex.”  A must read if you are into either attention or sex.
• Office 2.0 Is Not About Online Spreadsheets: Greg Reinacker of NewsGator talks about his first day at the Office 2.0 conference and why this should be about collaboration, community, and sharing.
• The Future of Vulnerability Management: Alan Shimel of StillSecure is never vulnerable – at least as far as I can tell.  But – he’s got great insights into the Vulnerability Management software market.
• What’s Been Hard At Judy’s Book: Andy Sack of Judy’s Book continues to discuss the details behind the evolution of Judy’s Book.
• On Deadlines and Director Meetings: Oh shit, realizes Scott Converse of ClickCaster – I’ve got a board meeting this week!  In addition, since ClickCaster pushes a release out weekly (now that’s agile) and has real customers now, why did I spent two hours with Brad at dinner last night (good sushi Scott…)?
• FeedBurner New Features: Wanna ping Google’s new ping server?  If you are a FeedBurner user, just click a box on PingShot.  Also – several new and exciting dynamic FeedFlare for Netscape and Technorati.

Time to get after the email (yup – no run today – a tendon in my right leg has been bothering me and rest is good.)

Todd Berkowitz at NewsGator posted on NewsGator Everywhere – describing how the NewsGator continues to enable receiving RSS content on any platform or device while maintaining full synchronization across all the platforms and devices that you use.  Some new places to play include Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Mobile, Windows Live Writer, and the Windows RSS Platform / IE 7. 

With this post, I’m officially switching from BlogJet to Windows Live Writer for posting to my blog.  I don’t know why I’m so late to come to this party, but for offline writing Windows Live Writer is spectacular.  I still don’t understand the name, but that’s not for me to know.

Andy continues blogging on the evolution of Judy’s Book.  He’s got a short summary of the meeting that led to some fundamental changes in the business.  In it he lists three key questions: what’s hard, what’s easy, and where is the parade?