A long time ago (high school, college?) I remember reading a Scientific American magazine cover to cover that was about the brain (blue cover – picture of the brain on it.)  While I don’t remember anything that I read (and – whatever it was – it’s probably irrelevant today), I was completely fascinated by it.

When I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s, “Artificial Intelligence” was the rage.  Cognitive Science (which has morphed into Brain and Cognitive Science) was also picking up speed at the time as MIT had a great collection of people thinking about neuroscience, biology, and psychology.  For whatever reason, I never engaged in it, and my interest ended up being a simple surface level fascination that I never went anywhere with.

Several years ago, my first business partner – Dave Jilk – started talking about some amazing research about how the brain works that was going on at CU Boulder by a guy named Randy O’Reilly.  Dave and Randy started a company called eCortex earlier this year.  I’m an investor and regularly talk to Dave about it when we get together – I understand very little of the underlying technology, but love the problem they are going after.

Randy just published an article in the 10/6/06 Science titled Biologically Based Computational Models of High-Level Cognition.  Our friends at the Daily Camera summarized it nicely – the brain is both analog and digital and O’Reilly – who is a product of the analog school of thought – suggests that “scientists trying to model the brain would be best served incorporating both schemes.”

If you are into this type of stuff, O’Reilly and eCortex should definitely be on your watch list. 

Ok – not really – but Dick (FeedBurner’s mostly hairless CEO) did a nice pithy short interview with Manoj Jasra for WebProNews.  I adore working with Dick and his team at FeedBurner – it’s been one of the funnest investments I’ve ever made.  If you want to get a feel for what’s behind the curtain, you can almost hear Dick talking during the interview.  Oh – and he does drop a few hints about what’s next.

Andy Sack – the CEO of Judy’s Book – has started writing about his experience of evolving Judy’s Book.  One of the really “exciting” (substitute your favorite word here for this euphemism, including “challenging”, “stressful”, “painful”, “complicated”, etc.) things about being an entrepreneur (or an early stage investor) is the continuous reassessment of what you are building.  Andy’s writing as he’s living it, which is very cool.

About six months ago, we had a board conversation where two things were clear: (1) Judy’s Book understood how to continue to grow using the “local only” strategy they were using and (2) the cost of doing this didn’t translate into a compelling business (e.g. we could buy content and traffic (measurement: a “unit”), but the marginal value of each incremental unit purchased was not positive in the long run.)  Overall, while Judy’s Book was making steady progress, it was unclear that the long term economics of what we’ve been calling “local only” worked.

So – Andy and team started a deliberate process to figure out where to evolve Judy’s Book.  Fortunately, they have spent very little of the capital they raised so they have plenty of time and flexibility.  You can get a sense of where it’s going at the Judy’s Book Deals site, although what you see is only about 20% of what will be rolled out by the end of the year.  For example, Expert Advice rolled out this week and the monetization underpinning should be shortly.  Of course, if you like toolbars, you can always grab the new Judy’s Book Dealbar (Firefox or IE).

Look for more from Andy as he walks through his team’s thinking, what they did, why they did it, and where it’s going as they build on “local only” and move beyond it to something we think is much more exciting in the long run.

Two weeks ago, NewsGator released NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile.  This is the product that resulted from NewsGator’s acquisition of Kevin Cawley’s company that created SmartRead and SmartFeed.  NewsGator Go! is now a full featured Windows Mobile reader that tightly integrates with NewsGator Online Service, including full synchronization.  If you are a Windows Mobile user, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever seen for reading feeds on a Windows Mobile device – hats off to Kevin (and – oh – check it out.)  If you want Greg Reinacker’s (CTO of NewsGator) view of how this evolved, he’s got a great post up about The story of NewsGator Go!

Greg and Kevin have been spending a lot of time working on mobile related stuff the last couple of years, starting with Greg’s original html mobile reader for NewsGator that came out in 2004.  Three of the key attributes of mobile readers that we’ve learned about are (a) only reading a subset of your feeds (e.g. I only have 20 feeds that I want on my phone – I have 700 feeds that I subscribe to in FeedDemon / NGOS), (b) intelligent formatting for the device while preserving all of the publishers content, and (c) full online / offline synchronization of read / unread states.  (a) and (c) are built into NewsGator’s platform and Kevin has done a great job of taking advantage of them, while working through many of the thorny issues surrounding (b).

Kevin has a post up on his blog with some of the features he’s already working on for the next release.  They include enclosure support, scheduled sync, viewing clipped articles, subscribe / remove feeds, compression, emailing articles, some navigation / readability improvements, and integration with NewsGator Enterprise Server (which was recently released for FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and Inbox.)

If you are a Typepad blogger, you’ll be especially interested in this.  Now – from within your NewsGator Online subscriber list – you can easily add the subscriber list to your blog as your blogroll.  You no longer need to manage a separate blogroll in Typepad.

This all started when Amy asked me if she could do this.  I screwed around on my site first and figured it out.  I then got it working on Amy’s Typepad blog.  I then blogged about how to do it.  It was way too hard for a human to do, so I emailed Brian Kellner at NewsGator.  He then blogged about our interaction around it.  This was about six weeks ago.

Fred Wilson then asked me how to do this.  I told him, he did it, and wrote about it.  I reminded Brian about this who told me the “make it easier” solution was in the queue.  Matt McCall – my fellow board member at FeedBurner – then wrote me and Fred and asked us how we did it.  I once again gave him my “too complex for most humans” instructions and reminded Brian (this was last week.)  Matt implemented it on his blog. 

Yesterday, Brian published a note about a few of the latest NewsGator releases, including the “little Typepad Widget.”  It’s now super easy to create your Typepad blogroll from within NewsGator Online and it automatically gets updated whenever you subscribe or unsubscribe to feeds.  There are a lot of deeper features (for example, I rename all my feeds to people’s names instead of the Feed name – easier to keep track of; I only publish a subset of my feeds by using the NewsGator “location” feature) – but 90% of getting there is making it trivial to connect between NewsGator on Typepad.

While this is a relatively simple example, it highlights a couple of things, including the power of the Typepad Widget (and other “widget”) approaches, the ease of rolling out new features within an on-demand service, and the dynamics of how an agile development shop (NewsGator is an aggressive practitioner of agile – using Rally’s software) can manage small features in the context of complex release cycles across numerous products.  It’s very different – and much more effective – than the historical 18+ month software development cycle that was broadly practiced in the 1990’s (and continues to be used by so many companies today.)

Andy Sack – CEO of Judy’s Book – wrote a nice summary of last week’s “bored” meeting, along with our meeting after in Boulder, and his new found inspiration to eliminate boredom from the lives of his board members.  A positive side effect of this meeting is that I did get a nice run in on the treadputer, although Andy took some of my money in poker later that night. 

Are your board meetings boring?  If so – do something different.

While I was on vacation, my friends at FeedBurner wrote a long post describing their stats methodology in detail, using the popular TechCrunch blog as the example (with the permission of Mike Arrington, of course.)  If you are a publisher / blogger and want more insight into what’s actually going on in the various calculations, why reach matters, or why just checking your server logs doesn’t really tell you much, this is a post you’ll enjoy reading.  In addition, there’s a little teaser at the end about where BlogBeat fits in.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the past six months thinking about the current dynamics of information on the web.  I wrote briefly about TAR (trust, attention, and relevance) at the end of last year and have intermittently sprinkled tidbits about what I’ve been thinking about and seeing in other posts.  However, I decided to spend some real time thinking about this, work with several of my portfolio companies on both the publisher and subscriber sides of this problem, and explore lots of new potential investments around this issue.  I’ve chosen to call it “dynamics of information” deliberately – what I’ve been pondering is a broader issue than any of the specific TAR topics, although there is definitely value in attacking them one by one (which several of the companies I’m working with are doing.)

I’ve made a few new investments addressing the “dynamics of information” problem. Interestingly (at least to me), two of them are in Boulder – one of them – Lijit – was profiled yesterday in the Boulder Daily Camera. 

I led a seed investment in Lijit which closed recently.  Lijit is the evolution of a project that Lijit founder Stan James created called Outfoxed.  Seth Goldstein – CEO of Root Markets – introduced me to Stan last fall – we got together for the first time for pizza at Pasquini’s in Louisville over Thanksgiving last year.  At the time Stan was trying to figure out what he wanted to do with Outfoxed, needed to spend some time finishing up his master’s thesis, and was in the process of moving to Boulder.  I liked him immediately, loved what he was working on and thinking about, made a bunch of local introductions, and kept in touch.

Three months ago my long time friend Todd Vernon was looking for a new gig.  Todd was the co-founder / CTO of Raindance, a Boulder-based company that I was part of the seed round funding for.  Raindance went public, survived the Internet bubble, built a successful and profitable business, and was ultimately acquired this spring by West.  Todd left after the acquisition closed.  I connected him with a few folks, including Stan.  They got to know each other and decided two months ago to go into business together.

Lijit is driving hard to a beta release in September.  If you are interested in seeing what it’s about, sign up to be on the beta list. 

FeedBurner released a new version of their Email Subscription service that gives publishers a lot more control over distributing their blog content via email.  If you prefer to subscribe to this blog via email instead of RSS, you can do it easily through FeedBurner – just put your email address in the box below.

The new features including extensive subscription management, communication preferences, email branding, and delivery options.