I’m proud of all the companies I invest in, but I’m especially proud of the ones that just crank up the volume and get it done, especially in markets that other VCs say “eh – boring.”  Rally Software is one of these – I’ve been an investor since it was started a couple of years ago and am having a great time watching Tim Miller, Ryan Martens, Don Hazell, and team create a business from scratch.  Tim, Ryan, and Don all had a tenure at BEA and their experience and seasoning shows in everything they do.

Agile software development has gotten plenty of play over the past few years.  Rally is at the forefront of this trend – providing an on-demand software product for Agile development teams along with a broad range of consulting services for Agile development.  This week they announced Release 5 of their product, a web services API for integration with customer management systems, Salesforce.com integration / Sforce Ecosystem authorization, and a formal partner program. 

Serious software development companies such as BMC, Intuit, Novell, Webroot, and CNet are now using Rally’s products as a core part of their software development cycle.  While I acknowledge my role in this play as an advertisement for Rally (I’m proud of my companies, but also shameless), if you develop software for a living (even if you aren’t currently using Agile methodologies), I encourage you to take a serious look.

Niel Robertson – the CTO of Newmerix – was interviewed recently about his “four rules of market timing” (as they apply to creating a company).  Niel is a successful multi-time entrepreneur (and fellow MIT grad) that I’ve known for a decade.  He was an early engineer at NetGenesis, co-founded Service Metrics (I was the lead investor – Service Metrics was acquired by Exodus in 1999) and co-founded Newmerix several years ago (again – I was the lead investor).  Niel is also the proud owner of the nicest Ferrari in Boulder.

In the interview, Niel talks about his four rules of market timing.  These rules help him determine whether the market is ready for an idea and he tries to apply them to any business idea he is thinking about.  They are:

• New dog, old tricks: Look for things where company invest in new technology platforms to essentially do what they are already doing.
• Throwing good money after bad: Look for situations where companies commit to a technology choice and then either scrimps on the initial implementation or poorly scopes the project.  If you can find systemic instances of this, they’ll need to throw new technology into the mix to get what they originally wanted.
• Earthquake: The pain of a problem rarely comes at once – it comes in waves – just like an earthquake.  If the small ones come first, you’ve got an opportunity.  If the big one comes first, forget it.
• Hokey Pokey: This one is my favorite.  Companies inevitably decide to bring things in house or outsource them over and over again.  If you can find a hokey pokey situation, it’s ripe for innovation.

In the spring, NewsGator announced its Media Platform and a deal with the Denver Post.  Today, the DenverPost.com released News Hound, their private-label RSS reader built on top of the NewsGator Media Platform.  We’ve got a bunch of other media deals in the works, but this is the first one to ship.  While News Hound is a standalone client (which the Denver Post wanted, vs. a web-based client), the integration with the overall platform (e.g. the NewsGator Media Platform) enables either a standalone client or a web-based client, or both.

Download News Hound and give it a whirl.  We’d love feedback on it in an effort to make it “easier” for the mainstream user to read RSS content, especially around tightly defined local content (e.g. The Denver Post in this case).

VNU announced today that it is going to start using FeedBurner to help manage and monetize its RSS feeds. 

VNU – one of the largest publishers in the world that owns companies and brands such as ACNielsen, Nielsen Media Research, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporting, Computing, Intermediair, and the Golden Pages director – is already very active with RSS.  Earlier this year they partnered with NewsGator to launch NewsGator France and NewsGator UK (and are in the process of launching NewsGator products in several other European countries.) 

Dominique Busso – the CEO of vnu.net – has been a gracious partner, great to work with, and has consistently been at the front of the curve for spreading RSS across Europe.

I manage feeds (using FeedBurner) for three blogs – Feld Thoughts (my stuff), Mobius Venture Capital (headlines from our companies), and Thoughts in Random Patterns (the blog of the most incredible woman in the world – she told me not to be so smarmy, but I can’t help myself.)

I’ve wanted to put the Mobius headlines on my site for a while, but I didn’t feel like figuring out how to deal with it.  Fortunately, FeedBurner did it for me – today they announced BuzzBoost – yafs (“yet another free service”) which – in addition to being super cool – shows off how easy it is to put together stuff now that their Feed Awareness API is out.

If you click through to Feld Thoughts and page down once, you’ll see a sidebar called “Mobius News” with five headlines.  Click through any of them and you are at the Mobius Venture Capital Headlines feed.  Subscribe to the feed if you desire.  Click on the title at the top and you are at the Mobius Venture Capital site.  Oh – and if you click on the “Mobius News” title – you’ll go straight through to the full headlines list (not just the top 5).

One simple line of HTML that FeedBurner automagically generates for me. All the content is live – as the Mobius headlines change, so will the list on my blog. I’ve got control over a bunch of variables if I want (and – I imagine after this gets used some, there will be more) but I kept it simple and just did everything within FeedBurner.

Fred Wilson had some content from his blog ripped off today.  Michael Parekh had some content ripped off also (same dudes). That sucks.  And – the problem is going to get worse.  However, there are lots of legitimate people who want to incorporate content from their friends’ blogs (or other blogs they control).  With FeedBurner’s BuzzBoost, I control how someone else would format my content and all the links click back to my site.  So – I now have a safe and easy way for having my friends (e.g. good people) republish my content. 

I’m an investor in Gold Systems.  I’m an investor in Rally Software.  I like both companies a lot.  So – it was fun to catch a thread from Jason Groshart – one of the engineers at Gold Systems – who is working on Gold’s Password Reset product (inexpensive enterprise speech-based password reset based on Microsoft Speech Server).  Gold is using Rally Software’s Agile Development Environment for running their software development process.

Jason has written a series of posts about his experience.  His recent ones talk about what’s working and what’s not working (and how he suggests addressing the stuff that isn’t working), as well as how he is thinking about the Rally Process Flow.

For those of you who know how much money is wasted by companies trying to “get feedback from their customers”, you know it doesn’t get better than this.  Raw, real time, lead user feedback out in the open for all to see.  Jason knows that by doing this he’ll likely impact (positively) Rally’s product, so it’ll become even more effective for him over time.  And – Rally gets rich user feedback.

It’s especially fun to wake up to it randomly in NewsGator.

Nick Bradbury put up a post earlier this week about FeedDemon going to a subscription model.  FeedDemon was acquired by NewsGator several months ago and – as part of NewsGator’s effort to “normalize” (and simplify) our product sales approach, we started the process of shifting FeedDemon to subscription pricing to match up with NewsGator’s pricing model.  This was in advance of a point release of FeedDemon (1.6) which will have the NewsGator synchronization engine fully integrated along with a other features. 

None of us expected 100 comments within 48 hours.  A few clear themes emerged from the comments.  A group of us, including me, Nick, Greg, and JB, had several long conversations over the past few days to both synthesize the comments as well as figure out the most effective and user-responsive approach going forward.

The result was a significant change in the way FeedDemon will work if someone’s subscription runs out – most notably – the software will continue to work, just with some of the subscription-oriented features disabled.  We also sharpened our thinking and point of view on the separation in the extended NewsGator product line between the software components and the service components.  Fortunately, we have plenty of models to build on (e.g. Symantec, McAfee) so we aren’t reinventing anything; however, we made progress getting clarity around how this works across all of our products.

The feedback to Nick’s second announcement has been uniformally positive.  It’s great to have users that have strong points of view, even when they are different (or of a much greater magnitude) than what you expected.  As a result of Nick’s blog, we were able to engage in a rapid, very public, and constructive feedback loop.  Assuming we are successful listeners, I’d hope this will lead to even better solutions for our customers.

Of course, there are several interesting sociological things at play here.  Historically, if users didn’t like what a manufacture of a product was doing (even if they loved the product), they were usually limited to one of two choices: (a) suck it up and live with it or (b) stop using the products.  The tempo and dynamics of blogging clearly has impact on these communication patterns in new and exciting ways, which will logically impact how products get created and evolve – hopefully to incorporate even more user feedback. 

Greg Reinacker has a comprehensive post up about why NewsGator has shifted to subscription pricing for all of their products (except the soon to be released NewsGator Enterprise Server.)  If you are a software entrepreneur thinking about “subscription” vs. “perpetual” pricing, it’s worth reading this post.  I’ve watched a number of my companies work through this – most end up either with subscription (e.g. Commerce5, Oxlo, Quova, Rally) or perpetual (Klocwork, Newmerix) but some end up with both (StillSecure).

Make sure you separate concept of the way you sell your software (subscription vs. perpetual) from the way you deliver your software (ASP / hosted vs. “shrink wrap” – remember when Apple II and TRS-80 software came in ziplock bags).  I find that – even today – lots of folks that I talk to get tangled up in the difference between these two constructs.

Ah – today was delightful.  I love the first day of a month, especially if it’s the day after the end of a quarter.  Amy and I have a standing date on the first day of every month (“life dinner”) where we get together and reflect on the previous month.  Tonight, we chowed down on sushi at Alibi (the one sushi place in Homer – buried at the back of a smoky bar) with our friend Nancy who is visiting for a few days.

Throughout the day (and at the end of the day yesterday) I got updates from a number of my companies about how they closed out the quarter for sales and on the top line.  Several ended up nicely ahead of plan, most were close to plan (we are talking about early stage companies, so close is fine), and a few had a disappointing quarter.  Overall, Q205 looks like it was a solid business quarter for young private tech companies (at least mine).

I consumed book two of the daily Homer bookathon – Jim Cramer’s Real Money.  Cramer cracks me up on those rare occasions that I stumble upon him on TV (usually at a health club somewhere) and I liked his last book.  This one wasn’t so good.  Several people have recommended Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk – that’s up next (and – by the look of it – will probably take more than a day).

FeedBurner held a hackathon last week and created seven new features.  I think the idea of a one day coding jamfests is great – classic “web 2.0” stuff where you can quickly put small features immediately into production.  If you are one of the 50,156 FeedBurner publishers (as of 7/1/05), you now have a manual ping page, feed geotagging, title/description modification, “feedmedic” validator, Javascript circulation ticker, Image enclosures (gif/jpeg/png), and a Mac OS Dashboard Widget for tracking stats.  Nothing heavy – just fun and cool.

I love three day weekends – lots of time to think, reflect, read, run, and chill.  Enjoy the long summer nights, wherever you are.