Feedburner announced a partnership with 20six to incorporate Feedburner’s feed statistics and syndication capabilities for the 20six blogging community.  This will immediately add an additional 50,000 feeds to Feedburner’s “feeds under management” and is the first implementation of the Feedburner partner API.  I think that one of the key drivers of success these days with web-based services is to quickly build out a robust published API to generate real partner activity – John Zagula and Rich Tong at Ignition Partners explain this as part of the “platform play” that they successfully executed at Microsoft as well as other companies they’ve been involved in.  It’s the right metaphor and this is a first visible step in that strategy.

Fred Wilson calls it one of the members of the Internet Axis of Evil.  You know it as spam.  Several of our companies (Return Path and Postini) are hard at work every day eliminating it from our inboxes.

Matt Blumberg, the CEO of Return Path made a pre-announcement on his blog today about Return Path’s acquisition of the Bonded Sender Program from IronPort.  While this is huge weapon in Return Path’s arsenal, it’s also another big step forward in the war on spam.  Rather than repeat what Matt said, I’ll simply refer you to his excellent post on why this matters and how it works.

I recently made an angel investment in Jonathan Weber’s (the former editor of The Industry Standard) new publishing venture – New West Network.  I got turned on to Jonathan by Jerry Colonna who knew Jonathan well from the publishing business.  New West isn’t a “venture deal”, so we chose not to fund it as a venture firm, but I like to support interesting projects that impact my community and New West definitely fit the bill as it’s a network of online communities devoted to the culture, economy, politics, environment, and overall atmosphere of the Rocky Mountain West, and currently includes specific sites for Missoula, Boulder, Salt Lake City, and Northern Idaho.

Jonathan’s having his Boulder launch party at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art on 4/14 from 6pm – 10pm (and – Amy and I are trustees of BMOCA – so yes – we helped get a good rate for the evening).  If you are in town, come join us, enjoy BMOCA, listen to music from The Indulgers and The Ash Ganley Duo, and eat good Boulder food from New West’s event sponsors – Rhumba, Zolo Grill, Avery Brewery, Jax Fish House, West End Tavern, and booze from Superior Liquor.  And yes – it’s Boulder – so there will be prizes.

NewsGator recently announced a broad European partnership with VNU. The first fruit of their labors went live today – the French VNU / NewsGator RSS reader.  Coincidentally, I had breakfast with Dominique Busso who is in charge of this effort for VNU.  Not surprisingly, Dominique is friends with Loic Le Muir at Six Apart and has embraced Typepad as part of their infrastructure, including the very clever nanopublishing effort called VNUNet Blogs.  While I can’t understand much of the French on the blogs, it’s pretty impressive to see a mainstream publisher like VNU so aggressively embracing RSS, blogging, and nanopublishing. 

Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner, announced yesterday that we led their financing and that I have joined their board.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that read my original Why Did We Invest in NewsGator post or my What do my blog stats really mean post.  I first hooked up with Dick Costolo and the Feedburner crew on May 8, 2004 shortly after I started blogging (on May 4, 2004) due to a heads up from Fred Wilson that I should use Feedburner to publish my RSS feed.  I’ve been waiting patiently ever since to have the opportunity to invest in Feedburner.

When I dug in and started trying to understand RSS and blogging in the spring of 2004, I identified eight segments that I believed existed: Content Management Systems (CMS), Aggregators (Readers), Tools, Hosting, Content, Search, Analytics, and Advertising.  I used this as the framework for both exploring the impact of RSS and identifying companies that I might be interested in investing in.  My framework has evolved in the past year, especially once I realized that my technical analogy for how RSS evolved was going to be similar (but not equivalent) to how SMTP evolved.  I was a very successful investor in email-related technologies (and continue to enjoy being an investor in two successful email-related companies – Return Path and Postini), but also learned some “interesting” lessons about how quickly the dynamics could change as I had a huge financial win at one point in the “email direct marketing segment” with a company called MessageMedia that ultimately got slaughtered (more on that some other day).

Our investments in NewsGator and Technorati covered a lot of the interesting territory for us.  However, analytics was an important segment that neither NewsGator or Technorati touched (although both have huge amounts of interesting data – they just weren’t focused on the publisher-side for analytics).  While Technorati – as a search engine – has an advertising component to its revenue model, it didn’t address feed-oriented advertising, nor did it address any of the publisher-side complexity associated with feed management and distribution.  While publishers benefit from both NewsGator’s and Technorati’s services (and are customers of each company), we saw a wide open opportunity to help publishers with all of their syndication management, advertising, and analytics opportunities – hence Feedburner.

Dick is far more articulate about this then I am, so I recommend reading what he wrote about Feedburner’s Business Model in his post about the financing.  Dick – as a good entrepreneur – built a great syndicate around his financing.  DFJ (co-investors with us in Technorati) – are investors, as is Sutter Hill (our co-investors in Return Path – Greg Sands, who I’ve worked with closely at Return Path, will be a big help for us at Feedburner.)

While we’ve missed investing in a few of the segments, most notably CMS’s (and Six Apart is undoubtedly the best emerging company in this arena, especially as the free stuff is already owned by Google/Blogger, Microsoft/Spaces, and Yahoo/360), there are a few new problems (and possibly segments) that have emerged, especially as you start to think about the second-order effects of RSS (now that the first-order effects are over a year old and in our face every day).

If you blog but don’t currently use Feedburner to publish your feed, try it.  I promise you’ll like it. Oh – and try NewsGator and Technorati also (my homage to Warren Buffett, master of promoting his own companies – drink a Diet Coke while you are at it).

One of my companies – Quova – just had a month where they served over 2 billion queries from their customers.  That’s 64m queries / day (or 750 / second) – a huge milestone (double what 1 billion was <g>) and actually represents less than half of the actual queries since this only counts customers of Quova’s that have query logging turned on.  Real time IP geolocation matters to a lot of people.

Non-financial numeric milestones are fun to track and always highly motivating for the team.  I remember clearly the day Raindance did more than 1 million of conferencing minutes and then several months later broke the 1.5 million mark.  There are patches where the growth curve becomes non-linear for a while and understanding what drives this (and all other growth dynamics) is very helpful to determining what to do to maintain and continue growth.

I’ve never completely understood the whole cell phone industry subsidize handset thing, but I’ll roll with it (ok – I understand it – market share, total value of the customer, service plan lock-in, uplift pricing for additional functionality over time).  I love my T-Mobile Sidekick II (as you’d expect since I’m an investor – but I really do love it even though Amy forbids me from taking it to bed with me).  You can get it for NEGATIVE $50 from Amazon right now.

Paris Hilton loves her Sidekick II also (note to self – don’t use your famous dog’s name as your password).  If you want a demo of how she uses it, click here.

There were a number of announcements from my portfolio companies in February.  Following are some of the specific things in case you are interested.

StillSecure announced support for Microsoft’s Network Access Protection (NAP) Technology and the v3.0 release of their Safe Access endpoint policy complaince product.  StillSecure also did a honeypot experiment that had fascinating (but not terribly surprising) results. 

Gold Systems and Avaya announced a large deal with AAA of Minnesota for speech self-service in AAA call centers.  Gold Systems CEO – Terry Gold – also had a hysterical article in the Boulder Daily Camera about a pet peeve of his called jarbarish.

Return Path released an email behaviorial targeting system across their PostMasterDirect business.

Quova announced a deal with NextLink to help protect international importers and exporters from regulatory violations.

Xaffire landed Altadis as a client – now you can buy cigars more efficiently online.

NewsGator launched their NewsGator Media Platform product – a private label RSS service for the media industry – today.  NewsGator Media Platform is based on NewsGator Online and Media News Group and the Denver Post have announced that they are NewsGator Media Platform customers.

Having seen the demos of NewsGator Media integrated into other sites, all I can say is that it’s stunning (of course – as a NewsGator investor – I’m biased – but it is stunning).  Every major media company should / will have private branded RSS aggregators as part of their web infrastructure – if you are part of a major media company, you should look at the NewsGator product as it lets you do this today.

I’ve seen a couple of posts about it already – Rok Hrastnik has a post up on Lockergnome where he totally gets it.