As part of my fantabulous week off, I caught up on some reading that had been sitting in my “to read” email folder.

Nine months ago I posted a chart of the top large cap M&A buyers from 2004 through spring 2005.  I thought  I’d revisit this list with the top 16 technology acquirers from 2003 through January 2006 courtesy of America’s Growth Capital.  The companies are listed in order of acquisitiveness with the number of acquisitions over the period listed in ( )’s.

IBM (28)
Cisco (28)
IAC (16)
Symantec (16)
Hewlett-Packard (16)
Yahoo! (15)
Oracle (14)
Verisign (14)
Ebay (13)
CA (11)
Google (11)
Infor (11)
Broadcom (10)
EMC (10)
Intel (10)
Microsoft (10)

When you extend the period and include the balance of 2005, SAP, Sun, and Juniper fall of the previous list.  In addition, there’s been plenty of M&A activity in February and March to date (e.g. Google acquiring Writely and Boulder’s very own @Last) which reshuffles things a little in the middle of the pack.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers just released their quarterly issue of Nextwave.  The headline article is Web 2.0: The Internet subset formerly known as the Web and features comments from a number of people, including me, Bill Gurley (Benchmark), Andreas Stavropoulous (DFJ), Tim O’Brien (Microsoft), Chris Sacca (Google), Dick Costolo (FeedBurner), JB Holston (NewsGator), and Dave Sifry (Technorati).  If you are a VC stats junkie, this issue also includes PWC’s Q4 and full-year 2005 MoneyTree Report.

I also showed up on a podcast last week via an interview done on The Podcast Roundtable by Martin McKeay and Jeremiah Owyang.  The week before Martin had done a podcast interview with my long time friend Alan Shimel, currently the Chief Strategy Officer of StillSecure.

The 100 HiveLive invitations that I wrote about yesterday are gone.  Hopefully some of you will post some comments about what you like and don’t like.

We fund plenty of things that are ahead of their time.  Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose.  DoDots – a company started by John and George Kembal – was one of these that – unfortunately – turned into dust.  But – a fun Internet bubble quote came out of it that even Timothy Leary would like – “Anything you can do on the Web, you can do on a Dot.”  Plus, it was a hell of a lot easier to spell than Konfabulator.  Oh well.

John got married, went to grad school, moved to Boulder, and now has started a new companies called HiveLive.  I’ve been playing around with it a little – like DoDots – it has some beautiful UI stuff and is – in this case – is taking a new approach to information management (not surprisingly, all web based.)  It’s early, but John is now looking to expand the number of lead users to play around with it. 

He gave me 100 invites to pass around – if you like to play with things and give feedback – go for it.  Feel free to email John feedback or leave comments on this post.

I apparently wasn’t clear enough how to sign up for HiveLive as I’ve had several requests for invites.  Simply click here to create an account.  If it won’t let you, it means the 100 invites are used up.

Once a year, the Feld men over 5 feet tall (me, my brother Daniel, my dad, my uncle Charlie, and my cousins Jon and Kenny) go away for the weekend and play.  This year we went to Phoenix for spring training and I disconnected from email for the weekend.  After a full day of meetings yesterday (classic VC Monday) and an evening of 24 (two full hours of Jack trying to save the world, more presidential screw ups, and a serious body count), I find myself finally caught up on email.  In my inbox was a guest blog from Ross (my IT guy) ranting on about DRM and the Apple iTunes Movie Store.  I love a good flame so I thought I’d share it with you.  Here goes (lightly edited by me.)

We all know why DRM sucks, right? Well actually I think most people don’t really understand why it sucks – last night the real reason dawned on me.  However, first let me take you through my journey from the other night.

Melanie (my wife) and I have started to watch (and love) the NBC show The Office. Steve Carell is great and the entire cast is just awesome. While you’ve never worked in their office you’ve probably worked in one pretty close. We missed the first few episodes so we wanted to go back to the beginning to see them in order. So I fired up Firefox and went online to search for the old episodes. It didn’t take long, and after a bit I had them downloaded so we could watch them. However since I grabbed them online the quality was pretty crappy (but watchable) so I decided to buy them from iTunes assuming the quality would be better since they’d be legit.  Here begins my saga.

I love to live on the edge of media technologies. I have nine computers in my house running everything from my normal desktop/laptops to three digital photo frames that I built, and two media center PCs.  I have a Treo 700 (with 4GB of memory) and my wife has a Treo 650 (with 2GB of memory). One of the things we love about them is being able to watch video on them (yes I’ve watched several full length movies on them.) In my bedroom I have a home built Windows Media Center PC connected to my 42″ HD plasma TV. The main use for this box is to watch TV shows in my bedroom (like The Office – recorded from my other Media Center PC) and the occasional movie. I happen to have iTunes on this box so I fired it up to purchase The Office. The iTunes interface was good and I had no trouble finding and purchasing the episode that we wanted to see which only took about three minutes total to do. It then took roughly ten minutes for it to download (over my 8MB Comcast cable) so we talked while it was coming down. After it was downloaded we settled in to watch it.  Here’s where things went bad.

I double clicked on the episode to play it and iTunes asks for my password (again). I type it in and blamo – I get an error that I’ve already authorized five computers and have to deauthorize one before I can watch this episode. What? I just paid $1.99 for this ten minutes ago on this computer and now I can’t watch it? What? Now, the real problem is I have no idea which five computers have been authorized (remember I have 9 in my house and countless PC’s at work.)  Since I rarely use iTunes for anything and am instead a Rhapsody subscriber (highly recommended), I have no idea how five PC’s were authorized in the first place. Ok, so now I’m pissed – I just paid $1.99 and waited 15 minutes to watch something (which I already had) and I can’t because of DRM.  Can someone explain how this is a good deal for consumers?

So I go to the regular PC in my office to do some Googling to look for a hack so I could at least watch what I just paid for! After about 10 minutes on Google I figured out that, once per year, you can run a command that will deauthorize ALL computers on your account. Since I don’t care about the other PC’s (you might) I deauthorized them and after that I was able to watch the episode. This is just so wrong. If it took me 10 minutes of Googling to find this answer and figure it all out then my bet is 99% of the population would have just given up at this point as most people would never in a million years deal with shit like this when normally they just turn the TV on and watch. This is ridiculous.

Ok, so it’s now about 30 minutes later, Melanie is beyond annoyed, almost to the point that she doesn’t even want to watch the episode, but I talk her into it. Now, remember what I said earlier, I have my PC connected to my HD plasma so we can watch videos like this. I double click the episode and it starts playing. But man does it look like shit.  I mean not like VHS quality, like total shit quality. Almost unwatchable. I paid $1.99 for this crap? It’s no better than the garbage I downloaded off the net in the first place. Why even bother with this?

So I thought about who Apple’s target audience is. Obviously it’s iPods and not real TV’s (not yet anyway). However lately you read all about their potential iTunes Movie Store and the new Intel Mac Mini and how it’s going to take over the living room. There’s one huge issue with this. The quality of these videos is horrible.  I will never purchase another one since I can get better quality online (from *other* places).  In the past when I’ve missed an episode of 24 I’ve been able to find it online hours after the show in full HD quality! What the hell is Apple thinking? The people that are going to buy movies are going to want them for more than their iPods but for that the quality has to be at least as good as broadcast TV (and should be DVD/HD quality). Obviously I understand the bandwidth issues here but this half ass attempt now is going to kill them in the future (and has killed them for me now.) People on the cutting edge of this stuff don’t have their PC’s hooked up to a 10 year old CRT monitors!

So while everyone loves Apple and the inroads they are making into our living rooms I think they are completely missing the point. Yes the iTunes Music Store is easy to use and has tons of content. Yes they’ve sold a billion songs, that’s because the audio quality is near perfect. They are not going to sell a billion videos, not like this simply because the quality sucks.  Forget about the DRM – they’ve totally lost me at this point – I’m now looking for a similar service that offers quality and DRM that works. While I understand the need for DRM and I support it, at least until it keeps me from doing thing that are 100% legal – for example watching something I just paid for! 

So after $1.99, 30 minutes of effort to watch a 20 minute show on crappy video, Apple had lost me, at least for now.  At least The Office made me laugh.

Rant off.

Scott Maxwell – a partner at Insight Venture Partners – demonstrates his prowness with Ajax.

My fraternity brother Colin Angle – the CEO of iRobot (I was his pledge trainer – that’s my claim to fame) was on Cramer’s Mad Money yesterday.  He did well – Cramer was subdued but happy.  It was fun to watch a Roomba cleaning Cramer’s studio floor with some toy bulls on top of it.

The new I Love Robots commercial is out (maybe it’s been out for a while and I just don’t watch enough TV.)  It’s cute – my favorite quote from the commercial is “the Roomba is more intelligent than some people I know.”  As the proud owner of three classic Roomba’s, one Scheduler Roomba, and a one Scooba I can comfortably say that I (and my dogs) love robots.

Most people that live in the general vicinity of Denver International Airport (including me) like to bash on our favorite formerly bankrupt airline – United.  Now that they are out of bankruptcy, we’ve lost one dimension on which to kick them around (e.g. no more liquidation jokes.)

I’m usually profoundly disappointed by airline websites for some reason.  United’s is no different – I go on the site all bright eyed expecting to be able to do what I need to do and 15 minutes later say to myself “fuck it – I’ll just deal with it at the airport.”  Today, however, was a success.

At 4:25am, I went online to try to print out my boarding pass for my day trip to Chicago.  I tried to login but couldn’t get my password to work (it must have changed it, but can’t remember to what.)  I used the site’s “password challenge” but failed.  So – I had the site email me a new password.  It didn’t seem to work so I did it again (hmm – so far this is feeling very typical.)

30 seconds later a new email appeared with my temporary password.  I went and tried it – twice.  No good.  Crap.  As I was about to give up, another email appeared with another temporary password.  Ok – I guess both attempts at getting a new password worked.  I logged in and changed my password to something I could remember.

I then went through the print the boarding pass process.  I got to the upgrade screen.  It wouldn’t let me past – I didn’t have enough electronic upgrades in my account.  Groan.  I chose a menu option that looked like it’d get me to a “purchase electronic upgrades” screen.  Voila.  I put my credit card in and bought a bunch of upgrades, fully expecting the systems to be disconnected, resulting in a 24 hour wait for my upgrades to appear in my account.

Wrong.  When I went back to the print the boarding pass process, my upgrades were there (ah – the joy of a normalized database, or at least a working implementation of a message broker like Tibco.)  I upgraded, printed my boarding pass for my 6:30am flight, and then went looking for my evening return flight.  Nope – not there.  Well – I guess something had to not work. 

For once, the United.com web site delivered – mostly.

As the next election cycle in Colorado gears up, I’ve been jumping up and down reminding everyone who cares about politics that the solution to the “growth of the technology industry in Colorado” is to improve our education system.  Our current governor has done everything he can to ignore education and at least one of our potential gubernatorial candidates can’t spell the word education.  Colorado has an excellent entrepreneurial and technical base – we just need much more supply at both the K-12 and college levels.  This isn’t a quick fix – at 20+ year view is required.

I think CU Boulder is the best college in Colorado and the one most likely to have a huge impact on the region in the next 20 years.  It’s always great to see additions to the faculty that have a clue about entrepreneurship and technology.  Phil Weiser – an Associate Profession in the School of Law with a joint appointment in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program has been doing a great job as head of the Silicon Flatirons Telecommunications Program.  He sent me a note over the weekend that Vic Fleisher, a law professor at UCLA and a blogger at Conglomerate with a deep interest in entrepreneurship, has just joined the faculty at CU Boulder.

I don’t know Vic, but given Phil’s note, I hope to meet him soon and welcome him to Boulder.