Someone is far down the negotiating path to buy the old StorageTek 440–acres in Louisville from Sun. The Boulder Camera is speculating that it’s eBay, Google, or Apple . Whoever it is will have fun demolishing million plus square foot eyesore that is the old StorageTek facility.
Josh Larson, one of the guys at MadKast, is completely obsessed with snow . His new blog – Boulder Weather – is a must read for anyone that lives here and cares about the weather. Josh is pretty sure we are going to have snow on the ground by Wednesday. It was 70+ today (beautiful, perfect November day) and is still around 60 as we settle in for the evening.
Hedge fund Pardus Capital Management which owns 2.6% of Delta and 4.82% of United is urging them to merge . While this might be good for Pardus, as a frequent traveler on United out of DIA, this sounds like a really bad idea to me. Probably 50% of the flights that I’ve been on since United came out of bankruptcy have had some sort of problem (mechanical, routing, crew delay, undermined) and I have several situations where the plane simply didn’t show up. ...
I got an email today from Ryan Roth, a long time reader of this blog. He is giving away four tickets to Saturday’s World Series game . The only catch is that you have to be a disabled Iraq / Afghanistan war veteran to be part of the drawing. Following is the story: So, we have four tickets! One upper deck, three lower deck. All for Game 3 of the World Series. We want to give them away to disabled Iraq/Afghanistan War Veterans. We don’t know you, but we are thankful for your service and your sacrifice. ...
Well – that was predictable. Rockies Blow Ticket-Sales Tech; World Series Next? About 30 minutes after Rockies world series tickets went on sale online (the only place you could buy them) their systems crashed. According to the Rockies Press Release, under 500 tickets were actually sold. The MLB ticket vendor – Paciolan – claims that the traffic (8.5m hits in some unspecified period of time) took down all their North American customers. Oops. Glad I was wearing my Red Sox jacket around town today. Maybe the Rockies should consider outsourcing the whole shebang to StubHub !
Last night I attended the Boulder 2007 Esprit Entrepreneur Awards where I was honored to receive the Rob Planchard Award. I shared the stage with two good friends – Tim Miller and Ryan Martens from Rally Software who won the Entrepreneur of the Year award. To highlight the evening – Bill Perry of Softbridge Advisors won the Lifetime Achievement Award. When I moved to Boulder in 1995, Amy and I only knew one person and he moved away six months later. I had no expectations of doing any meaningful amount of business in Boulder – I moved here to live in a beautiful place that was between the two coasts (Boston and the Bay Area) that I was traveling between on a weekly basis. ...
Last Thursday, I shared the stage at the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. During his speech, Governor Ritter announced the formation of the Colorado Innovation Council. I’m one of three co-chairs, along with Juan Rodriguez (co-founder of StorageTek and Exabyte) and Phil Weiser (professor of law at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a national telecommunications policy expert.) Phil and I have been working with Governor Ritter and his staff to form this since the beginning of the year. One of our goals was to create an organization that could have real impact, rather than just a collection of people who’s names would go on a web site and letterhead somewhere. We spent plenty of time talking to various folks both in and out of government who have been involved in things like this in the past and, as a result of our research, are hopeful that we’ve created an organization of “doers” vs. either “figureheads” or “pontificators.” ...
If you follow the Boulder entrepreneurship scene, Jerry Lewis – the editor-in-chief of the Boulder County Business Report – has a video interview series up on the web titled Entrepreneur BizCast. This week he interviewed Lijit Networks and has interviews up with Collective Intellect, me.dium, and TechStars. They are quick – and good. You can also follow along in your RSS reader on the BoulderNews.Info blog.
The really cool thing about having friends like Paul Berberian is that I can act out my desire to participate in a real life equivalent of Being John Malkovich . Paul has a fascinating new company that is launching at the end of the year. His product is both physical and virtual; the physical part of it (nicknamed “the bong” by me) is manufactured in China. I don’t really have any desire to go on an eight day business trip to a factory in Qingdao, but it’s awesome to read Paul’s description of it in his post China visit – nothing is as it seems . Now – the conclusion (signaled by the title) is no surprise, but my voyeristic view of Paul’s week was satisfying this early morning in Boulder. ...
My friend Kimbal Musk (owner of The Kitchen and CEO of Me.dium) is in GwangJu, South Korea with his wife Jen installing her light harp. As usual, Kimbal is hysterical. A typical paragraph: “And NO ONE speaks english. It’s like we’re aliens. They can’t even read the tourist map. We spent about 45 minutes in an insane, high speed taxi ride trying to explain where we wanted to go by pointing at the map the hotel gave us. I think the map we got was a joke played on the only western tourists to hit GwangJu this year. The cab driver thought we were retarded. We thought he was out to kill us.”