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Another TechStars company has been acquired. Well – part of it has been acquired. Today it was announced that eBay has acquired the RedLaser product from Occipital . The Occipital guys tell the story in their post titled Arrival at the Launchpad . Occipital’s founders – Jeff and Vikas – are the epitome of bootstrap entrepreneurs. Every TechStars class seems to have one and Occipital wins the bootstrapper of TechStars Boulder 2008 award. At the end of the program they had a few chances to raise money but weren’t happy with the valuations so decided to hunker down and just bootstrap things. They reinvented themselves several times until they launched RedLaser which has been a runaway hit (over two million copies sold to date.) As RedLaser took off, they had another set of interesting investment offers but no longer have any need for outside capital. ...

Monday night, I’ll again be the co-host of Entrepreneurs Unplugged where we will be interviewing Tyler Tysdal, the Managing Director of Mantucket Capital. We’ll start at 6pm at the CU Boulder ATLAS center. Tyler has a neat background as both an entrepreneur and investor and I expect this will be another fun and enlightening session. Tyler’s background follows: Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also the founder of Sports Shares, a fractional luxury suite club. He began his career in investment banking with Alex. Brown & Sons, focused on corporate finance and mergers & acquisitions. Mr. Tysdal graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA in Finance from Georgetown University ...

Speaking of the metaverse, we had a great TechStars summer program this year. The companies that graduated from the program are starting to announce their financings and two announced this week. SendGrid Raises $750K For Email Deliverability Software : I love these guys. If your company sends transaction outbound email to your end users (e.g. confirmations, alerts, notifications) you can either (a) do it yourself and build all the infrastructure / support around it or (b) outsource it to SendGrid . I’m a huge fan and really excited about their investor group led by Highway 12 Ventures, with SoftTech VC and FF Angel. ...

I’ve always hated walled gardens. Before I started blogging in 2004, I had a point of view that was driven from my desire to share interesting information with my friends and colleagues. Since I’m a big reader, I run across a lot of stuff and have always enjoyed sharing, going back to the late 1980’s when I used to cut articles out of magazines and mail them to people. When I started blogging, I gained an entirely new perspective. As a writer, I was proud when people referenced things I wrote. I loved the debate and discussion around topics that were controversial. I’ve always been comfortable expressing my opinion and having people express a different opinion, as I almost always learn something as long as there is a real discussion. ...

I spent last Thursday at TechStars Boston meeting with all of the TechStars Boston 2009 teams. They’ve all made a ton of progress since I met with them a month ago and many of them are shaping up really nicely. A few of them are starting to be more public about what they are up to. One of them – Sensobi – is ready to roll. I’m not a BlackBerry user (I use an iPhone), but when I fiddled around with their app on a BlackBerry a month ago I totally got it. BlackBerryCool calls it an “enterprise-grade address book.” ...

Yummy – that’s a fun tongue twister. It doesn’t quite mean “synchronizing data”, but it’s in the same family. I don’t have a better phrase yet for “renormalizing denormalized data”, but there is probably a construct for it that someone reading this blog can tell me (or invent – here’s your choice to replace the TLA RDD with something else.) Two companies – Gnip and Brightkite – that I’m involved with (there – full disclosure!) made announcements today about data integrations. ...

Xconomy has a post up titled Who Knew? Xconomy Uncovers the Strange-But-True Details of Boston’s Innovation Leaders . My bathroom at CU Boulder enabled me to make the list, even though I’ve never really been part of the Boston VC community. The list includes some entrepreneurs (it is a list of the strange proclivities of Boston’s Innovation Leaders after all.) In other VC hobby news, Fred Wilson is digging the new Soul Patch album Sooner or Later. That would be a hobby of my partners Jason and Ryan.

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know I’m a huge Warren Buffett fan. So are many of you – when I offered to send out the “Annual Letters of Buffett Partnership, Limited, 1957 – 1970” I got over 1000 requests and every week I get a new one. (FYI – if you want them, just email me a request and I’ll send them to you, but you have to promise not to post the letters per a request from Buffett.) ...

Jeff Nolan from NewsGator has a good post up on the Enterprise RSS blog titled Attention Data: Content vs. User that describes both attention data and privacy dynamics. There’s a lot more where this comes from, but it’s a good starting point if you keep hearing “attention” in the context of RSS and wonder to yourself “what is it / why do I care?”