Today on Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals, we are featuring the Urban Sherpa Strap from Go Gaga. Sherpa Straps distribute the weight from laptop bags, gym bags, and briefcases that take straps, across your back and shoulders. I’ve been using the Sherpa Strap for a while – it’s dynamite. With today’s deal, you can get the strap and free shipping for $19, a discount of 50%. If you have a bag that you love, but are tired of having it cut into your shoulder as you are traveling from DEN to LGA, check out Sherpa Straps. For each purchase, Go Gaga will make a donation to The Mountain Fund, helping some real sherpas.

I’ve always loved getting books signed by the author. As an author of two books, it makes me smile a huge smile when someone asks me to sign a copy of my book for them. With Kindlegraph, I can finally sign my Kindle books. I met the founder, Evan Jacobs, at Glue a few months ago. He had just started putting books up on it and I immediately told him that I was game to put Do More Faster up. I tweeted about it and signed a few.

Mark Suster interviews Ian Rogers, the CEO of Topspin Media, on ThisWeekIn Venture Capital. We’ve been investors in Topspin since early 2008 and I’ve got a huge man crush on Ian. I find him incredibly passionate and articulate about what he does – he exemplifies the kind of entrepreneur we want to back in our Distribution theme. Oh – and Ian was the original webmaster for the Beastie Boys – how cool is that? And, in case you were wondering, the original Beastie Boys website was at https://www.cs.indiana.edu/~irogers/beastieboys.

When we were last with Dick and Jane on Finance Fridays, our fearless entrepreneurs were figuring out how to split up their founders equity and account for an investment from Jane. While they’ve been hard at work on their product, they’ve also incorporated the company, now named SayAhh (thanks Mac!) as a C-Corp in Delaware. They’ve done a bunch of other mundane things, such as establishing a business checking account and depositing Jane’s $50k in seed capital, but like all good early stage entrepreneurs, they’ve spent most of their time obsessing about their product, talking to a few potential early customers about what they needed, and coding away on their MVP.

Yesterday, we announced that we have invested in Occipital. You may know them as the creators of the popular iPhone app 360 Panorama, the creators of Red Laser (acquired by eBay), or just a gang of the smartest computer vision guys you’ll come across. And when I say “computer vision”, I don’t just mean the technical part, but also a vision of where it’s going. For example, from the Occipital blog post announcing the investment:

One of my favorite conferences of the year is Defrag happening in Boulder on November 9th and 10th. Eric Norlin is gearing up for it and just announced several scholarships for Defrag, underwritten by the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman scholarships are for students and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to attend Defrag, but would receive significant benefit from doing so. Eric is making a concerted effort to get more women to Defrag so he’s allocating 50% of the scholarships to women. For information on applying, take a look at the Defrag scholarship post.

Amy and I spent the last week in Tuscany with some friends, including Howard Lindzon. Howard is the CEO of StockTwits, a company we’ve been an investor in for a few years. I was an investor in Howard’s previous company WallStrip, met Howard through an introduction from our mutual friend Fred Wilson (it’s a pretty funny story, as are many things with Howard), and have worked closely together on a bunch of things including TechStars where Howard has been a great mentor and investor since the beginning.

I’ve been railing against software patents for a number of years. I believe software patents are an invalid construct – software shouldn’t be able to patented. For a while, I felt like I was shouting alone in the wilderness. While a bunch of software engineers I know thought software patents were bogus, I had trouble getting anyone else to speak out against software patents. But that has changed. In the last few month the issue of software patents – and the fundamental issues with them – have started to be front and center in the discussion about innovation.

Today is Finance Friday and post #2 has been drafted by the Finance Friday team from University of Chicago Booth and is waiting for my edits. I’m procrastinating so I thought I’d write one of my periodic public service announcement for entrepreneurs. This one is more specific than “ignore the macro economy” – instead, it’s “ignore the Dow and the stock market and get back to work on your business.”