As I embarked on my journey to learn python, I began by exploring a number of different approaches. I finally settled on using “beginner’s mind” (shoshin to those of you out there that know anything about Zen Buddhism). Rather than just dive in and build on my existing programming skills and experience, I decided to start completely from scratch. Fortunately, MIT’s Introductory Computer Science class (6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming) is available in its entirety – including all 24 lectures – on MIT’s OpenCourseWare.

January’s Tech Theme of the Month is going to be Python. I realize it’s still December; I decided to get a head start. Last month’s tech theme was videoconferencing. I learned a lot, including the unfortunate continued split between low end and high end and general lack of ability to have a single universal solution. Oh – and bandwidth still matters a lot. I expect by the end of January we’ll have much better videoconferencing infrastructure set up at Foundry Group with the single goal of eliminating some travel.

If you are reading this on my website you’ll see a new bar popup at the bottom of your browser. It’s the BigDoor MiniBar. If you are a regular reader of Feld Thoughts, check in and join the community. We invested in BigDoor earlier this year as part of our Distribution theme. BigDoor’s goal is to “gamify” any website. They’ve built a very deep and rich set of functionality around game mechanics via a programmable API – things like checkins, points, badges, trophies, levels, and a virtual economy. For an example of a deep integration, take a look at Devhub or the summary article on TechCrunch titled DevHub Now Turns Building A Website Into A Game.

I nominate “platform” for overused tech word of 2010. Yeah, I whined about this a few months ago in my post Your Platform Is Not In My Space. I hear the word “platform” in over 50% of the short pitches I get. A friend of mine who is working on a new startup that isn’t even funded yet (and he’s grinding on the financing) described his goal of “creating a platform for a-phrase-that-only-73-early-adopters-will-userstand.) Entrepreneurs everywhere describe the first release of their MVP (“minimum viable product” – for those of you that haven’t intersected with the Lean Startup movement) app as a “platform”. The first three pages of a google search on “platform” are 33% tech, 33% politics, and 34% other. At least Google image search is more accurate, for example:

CES is just around the corner and I’m psyched to be going again this year. Toss in a BigDoor board meeting early in the week in Las Vegas and I’ll be getting my annual allotment of sin city in the first week of the new year. Lots of my friends and a number of our portfolio companies will be at CES this year. Lest you think it’s just a VC boondoggle, one of my favorite moments of all time happened at CES in 2009 when my dad bought the very first Pogoplug. We went on to fund Cloud Engines (the company that makes the Pogoplug) which just closed a new $15 million financing that includes Softbank and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners. Oh – and they have had a totally kick ass year.

David Cohen (TechStars CEO and co-author of Do More Faster) is blogging a chapter a week from the book on the TechStars web site. The first chapter he’s put up is “Do More Faster” (by David). TechStars is currently accepting applications for the Boston program in the spring of 2011. Do More Faster and go apply now if you’ve been thinking about it.

After reflecting over the past few weeks on Turning 45 as well as Death and Dying, I’ve reached a conclusion that I’ve said out loud several times: “My life is most likely more than half over.” The singularity not withstanding, the chances, at least today, that I’ll live to be over 90 aren’t great. Over the weekend, I saw two blog posts from friends – one from Joanne Wilson about her mom passing away titled Judy Solomon, Entrepreneur and one from Ken Smith (I’m actually close to Ken’s brother Keith, the CEO of BigDoor) titled A Eulogy for Elmer Smith. Both are beautifully written – Judy was 73 and Elmer was 97. Joanne starts off with a very insightful statement:

As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.” As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.” Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?” This is a not a new question. I’ve been thinking about this since I first started writing code (APL) when I was 12 (ahem – 33 years ago) on a computer in the basement of a Frito-Lay data center in Dallas.

There are tons of startup events in Boulder. I get asked almost daily by folks what they should attend to get involved in the local Boulder startup scene. Fortunately, Tom Markiewicz (founder / CEO of StatsMix, a TechStars Boulder 2010 company) is now curating the Boulder Edition of StartupDigest. It’s a great resource for anyone that wants to know what is going on in the Boulder startup scene. Thanks Tom!