Gist just announced that they have acquired Learn that Name and incorporated it in the Gist iPhone app. There are a lot of fun connections here for me. For starters, as many of you know, I’m an investor in Gist. If you haven’t tried it – or haven’t played with it for a while – give it a shot. The evolution of the product over the last six months has been remarkable as it gets better every two weeks (the Gist teams’ release cycle).

I love the conferences we help sponsor (Glue and Defrag). Eric Norlin is a genius at putting together a specialty technology conference. He gets amazing people to attend, curates the content meticulously, isn’t afraid to try new things every year (and have some not work), and just keeps at it with single minded commitment. He also totally gets why to do these things outside of the bay area – there’s a completely different tempo (and magic can happen) when people really commit two days of their life to a conference.

My long time friend Alan Shimel has been blogging up a storm on Network World (if you want to hear any amusing story, ask him about the first time he met me.) When Alan started writing his column for Network World he asked me for introductions to a bunch of our portfolio companies that were using open source. Alan is a tough critic and calls it like he sees it so while I knew there was no guarantee that he’d go easy on the companies, I knew that Alan would do an even handed job of highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. I also know that everyone I invest in values any kind of feedback – both good and bad – and they work especially hard to delight their customers so any kind of feedback will make them better.

As you may have noticed, I’ve got a new blog design, as do my partners Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Seth Levine. Every year or so I get bored of my blog design and we go through a nice little upgrade. Our good friends at Slice of Lime do all the design work and Ross (our IT guy) wrangles everything. We’re still changing some stuff, but if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs, please leave comments so I can tune things up.

Not long after I posted about Dave Jilk’s experience with the Pogoplug, he started using the phrase “Pogoplug Simple” to describe one of the goals of Standing Cloud. The idea is that technology products should be so easy to set up and use that the experience is vaguely unsatisfying – you feel like you didn’t do anything. Standing Cloud – a company we provided seed funding for last year – is launching publicly this week with its Trial Edition and I think they’ve managed to make cloud application management “Pogoplug Simple.”

One of our internal mantras at TechStars is to “publish your data.” We encourage every team to do this starting very early in their life. To this day, I still get daily performance reports (I refer to them as TPS reports) from many of the companies that have gone through the program. Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data. 39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston). The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company. Some of the pertinent summary data follows:

If you happen to live in North Carolina or regularly attend the CED Venture Conference (the Southeast US’s longest running early stage company financing conference), come say hello to me on April 21st. I’ll be spending the day at the conference and am speaking on a panel from 1:30pm to 2:45pm. We don’t yet appear to have a panel title, but the other participants are Dana Callow (Boston Millennia Partners), Noel Fenton (Trinity Ventures), Todd Forrest (Hummer Winblad), and Patrick Kerins (NEA). I don’t think I’ve ever been on a panel with any of them before (although I’m pretty certain I’ve fixed Dana Callow’s computer a few times back during my Feld Technologies days), so I’m looking forward to having some fun bwahahahahahahahaha.

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

I know I owe everyone a follow up to my post from last week titled The Proliferation of Standardized Seed Financing Documents. To the many of you out there that emailed me in response, thanks for all of the thought, ideas, suggestions, and offers of help. More on that soon. In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know. My partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors. If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary pretty widely. If you are interested, sign up here.