I have to keep reminding myself that some things just take a long time. My rampage against software patents continues and, while my efforts around the StartupVisa have dominated my “government time” in the past quarter, I’ve still got my eye on the ultimate goal of rendering the construct of a software patent invalid. I smiled yesterday when I saw the short article titled 3D Computer Graphics Patents Deemed Invalid. The key line from the article is “Though the calculations may be performed on a computer, they are not tied to any particular computer. For these reasons, the claims of the [patents-in-suit] fail to pass muster under the Bilski machine implementation test for patentability under 35 U.S.C. § 101.” 

I really miss Jack Bauer. Hopefully he’ll be back on my giant screen in my living room soon. In the mean time he interrogates Santa Claus. You can see that Jack is getting soft. Santa Claus has always stood up to a lot of scrutiny. We all know that one day the Santa Claus Sex Scandel will hit, but I expect Ms. Claus will stay by his side. Jack – I was hoping for better from you on this one.

Yesterday, TechStars announced that it is a launching a new program in Seattle. This will be the third program that TechStars runs – with the other two being in Boulder over the summer and Boston in the spring (we are currently accepting applications for the Boston program.) The Seattle program will be run this fall. There’s been some great initial press on this including TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, PEHub, and Seattle’s TechFlash. Greg Huang – who writes for Xconomy (which has also done a great job of covering TechStars Boston) covered the launch well and had a nice follow up post linking the Boston and Seattle programs origins. It’s really satisfying to read the articles as pretty much everyone gets that a key part of TechStars are the mentors – and the Seattle mentors are just awesome. 

We are deep in budget season as the last board meeting of the year typically includes the 2010 Budget – or at least the “2010 Draft Budget” or “2010 Budget – Draft”. This is also known as “the joy of cramming a spreadsheet into a powerpoint presentation.” The budgets I see generally fit into one of the following five categories. Pre-Revenue: We are pre-revenue and won’t generate revenue in 2010. First Year of Revenue: We are pre-revenue but will generate our first revenue in 2010. Growing Revenue: We are on a revenue growth curve in 2010 but will lose money every month. Becoming Profitable: We are currently losing money but will become profitable in 2010. Profitable: We are profitable every month this year. While I’ve written about this before, it’s worth noting that “profitable” is often used to mean either EBITDA positive, Net Income positive, or Cash Flow positive. These are three totally different things and you aren’t really in a happy profitable place until all three are true.

I’ve introduced two new devices into my personal human instrumentation experiment. In addition to my Zeo, I am now carrying around a FitBit and using a Withings scale. I’ve discovered the mild embarrassment associated with having a scale mis-tweet your weight by 10 pounds too much (e.g. “Brad – you gained a lot of weight recently – everything ok?”) But I suppose that is part of the experiment. The comparison on the Zeo and FitBit sleep data is fascinating. Take a look. Zeo from last night first.

Jon Hansen from PI Window on Business had so much fun with me a few weeks ago that he asked me to do another interview – this time on the dynamics around foreign investments. We covered plenty of ground, including what country, state, and local governments do to slow down investments, along with a bunch of my own philosophy around why I only make VC investments in the US and Canada. Buried deep in the interview is my track record making VC investments in European companies (hint: not pretty).

I love having steel balls. Amy and I discovered Mark Castator about a year ago. He’s a Boulder based artist that does amazing stuff with steel. Here’s a few other things in our house in Eldorado Canyon. The metal painting on the wall is by Mark Cesark who is an Aspen based artist (and another Mark) who we’ve fallen in love with and are collecting aggressively. The steel towers by the window are Castator’s.

How to be a Jewish Star. I feel like some potato latkes this morning. When I was a kid, everyone said that Hanukkah was better than Christmas since we got eight gifts. My view was that we got eight shitty little gifts while all my friends had a giant gift orgy on Christmas. At some point I stopped caring completely. Really, I don’t care. Really! Well not really.

Last week I complained about how miserable I was with AT&T. I love my iPhone, but the AT&T service (both data and voice) is abysmal here in Boulder. All my Blackberry friends on Verizon are happier, so I decided to try a Droid on Verizon. After 24 hours I bailed and went back to my iPhone – the Droid just isn’t ready for prime time IMHO. Thaddeus Arroyo, the CIO of AT&T Services, is on the National Center for Women & Information Technology board with me and saw my tweet (apparently via Facebook) whining about AT&T. He reached out to me immediately and asked if he could help in any way. I sent him a long note which has resulted in a call tomorrow with the senior regional area support executive.