The Gist iPhone app was released this morning. It’s the first of two meaningful iPhone releases this week from companies I’m an investor in. Not surprisingly the Gist iPhone app is tightly coupled with the overall Gist service which I’ve written about in the past. Bill French wrote a great review on iPhone CTO titled Mobile Professionals Develop Business Acuity and Information Readiness With New Gist iPhone App. In this he clearly explains what Gist is trying to do, why it’s special-magic-happy, and where it has room for improvement.

I ingest a ton of information on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. My process for doing it today is entirely manual. I’m starting to look around for a way to automate this using the metaphor of a “personal dashboard”, not dissimilar to the idea from the 1980’s of an EIS (“executive information system”). Let me explain. Daily: I have an information processing routine each morning that is web-based. I open a folder in Firefox that contains 14 tabs. I then go through all of them – most, but not all are news related. A few are interactive and require data from me. I then scan through my tweets from the previous night. I then review my “Daily” email folder – most of the items are “daily reports” from a variety of companies I’m an investor in. Next up, my RSS feeds. Finally, I process whatever email came in from the previous night. Weekly: I have a weekly tab in Firefox. There are only 5 tabs here and they shift around a little. But – they reference a variety of text and numerical data that I check on a weekly basis. Monthly: I get financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement) along with board packages from all of the companies I’m an investor in along with all of my personal financial information. Quarterly: Similar to monthly, but for the quarter. Annual: Similar to monthly, but for the year. I also generate a variety of other “annual data” much of it to do with either money or fitness. My Daily routine takes around an hour. Weekly, which includes reviewing my upcoming calendar, takes about 30 minutes. I don’t know how long Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual take as they are usually spread out over multiple days.

As the co-founder of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, I’m a huge fan of what the Entrepreneurs Foundation is all about. Two weeks ago, when I was in San Francisco at Cloud Engines’ offices (makers of the Pogoplug and one of our investments) I noticed their Entrepreneurs Foundation plaque signifying their membership in the bay area chapter. I asked Dan Putterman – the CEO of Cloud Engines – if he’d write a guest post about why Cloud Engines joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation. It follows.

This year TechStars ran a program in Boston. Shawn Broderick was the ring leader and everyone had an awesome time. To get a feel for the scene, take a look at The Founders video on Bean Town. The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 13 | Bean Town from Andrew on Vimeo.

Two things really tweaked me in the past 24 hours. The FTC rules to regulate product endorsements in blogs The US Antitrust Inquiry of IBM The FTC thing is just fucking stupid. Jeff Jarvis does a better takedown of it than I could ever do on his post FTC Regulates Our Speech. I’m not a journalist, nor do I pretend to be. I’m involved in some way in virtually everything I write about on this blog. While I don’t directly make money when you buy a product or service from one of the private companies I have an investment in, I have the potential of eventually making money if the company is more valuable. I do get a share of the ad revenue that appears alongside the articles and I get affiliate fees from some services like Amazon whenever I write about a book or movie, link to Amazon, and remember to include my affiliate link. These are all well known practices among bloggers that adding “disclosure to” in every post is tedious, pointless, and irrelevant.

Last week I was interviewed by the Denver Business Journal for an article on the StartupVisa Movement. Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) – who represents the district in which I live – was also interviewed. Kevin Mann – the founder of Take Publishing (one of the TechStars 2009 companies) and a UK citizen – talked about his story. Good – and important – stuff – Polis wants foreign company founders to be allowed to stay in United States.

The other day I wrote about two TechStars companies (Occipital and DailyBurn) teaming up to create FoodScanner for the iPhone. That app is now in the top 65 in the app store. Occipital provided the underlying scanning technology which is based on the RedLaser SDK. Anyone can use that SDK to easily add magic bar code scanning to their own app. As of right now, RedLaser itself is #2 on the top paid apps list in the app store. You can use it to scan any barcode to quickly check online pricing. I love stuff that works like “magic” and RedLaser qualifies because it’s fast and effortless and uses nothing more than the built in camera to read the barcode, even on curved surfaces, and even without autofocus**.**

In the few weeks since I wrote the post The Founders Visa Movement there has been a ton of positive momentum, input, ideas, and support. Thanks to the efforts of Dave McClure and Eric Ries, we shifted the name to the StartupVisa, figured out that the EB-5 visa was the most logical one to try to “modify”, and got a web site up about it. In the mean time, I’ve now had extensive conversations with three of my congressmen, all of whom get it, including one who is deep in working on some draft legislation around it. I’ve also gotten a CU Law JD/MBA student to work with us as an intern to help put some substance around the approach and proposal. I’ve also been taken to task by some folks who think I’m naive, misguided, or simply are against increasing the number of legal immigrants into our country.

Defrag 2009 is happening in Denver on November 11th and 12th. As this is Defrag’s third year, I can say with great confidence that it will be an amazing experience. I’ve watched Eric Norlin orchestrate two Defrag’s and one Glue conference and he is a master at the small, intimate, high quality tech conference. The simple metaphor for Defrag versus all of the other tech conferences that exist can be summarized in one question: “Would you rather eat at TGI Fridays or the family owned restaurant, where the owner brings the food to your table?"