As the TechStars Boulder program starts its third week, the TechStars Boston program kicks off its first week. Andrew Hyde has a good summary of the first two weeks of Boulder (along with a callout to TechStars TV) and the Boston Herald ran an interview with me, Shawn Broderick, and David Cohen on the creation and goals for TechStars Boston. Plus, I came up with the idea for this summer’s TechStars Boulder hack – let’s see if the gang can live up to the standards set by MIT Hackers.

I tried an experiment last week when I was in Seattle. I did two of my “random meetings” in cars between things. I had a full day (a run with TA McCann (the CEO of Gist), the Gist board meeting, and then the Impinj board meeting. I had to catch a flight home to Denver at 5pm because I had a meeting first thing in the morning with one of our investors. So – I didn’t really have any slack time in my schedule.

Well – that serves me right. If you requested a Gist beta invite, be patient. I’m grinding through my inbox and you’ll have your invite by tomorrow at the latest. Thanks everyone who requested one, especially for all the kind feedback on the blog. But that’s not what I’m thinking about this morning. Last week I read an intro O’Reilly book to HCI called Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices. It was ok, but one of the insights – that the public restroom has become a test bed for gestural interface technology – really stuck with me.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post titled The Maturing of the Implicit Web. In it I talked about new releases from AdaptiveBlue and OneRiot. As I sit here in my hotel room in Seattle waiting for TA McCann (CEO of Gist) to show up for our pre-board meeting run, I’m pondering how much work I’m starting to get the web to do for me. For example, as part of my morning information routine, I go through my Gist dashboard. This is a list of all the new information that Gist has found from a wide variety of data sources about people and companies in my social network. It derives the social network from my email inbox, integrates it with my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter social graphs, and then presents it to me in a way that is prioritized by what it thinks I find most interesting. The level of relevance to me is amazing now that I’ve had it running for a few months. While Gist is still in closed beta, if you want an invite just email me.

I have lots of short meetings. I’ll try to meet with anyone that I can that is referred to me or seems to be doing something relevant to my world. I’ll also meet with people I think are interesting or, in some cases, just to be polite. Some of the most interesting things I’m involved in have come out of random meetings. One of my favorite examples is TechStars. David Cohen somehow ended up on my “random day” meeting schedule. We had never met before and I had no idea who he was. He came in, sat down, and handed me a first draft of a brochure he had created. I asked him to tell me about himself and “TechStars.” He did. Five minutes later I looked at him and said “I’m in – let’s figure this out.”

I haven’t been reading that much lately (only 27 books so far this year) so I had a nice weekend chewing on a handful of them as I tried to catch my breath from a few weeks of constantly moving around. The first – and most enjoyable – was Bricklin on Technology . I’ve somehow managed to end up with three of them – I know that Dan Bricklin sent me one and Amazon sent me one, but I don’t know where the third came from. Dan told me about this book a few months ago when I saw him in Boston at the TechStars for a Day event. He’s done an outstanding job of combining his essays on computing with updated thinking along with a bunch of great history. There are a dozen chapters – each are a “mini-book” within the book. My favorite was Chapter 12: VisiCalc (which is – not surprisingly – the history of VisiCalc) but the other chapters are all great and include things like:

It’s been a busy and exciting week so far. The best part is that Amy arrived home from her two week trip to Africa yesterday evening. I picked her up at the airport and got to spend the night with her before heading back out to Glue on my way to San Francisco on my way to Boston. The weekend starts Saturday at noon for me when I get back in Boulder and I expect to be enjoying it thoroughly.

I’m at the Glue Conference today. The room is packed with a bunch of great folks, including a large contingent of locals (thanks guys – especially the BDNT crowd!) So far we’ve heard from Josh Elman (Facebook) on “Gluing together the web via the Facebook Platform” and Aaron Fulkerson (Mindtouch) on “What is Web Oriented Architecture?” Andre Durand (Ping Identity) is up now talking about “How Identity Makes the Future Internet Possible”. Great stuff so far – follow along at #gluecon OR #glue.

My partner Jason Mendelson (an ex-lawyer) has a dynamite post up titled Quick Ways To Get Fired as a Lawyer*.* While some of my best friends are lawyers (or ex-lawyers), I’ve encountered most of the stupid lawyer tricks that Jason enumerates in his post. The big ones (immediate termination) are: Screw around with redlines. Endorse the chief competitor. You provide little leadership and wait for someone else to come up with the answer. You provide advice to the CEO adverse to the company’s interest. The medium ones (you’ll lose us over time) are: