In response to my post The Beginning of the Real Mess in the Clouds I received several emails / twitters / comments saying some variation of “these are easy problems to address” or “the cloud computing providers will quickly fix all this stuff and even my mother will be able to use cloud computing.” Uh huh. Here’s another one. We’ve got hundreds of these already and it has only been 75 days since we started the company.

Anyone who has driven to DIA has seen the mysterious big blue horse. Yes – it has special powers. It has killed before (its creator – Luis Jimenez) and may kill again. I’ve just joined the I am afraid of the big blue horse at DIA Facebook group. Here’s one of the best quotes from the wall. Approaching DIA, my heart began to thump. Summoning all my resolution, I gave my Suby half a score of kicks to the gas pedal in an attempt to hasten my journey. At just that moment a splash of blue caught my eye. In the dark shadow of the field, on the margin of the airport, I beheld something blue, so blue, and towering, a gigantic monster ready to pounce upon this weary traveler. “What are you” I whispered, and received no reply. Agitated, I repeated my question. Pushing the gas pedal, I closed my eyes and uttered an involuntary psalm. I opened my eyes. The shadow took shape, a huge horse with powerful frame, whose eyes burned red and followed me, keeping pace. I rounded the curve, bringing the relief of the giant against the sky and I was horror-struck on perceiving it was…art? ~ Jenn Bma (Boulder)

All the economics and newscasters like to talk about GDP Growth Rate (and its importance to life, the universe, and everything). Whatever. One of my very smart LPs sent me this the other day. He sent the attached note: This is not meant to be exhaustive or to suggest any correlation – only a reminder that great companies continue to be created at shitty times. It is, however, interesting to think about what attributes might lead companies founded in shitty times to go on to be successful. How about: single-mindedness of purpose, frugality/capital efficiency, and more sweat than equity.

We made a seed investment at the end of last year in a company called Standing Cloud. They are working on a set of application development and deployment tools for cloud computing that build on some of the ideas in the posts What Happened To The 4GL? and Clouditude. They’ve spent the first quarter of 2009 testing out a series of hypotheses we had concerning issues with Cloud Computing as well as building an first release of their cloud deployment tool.

While you might be interested in a ego vanity iPhone app like the Brad Feld iPhone app, you are probably a lot more interested in an iPhone app for your business. NewsGator has become an expert at building these and has developed a superb framework for branded iPhone apps. On March 31st they are having a Webinar titled Gain Revenue & Readership with Branded iPhone Apps – Reed Business Case Study Webinar*.* Walker Fenton from NewsGator and Brien Tate (Reed Business’ CTO) will walk through what they’ve done around the Variety iPhone app including:

I love living in Boulder. But, I travel a lot. And I like that also, especially when Amy comes with me. I’m in Boston today for TechStars for a Day and then doing a bunch of stuff at MIT tomorrow. Amy came with me and is doing her own thing at Wellesley. I often get asked how much time I spend on the road versus at home. I decided to track it – along with several other things (miles run, books read, and airplane flights) for 2009. Following is where I have slept so far this year as of 3/10/09.

I have always wanted a jetpack. From one of my favorite West Wing exchanges (among many) in “The West Wing: The Warfare of Genghis Khan (#5.13)” (2004): Leo McGarry: My generation never got the future it was promised… Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don’t even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped. Josh Lyman: The personal computer… Leo McGarry: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where’s my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?

“There is a category of people that do stuff and a category of people that stuff gets done to.” The following short video is from the end of the event I did a few weeks in Seattle that was summarized nicely by Xconomy Seattle in Greg Huang’s post VC Model Is Not Broken: Insights from Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group. Brad Feld – cofounder of Tech Stars – “Do Stuff!” from Seattle20 on Vimeo.

I love numbers. I was thinking about numbers and dates on my run yesterday. Here’s a few fun ones for you. 101010 – On 10/10/2010 the answer the life, the universe, and everything will be revealed. 030309 – Isn’t it fun to have square root day be “prime square root day”? How many of them are there in the 21st century? How about 02/02/04, 03/03/09, 05/05/25, 07/07/49. That would be five. So there are a prime number of prime square root days.