I love my dogs. I have two giant golden retrievers – Kenai and Brooks. Dogster (where I’m an investor) recently launched a new Together Tag pet ID service in partnership with the American Red Cross. It’s a comprehensive and well thought out service that goes beyond things like microchipping your pet. It’s inexpensive – only a $24.95 one time fee for your pet. As part of this, Dogster contributes $5 of the fee to the American Red Cross to help support pet safety programs. I just got one for each of Kenai and Brooks – the signup process was trivial and took less than five minutes.

In case you don’t get enough of me, you can now download the Brad Feld iPhone app. Or – from your iPhone – just do an App Store search on Brad Feld. As a result of the Brad Feld iPhone app you can easily get the blogs from Feld Thoughts, Ask the VC, Foundry Group, Amy Batchelor, and Stan Feld all in one nifty app on your iPhone. While my ego is satiated, at least for a few days, the really cool thing to me is how this came together. When the iPhone first came out, Brent Simmons created an iPhone version of NetNewsWire which was dynamite. He iterated quickly on this and realized that it could be the core of an iPhone app business built on top of the NewsGator / NetNewsWire framework. This has resulted in a new product for NewsGator – the NewsGator iPhone App Framework.

I’m heading out to Seattle for a board meeting and a few other things. Tonight, I’m going to be doing an event called Beers and Boulder with Brad. I’m going to talk about entrepreneurial communities, the critical importance of entrepreneurship and innovation today, TechStars, what we’ve done in Boulder to drive entrepreneurship that can apply to other cities such as Seattle, and why we are expanding TechStars to Boston. I’m then going to stick around until they kick us out answering any and all questions and talking with whoever wants to hang out.

Last week while I was off the grid for my Q1 vacation, TechStars announced that we are doing a Boston program this summer. Applications for both the Boston and the Boulder programs are open until March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT, but apply before 3/1/09 and be eligible to attend TechStars for a Day. We launched the original TechStars program in January 2007. We’ve now run TechStars in Boulder for two years and have had a dynamite time, helped create some super companies (we’ve had 20 companies go through the program, 2 have been profitably acquired, 2 are profitable, and 12 have been funded), and have been able to contribute meaningfully to the Boulder entrepreneurial scene.

Unknown Error. Please Restart. Perfect. I love The Onion. Thanks Rick.

Sim Simeonov, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, sent me (along with a bunch of his closest friends) the following email this morning. “Founders often ask about the dilution they are likely to experience through exit. There are rules of thumb but there is no good data about what happens to common stock (at least, I haven’t been able to find such data outside of S1 filings which are a very biased sample). So, I built a little survey to collect anonymous data from entrepreneurs. I’ll crunch the numbers and share the stats with everyone. I’d appreciate your help in spreading the word around so that we get enough data.”

Don Dodge totally nails it in his post Create 50,000 companies for $1B. He builds on Fred Wilson’s No Thanks post when discussing what the US government should do with 1/20th of auto industry bailout money. “Government should create incentives for investment. It is probably best not to make the investments directly. There are already some good programs and incentives in place that have been forgotten or underfunded for too long. Pouring money into these programs is certain to stimulate investment, inspire innovation, and create jobs.”

My monthly column in Entrepreneur Magazine is up (and on the newsstands). This month’s article is titled Check Your VC’s Pulse and offers entrepreneurs three important questions to ask your VC investors to understand better the health of their firm. It also explains what the various answers to the questions mean. As an addendum to the article, read Fred Wilson’s post titled A Stimulus Plan For Venture Capital? No Thanks. In response to Tom Friedman’s NY Times op-ed piece where he suggests the US government take the auto industry bailout money and give it to top venture capital firms instead, Fred explains the problem and risk of adverse selection very clearly.

I’m back in Boulder from my Q1 vacation with Amy. We spent the first few days at our ski house in Keystone with the Wilson Quintet (Fred, Joanne, Jessica, Emily, and Josh). We then went to Paradise Island in the Bahamas with our Boston friends Warren and Ilana Katz. We had a great time chilling out, enjoying our friends, sleeping a lot, eating at Nobu (twice), reading, and being completely off the grid.