In December, I wrote a post titled Give Your Sales People All The Knives. While I let you draw whatever conclusions you wanted from the post, I thought I’d follow through and give you a little more detail about what I meant by the statement. I framed the problem with the struggle many software companies have been going through over the past few years (or decades – depending on who’s version of history you believe) around selling perpetual licenses vs. subscriptions. I inadvertently included the construct of the deployment model (desktop, server, or SaaS / hosted) which, while a key part of the evolution of the software business, was not the part of the problem I was referring to when I suggested you should give your sales people all the knives.

Applications for the 2009 TechStars program are now open. If you apply before March 1st, you’ll be eligible to receive an invitation to TechStars For A Day on March 3rd. The applications deadline is March 21, 2009 at 11:59:59 PM MDT. For an example of one of the TechStars 2008 companies, take a look at the recent article in the NY Times titled An Online Farmers Market. It’s a great profile of Foodzie – one of last year’s companies which was founded by Rob LeFave, Emily Olson, and Nik Bauman. Foodzie recently raised $1m from First Round Capital and SoftTech VC, have launched a dynamite site, and are off to the races.

If you read one book in 2009, read Daemon. It’s unusual for me to recommend a book so early in the year. Daemon is only my fourth book of 2009. It’s a first novel. And it’s mental floss. But it’s as close to flawless for a book of its genre. I first heard about Daemon in December from Rick Klau. I got to know Rick at FeedBurner; he’s now at Google running Blogger. Rick told me that I had to read this book. He pointed me to a blog post he had written in 2007 about it.

Amy is in Mexico on vacation with her sisters and I’ve been spending most of the weekend in bed. Sleeping. I twisted my ankle running on Tuesday and had an intense week so I think I’ve come down with a strange sleeping sickness that I’ll call “the ankle twist.” I did manage to read through my RSS feeds this morning and found some good stuff for you. Forecasting Sales in 2009: Will Herman is a semi-retired spectacular entrepreneur and CEO. He’s also an old friend who has put up with me since 1984. Whenever he writes something on sales (or selling) I read it carefully. So should you.

I’m an investor in Bug Labs (personally, not through our funds). When I first met with Peter Semmelhack, the CEO, on an introduction from Fred Wilson (the lead investor) I immediately got it. After about 15 minutes, I said to Peter something to the effect of “ah – today’s version of the Healthkit.” Peter’s vision was that in addition to being a completely open source hardware product that allows you to prototype any consumer electronics device (or – more simply – any “electronic gadget”), all the software and design would be “open.”

I fly a lot so I’ve been bizarrely obsessed with the US Airways crash last week. While most of the video comes after the plane is in the river, it’s a pretty heavy video. I think the pilot who landed this plane is an absolute heroic figure. I only hope that in situations that intense I keep my cool.

This year at Sundance, Oblong unveiled Tamper. The Tamper application is a gestural interface for cinematic design. It is built on Oblong’s g-speak spatial operating environment and is a fun example of how Oblong’s core technology can be applied to a film editing system. Tamper is part of the New Frontier on Main exhibit located at 333 Main Street on the lower level. Oblong has set up a channel on YouTube to show some of the various videos that folks at Sundance are making with Tamper. 

Greg Reinacker, the founder/CTO of NewsGator, has a post up titled Enterprise RSS – the State of the Industry that is a continuation of the discussion that’s recently ensued around Enterprise RSS (reference my post from the other day – Enterprise RSS at NewsGator is Alive and Well). Following is the setup. First, let me get this out of the way – RSS use in the enterprise is definitely alive and well. But it’s not in the obvious places. No one is writing articles talking about how their desktop feed readers are revolutionizing the way they do business. No one is talking about how they’re retiring their Exchange servers because so much content is delivered via RSS instead of email (and in fact, email is alive and well). No one is saying “if I only had Google Reader behind my firewall, I could save millions of dollars.” Few companies even say their users are clamoring for some sort of enterprise RSS application. So if not all of that, then what? My team and I, collectively, have detailed conversations with at least 50 different large companies every week, talking about the real problems they do want to solve. Many of these include 10 or more people on their side, ranging from IT folks to business owners with line-of-business responsibility. And these conversations rarely start with any mention of enterprise RSS.

Howard Lindzon cracks me up. Endlessly. Continuously. His latest rant is all about Asshat’s from 2008 put on by one of his new companies StockTwits. I’m not really sure what an Asshat is since I don’t pay any attention to the public market, but I’m going to guess it had something to do with people that consider themselves experts in trading public equities. It’s definitely NSFW, rude, crude, and crass, but that’s how Howard likes it.