If you are located in the Boulder / Denver area and doing stuff with Amazon Web Services, there is a new group forming called AWS Anonymous. Per the Colorado Startups blog, they are having their first meeting at The Cup in Boulder on January 20th at 10am. Just show up if you are interested – it’ll be easy to find them since they’ll be the nerds saying things like EC2 and S3.

I’m so about this. Thanks to localstops (via twitter) for pointing this out.

I love ReadWriteWeb. I respect Marshall Kirkpatrick. But I’m completely baffled by his article R.I.P. Enterprise RSS. Marshall says “It’s with a heavy heart and a sense of bewilderment that we conclude that the market for enterprise-specific RSS readers appears to be dead.” Huh? Marshall, are we living in parallel universes? NewsGator has built its business on Enterprise RSS. It has two primary revenue generating products around Enterprise RSS: Social Sites Professional and Social Sites Enterprise. There are now over 120 companies using these products representing over 800,000 users. Per the press release NewsGator issued today, customers that bought these products in 2008 include:

Late last year, Phil Weiser (the omnipresent head of Silicon Flatirons and CU professor of Law and Telecommunications) asked me if I was interested in doing a “One-on-One” public interview series with him. Phil and I have stirred up plenty of trouble together over the past few years and I’d never pass up an opportunity to share a stage with him. So – on February 3 from 5pm to 6pm at the Wittemeyer Courtroom in the Wolf Law Building at CU Boulder we will be doing our first One-on-One on “Finance”. Here’s the summary:

As I sat at Gate C18 of the Las Vegas McCarran International Airport on Friday afternoon, I heard the phrase “Wheel of Fortune” about 120 times during the 40 minutes I waited to board my flight home. I was amused the first three times, increasingly annoyed the next 37 times, and then just numb the remaining 80 times. While I was on the edge of one of those “going postal” moments (if my plane had taken 50 minutes to board, I might not have made it as the Las Vegas police officers would have taken me somewhere dark and quiet for destroying a Wheel of Fortune slot machine with my bare hands), it did occur that me that the phrase “wheel of fortune” has some applicability to my universe.

The first night of 24 Season 7 went better than expected. I’m looking forward to tonight’s “surprises”. In the mean time, here’s an assassin joke that puts it all in perspective. Job Opening The FBI had a job opening for an assassin. After all the background checks, interviews and testing were done, there were three finalists; two men and a woman. For the final test, the FBI agents took one of the men to a large metal door and handed him a gun. “We must know that you will follow your instructions no matter what the circumstances. Inside the room you will find your wife sitting in a chair…….Kill Her!” The man said, “You can’t be serious. I could never shoot my wife.” The agent said, “Then you’re not the right man for this job. Take your wife and go home.” The second man was given the same instructions. he took the gun and went into the room. All was quiet for about 5 minutes. The man came out with tears in his eyes, “I tried, but I can’t kill my wife.” The agent said, You don’t have what it takes. Take your wife home." Finally, it was the woman’s turn. She was given the same instructions – to kill her husband. She took the gun and went into the room. Shots were heard, one after another. They heard screaming, crashing and banging on the walls. After a few minutes all was quiet. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman, wiping the sweat from her brow. “This gun is loaded with blanks,” she said. “I had to beat him to death with the chair.” MORAL: Women are crazy. Don’t mess with them.

I’m going to be hosting TechStars Meetups in Seattle and Houston this month when I’m in those cities. If you are considering applying for TechStars 2009 or interested in learning more, please register and come hang out with me. 1/20/09 @ 6pm: Seattle, WA. W Hotel. 1/22/09 @ 6pm: Houston, TX. Hilton Garden Inn. Attendance is limited to 15 people per meetup so sign up now if you are interested.

CU just received a $17 million grant from NASA to probe the faint sounds of the early universe and better understand the lunar environment. I wonder if the Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies will adopt Pink Floyd as their official band. Whenever I hear of something NASA is funding, I think of the exchange between Josh and Leo in the West Wing episode The Warfare of Genghis Khan. 

Yesterday, NewsGator announced the release of their AdBurner Online Advertising Program. AdBurner is a partnership between NewsGator, Technorati, AdMeld, Gigya, Medialets, and Tremor Media. If you’ve been following NewsGator’s progress, you know that they have two major parts to their business – their (1) enterprise products and (2) media products. They had an excellent year in 2008 with significant growth on both sides of their business along with an especially strong Q4.