Ian Rogers – the CEO of Topspin – just posted his entire keynote speech (with slides) from the GRAMMY Northwest MusicTech Summit 2008. The pivot slide of the presentation: It’s been awesome to get to know and work with Ian, Shamal Ranasinghe, and Peter Gotcher – the founders of Topspin. These guys know their business – and the transformation it’s going through – better than anyone else I’ve ever met. My partners Ryan and Jason who spearheaded our investment in Topspin have been looking for their “music investment” since I met them. This is it – and it’s a monster.

Are you into browser Add-on’s? The first Add-on-Con is happening on December 11th in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum. My friends at OneRiot and AdaptiveBlue are organizing it along with Sxipper. The lineup is shaping up nicely to including folks from Mozilla, Google, Xoopit, Alexa, and Microsoft. It’s only $150 for the day. If you use the discount code “feld” it’s only $100.

Current TV ran a great segment on TechStars tonight. I hung out in the bunker with a bunch of the TechStars gang (including the Foodzie folks who are highlighted.) Following is the longer (better) version – ten minutes of TechStars fun that gives you a sense of some of the personalities involved in the program. My partner Jason Mendelson makes a surprise (and very entertaining) appearance at 8:50.

At Foundry Group, we’ve been talking about human computer interaction (HCI) as one of our key investment themes. Our premise behind HCI is that the way humans interact with computers is going to change radically over the next 20 years. If you roll forward to 2028 and look back to today, the idea of being tethered to a computer via a mouse and keyboard is going to be a “quaint” as using the punch card or a cassette tape as a primary data storage medium.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve been an investor in NewsGator since it was one person (Greg Reinacker – the founder). We had a board meeting yesterday (I’d guess it is my 25th or so NewsGator board meeting) and it was the best one yet. I’m incredibly proud of the NewsGator gang – they’ve really hit their stride and have created a real company that is an clear market leader.

I’ve been an unabashed Obama supporter for a while. I’m glad he’s going to be our next president and am optimistic about his leadership. I’ve been enjoying listening to some of the punditry ricocheting around about his coming administration now that I don’t have to listen (or – in my case – try to ignore) the endless analysis about the campaign. A few requests on my part have come to mind as I start to synthesize what I’m hearing. Of course, I’m not so arrogant to believe that President-elect Obama – or for that matter – anyone in the administration – will care about my specific requests, but since this is my blog afterall I thought I’d toss my thoughts out into the wild.

Two years ago if you had told me that I’d be playing Texas Hold’em Poker with my Facebook friends on cell phone and enjoying it I would have snickered. Well – that’s what I’m doing right now (actually – I just took a break from this blog post to play a hand – of course I lost all my chips on a pair of aces.) And it is awesome. Our portfolio company Zynga just released Live Poker on the iPhone. Live Poker is a beautiful implementation of Texas Hold’em poker on the iPhone. More importantly, it uses Facebook Connect to let me play Texas Holdem with all my Facebook friends (and anyone else on Facebook that happens to be playing.) Zynga currently has over 1.4 million people playing Texas Holdem each day the free virtual casino is now enormous.

I didn’t come up with this idea – Om Malik did. But he’s absolutely right – Obama needs to look outside the beltway for many key positions, including FCC Chair. Tom Evslin is an absolute star in my book and as Om states: “Tom Evslin, who is a retired telecom executive, is the kind of person I would expect to be in the FCC. He knows the machinations of the big companies and at the same time is an Internet liberal who can keep broadband providers and their anti-consumer tricks under check.”

As I stall before I head out the door for an hour run in the cold, dark mountains outside my house, I thought I’d share some of the interesting stuff I read this morning with you. Forrester Chief on What Not to Cut in a Downturn: I mostly include this since it’s so entertainingly short and substance-free. It links to a post of George Colony’s blog titled Why this tech recession will be different which is still short, has a little more substance, but seems painfully obvious. Maybe people will cut their Forrester spending in the downtown (oh, cynical me.) I hope no one at Forrester is using social media or any keyword alerts that catch this blog or else I’ll be in trouble with my friends at Forrester.