David Cohen has a detailed post up describing the types of companies that should apply to be presenters at Venture Capital In The Rockies Winter 2009. VCIR is now in its 26th year and is the premier conference for startups in the Rocky Mountain region. If you think you fit the bill, drop an executive summary to submissions@vcintherockies.com.

I had dinner tonight at the Defrag pre-conference “Future of Email” gathering. It was a great crowd that included a bunch of smart people working on interesting email / communication / collaboration stuff. Around dessert, I got into a deeper conversation about features. We were talking about one of the greatest challenges of any software company – how to decide what features to leave out of the next release of your product. We immediately went deeper than the typical “do what your users say they want” paradigm as anyone that has sold software knows that there is a huge difference between “what your users say they want” and “what your users will pay you for”. This is especially challenging if you have a free, or freemium, model.

To celebrate today’s New York Marathon, I went for a hard and fast run in the mountains near my house. There’s nothing quite like grinding your way up a hill for three miles and then turning around and running down it as fast as you can. As I reflected on my run, I am kind of amazed at the range of thoughts that went through my head over the course of an hour.

Stanford has put all the course material for CS 193P – iPhone Application Programming up on the web. If you are developing an iPhone app, or considering it, the course looks like it has a huge amount of useful data.

While it’s not over yet as the Supreme Court might weight in, the Federal Court Kills Patents on Business Methods. I haven’t read things carefully yet (I’ll leave that for the bathroom this weekend) but from the quick analysis I’ve read (In re Bilski: Patentable Process Must Either (1) be Tied to a particular machine or (2) Transform a Particular Article) it looks like it is a strong, unambiguous decision in the good fight to eliminate ridiculous patents.

All of the hedge fund (and some of the VC fund) statements I’ve been receiving the past few weeks have long essays in them. I categorize most of them as either (a) marketing, e.g. “look how smart we are – we know what’s going on” or (b) rationalization, e.g. “our numbers totally suck, but here’s why you should be optimistic about our future performance.” However, at least one of them was really interesting, well thought out, and gave me plenty to think about.

VentureBeat had a Downturn RoundTable yesterday consisting of a panel of VCs and an panel of entrepreneurs giving their advice on what to do to whether to current economic crisis. I found the TechCrunch commentary to be a very good summary: VCs Speak On The Economic Downturn: Batten Down the Hatches Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs: Make Cuts, Stay Stingy, But Never Forget The Dream Since VentureBeat actually put on the event, it seems appropriate to link to their content also.

I was talking to Andrew Hyde over at the Boulder.me Job Fair and a few of the folks I ran into busted my chops (in a good way) about my publicly declared jihad on my weight. For those of you that have commented – thanks – the encouragement, support, and suggestions have been great. I’ve started a group competition on Gyminee called Overweight Boys In Boulder*.* The competition is to lose the most % body weight before 1/31/09. The losers buy the winner a super healthy meal at Leaf (and we all have a party together). Micah has suggested he’s going to kick my ass, but I think his odds were better in the sushi eating contest that occurred recently.

If you thought the reason I haven’t been doing a Daily Reading post lately was because I didn’t feel like adding more to the endless stream of political noise, global economic crisis, and the impending extinction of arctic wolves, you’d be wrong. I simply forgot I was doing it. Oops. Here are a few good ones from today. Chess Move Simulator: If you are a chess player, you must check this out. Awesome. Thanks Bruce. Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed: Mary Jo Foley tries to explain Azure. If you notice a bunch of software engineers wandering around Boulder, that’s because the Boulder Colorado Job Fair is in full swing. If you run into someone from out of Boulder, be nice and make sure you tell them it’s never actually cold in Boulder. Seth Godin speaks up on some of his failures in Failure as an event. As is typical of Seth, he has concise, brilliant advice. His biggest lesson of all – “Persist. Do the next one.” Bill Flagg has a great contrarian post on Startup Valuations. Actually, it’s not contrarian. It’s just good old bootstrapping common sense. Ho Nam at Altos Ventures has the real contrarian post of the day (he even uses the word contrarian in it). RIP Good Times? A Different Perspective. Off to spend the day with a top secret group of VCs discussing what we think of the future.