If you’d like to do something political that has nothing to do with the upcoming elections, read through Tom Evslin’s post Act Now for Better Internet Access. Then go sign the online petition at freetheairwaves.com. It kind of blows my mind that the National Association of Broadcasters is still fighting this stuff, especially with the impending federally mandated cutover to digital TV in February. But hey, lots of things seem illogical – this is nothing new.

I spent the past 10 days on the road in a bunch of different cities (New York, Bar Harbor, Boston, Westford, New York again, Tysons Corner, Alexandria, Owings Mills) doing a bunch of different things (stuff with MIT, our LPs, our companies, some friends, my partner Jason, Amy, and myself). As is my typical fashion, I didn’t pay much attention to the news while I was traveling – allowing myself one read through the headlines each day as part of my morning routine. This left my brain pretty clear to concentrate on the things I was doing and pick up the nuances of how people were thinking and feeling based on what they were saying and doing.

One of the TechStars 2007 companies is Brightkite. Brightkite is a real time location-based social network. I travel a lot and have always wanted an easy way to broadcast where I am at any given time. Brightkite is the solution. While their mobile UI is very good, when I’m traveling the general mobile performance via a web browser has been slow enough to prevent me from using it consistently. Brightkite just released their iPhone app. It is incredible. It integrates brilliantly with all of the iPhone thingys (geolocation, maps, directions), is fast, and clean.

A friend of mine has been going deep on the entire cloud computing ecosystem as he works through some ideas for a new company. He coined a term “clouditude” a few days ago and send me his thoughts about it. I found his term / definition fascinating and very relevant (look for me to start using the word “clouditude”. I asked if I could republish his thoughts directly to see if anyone had any comments to add; here they are. 

Yesterday, I got the following question via email: “I was wondering if you think running has had a long-term impact on your professional self? Does it help keep you focused and motivated while you work, or does it reduce the amount of time you could spend reading about business and financial trends?” This question hit an interesting chord with me – both because of the general nature of the question as well as the “or” part (e.g. the specificity of the “reduce the amount of time you could spend reading about business and financial trends.”)

I’m still loving my iPhone. It’s been around two months now, so I think this thing is finally going to stick and I’ll use an Apple product regularly. My regular iPhone app usage is increasing to include the new version of Brightkite (wow – I’m bfeld if you want to follow me), NetNewsWire (double wow), and the NY Times app. I’m fascinated with the NY Times app – I think it is an extremely well done specialized iPhone app.

Having lived through the last major tech downturn (precipitated by our friend, the Internet bubble), one of the big lessons that I learned was to steadily play through. Specifically, I’ve reached the conclusion that there is no right or wrong time to start a company, or build a company. Great entrepreneurs will figure things out regardless of the macro environment. As I’m quick to say (and it’s now becoming one of my favorite cliches), “some of the best investments I’ve ever made / companies I’ve helped start were created / funded between 2001 and 2003.”

Today’s special guest post is from Sarah Reed of Lowenstein Sandler PC. Sarah is a good friend and collaborator with my partner Jason on the NVCA Model Legal Document task force. She also has a wicked sense of humor. After sitting through ten days of meetings hearing a variety of VC-lingo tossed around as though it was LA-trendy-speak (seriously dude), I was amused to get the following unsolicited email from Sarah with a guest post attached. 

The Defrag Conference is happening on Monday 11/3 and Tuesday 11/4. I’m totally psyched – Eric Norlin has put together a killer agenda. The list of people coming that I can’t wait to see and spend time with is dynamite. When Eric and I cooked up the idea for Defrag, our goal was to create a “thinking person’s” conference for exploring ideas around the Implicit / Semantic Web. It’s evolved and – in its second year – we are planning on talking about the intersection of the following topics: