I’m one of those guys that can’t resist downloading a piece of software to try it out. I buy every gadget, download everything that comes my way, and create an account on every web service I notice. I’ve told Ross (my IT guy) never to come back from a trip to Best Buy without buying me something to play with. Yes – I have poor impulse control. I’m finding that a lot of the stuff I’m trying is sticking with me these days. I still have a wide range of things that go into the discard pile (which – if it’s a physical device – means I give it to Ross as a gift after playing with it for a week or so.) But – a surprising amount is useful.

My friend Mitchell Ashley has started a really powerful new blog titled BreastCancerForHusbands*.* I’m at the age where several of my friends have now fought with breast cancer – fortunately no one close to me has died from it. Mitchell’s wife Mary Ellen has breast cancer and he’s decided to blog about his experience with it. Mitchell is a brave writer and speaks his mind clearly – he’s not afraid of talking about the ups and downs. He also doesn’t pull any punches, as is evidenced by his post Don’t Be An Edwards Dumbass, Support Your Wife.

August is theoretically a slow month. Um, yeah. As I pondered what I’ve got in front of me the next few weeks, I thought I’d share the things you are invited to come to and play with me. Thursday 8/14 @ 5:30pm: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado party on top of the Foundry Roof Deck. Saturday 8/16 @ 8am: Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Annual Give Back Event at Foothills Community Park.

There’s lot of good Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado stuff going on. The other day I wrote about the EFCO Annual Give Back Event that is happening on Saturday (please come join us.) Today, New West announced that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Tomorrow (8/14) at 5:30pm, Application Experts is announcing that they have joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and is having a rooftop party on the Foundry Roof Deck to tell anyone that’s interested why you should care about EFCO. A bunch of TechStars folks with be there along with me and my partner Jason Mendelson – come join us for a beer.

The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado is having their first annual “give back” event on Saturday 8/16. If you are an employee of a company that is an EFCO member, you and your family are invited. EFCO is doing this in conjunction with the Intercambio-KGNU Friendship Fun Run. The logistics follow: August 16 at Foothills Community Park (at Broadway and Violet, Boulder) 8 AM & 9:15 AM Adult 5K 8:45 AM Kids’ 1K 11 AM to Noon – Intercambio Strategic Planning Session Noon – Celebration Family Picnic

As the TechStars 2008 companies gear up for Investor Demo Day, many of them are asking me to write about them on this humble blog. I’m really proud of what they all have accomplished this summer – it’s pretty remarkable to look at them now and compare them to where there were at the beginning of the summer. Many of them are launching (or have recently launched) so I’ll start talking about them as individual companies.

Eric Norlin has a good post up titled Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme. In it he addresses the question “Is enterprise 2.0 bullshit?” Eric doesn’t think it is, nor do I. However, there is still a lot of difficultly getting real alignment on what it means, what is unique about the enterprise characteristics, and why anyone should really care. I’ve seeing an interesting and predictable phenomenon occurring. Corporate IT has gotten energized about implementing “social computing” and “all that Web 2.0 stuff.” The analyst crowd is writing about all the different Enterprise 2.0 categories and starting to extensively position products in pretty matrices. Several big software companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are making major pushes into this “category.” Loads of startups are emerging in every segment. TechCrunch even has an a new property called TechCrunchIT.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the AEA survey that ranked Boulder as the #2 CyberCity in the US. I suggested that this was misleading since #1 was “San Jose/Silicon Valley”, which is not actually a city. If you’d decomposed “San Jose/Silicon Valley” into the various cities that actually make up Silicon Valley, they would have been #1 through at least #5 and Boulder would have been #6. Ever since I’m moved to Boulder in 1995, the “what do we need to do to be more like Silicon Valley” meme pops up ever regularly. I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley, have lots of friends and colleagues there, and have made (and continue to make) lots of investments there. It’s a special and unique place. 

I have been looking forward to this day for a while. I’ve always been obsessed with following any news or blog mentions of any of the companies I’m an investor and the people I work with. For the past few years I’ve satisfied my obsession with an extensive set of Google Alerts (via email), Yahoo Alerts (via email) and Technorati Alerts (via RSS). Occasionally I’ll add something else to the mix usually through RSS (such as a FriendFeed or Summize keyword feed.) My email rules shunt everything to my “daily” folder so I only have to look through it once a day (when I read through my RSS feeds.)