I’m knee deep in reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, listening to Pink Floyd, and enjoying a perfect Homer, Alaska evening with Amy. I was an undergraduate at MIT during the Lucasfilm days of what became Pixar and vaguely remember early Media Lab / Project Athena animation stuff and watching super cool computer graphics wizardry post-SIGGRAPHs at the Computer Museum in Boston. Fortunately, YouTube has all the old classic computer animations online, including The Adventures of Andre and Wally B.

Part one of a video interview with Mike Cote of ColoradoBiz talking about TechStars. Get answers to the following questions in under four minutes. 1. What’s the elevator pitch of TechStars (payback for David since he makes all the TechStars teams give their elevator pitches over and over.) 2. What’s the latest crop look like? 3. Are there any women in TechStars? 4. How many applicants did you have this year? 5. What criteria did you use to select them (see me make a nerdy Dungeons and Dragons reference.) 6. Is it the idea you get excited about?

Earlier this year we made a seed investment in a new company called Gnip. Yesterday, Gnip launched their first service – a free centralized callback server that notifies data consumers (such as Plaxo) in real-time when there is new data about their users on various data producing sites (such as Flickr and Digg). I’ve written my version of the overview on the Foundry Group blog in my post titled Gnip is Ping Spelled Backwards, there are a couple of posts up already on the Gnip blog, and a number of people have already written about Gnip including TechCrunch, TechCrunchIT, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, Dave Winer, and Joe Smarr (Plaxo’s Chief Platform Architect). Rather than repeat what Gnip is here, I’m going to tell you how this investment came about.

Microsoft is trying to. It’s up on PeerToPatent and you can comment on this patent application (and the USPTO will presumably listen to you) if you’d like to help keep the world free of really silly software patents. Following is the abstract. “A method and system for recommending potential contacts to a target user is provided. A recommendation system identifies users who are related to the target user through no more than a maximum degree of separation. The recommendation system identifies the users by starting with the contacts of the target user and identifying users who are contacts of the target user’s contacts, contacts of those contacts, and so on. The recommendation system then ranks the identified users, who are potential contacts for the target user, based on a likelihood that the target user will want to have a direct relationship with the identified users. The recommendation system then presents to the target user a ranking of the users who have not been filtered out.”

As I was contemplating how to optimally pack my liquids and gels into a single quart sized ziplock bag I came across an article in the NY Times titled Bag Helps Laptop Pass Air Security. Apparently, the TSA has been testing new luggage as a result of an RPF they sent out recently. They won’t certify these bags – rather they’ll encourage manufacturers to adopt a universal logo akin to “this bag is checkpoint friendly.”

Thanks to my buddy Alex Iskold at Adaptive Blue for my new t-shirt. $DO || ! $DO ; try try: command not found That describes my marathon and life philosophy perfectly.

It’s summer time and I’ve once again been powering through a bunch of books. Amy and I are heading to our place in Homer, Alaska tomorrow where I’ll likely continue my pace of at least a book a day. Look for regularly updates and quick reviews here. In the meantime, here’s the latest set from the last week. The Turnaround Kid: What I Learned Rescuing America’s Most Troubled Companies: This is the autobiography of Steve Miller, a well known turnaround executive. He started his career at GM and progressed to be part of Lee Iacocca’s turnaround team at Chrysler (he was the CFO). After Chrysler, he has been involved in a number of turnarounds including Federal-Mogul, Morrisson-Knudson, Bethlehem Steel, Waste Management, and Delphi. Miller is a guy that’s not afraid of a Chapter 11 filing and appears to have skin as thick as the steel that Bethlehem Steel produced. Good business history, especially if you enjoy reading about difficult situations.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled Tech Giants Join Together To Head Off Patent Suits. It describes the efforts of a new organization named Allied Security Trust who’s goal is to “buy up key intellectual property before it falls into the hands of parties that could use it against them.” The named companies that have joined Allied Security Trust are Verizon, Google, Cisco, Telefon, Ericsson, and HP. Allied Security Trust appears to be an example of the emerging construct of a “patent commons”. There are already a number of existing patent commons such as the Patent Commons Project aimed at protecting open source software.

Month 1 of this year’s TechStars program is over. Andrew Hyde captures the sights and the people of TechStars in a fun three minute video. While you are at it, if you were a Lego fanatic take a ride down Lego Memory Lane. Finally, in the continued emergence of the Kindle as a serious thing, Princeton University is now publishing Kindle textbooks. No more giant backpacks full of books and lecture notes.