I noticed two articles in the NY Times this morning that pressed my email theme button. The first was actually from yesterday – Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast**. The second was In the E-Mail Relay, Not Every Handoff Is Smooth. Both are interesting, but relatively light weight articles. That’s not really a surprise since they are aimed at the mainstream public instead of Joe Techie. There are a few fun things in Lost in E-Mail … such as the new and exciting “Gmail E-Mail Addict” feature that lets the user take a 15 minute break by hitting a button or a neat program called Rescue Time which tracks how much time you are spending in different applications (I used it for a few weeks until I got bored of seeing how much time I was spending on email.) However, neither really gets at the core of the issue they are addressing, which is something approximating “how can human beings deal with the current onslaught of email?”

The “Facebook for the enterprise” meme in now hitting its stride after all the activity at Enterprise 2.0 earlier this week. My friends at NewsGator were there in force showing off NewsGator Social Sites 2.0 which just started shipping. Following is a short demo that’s up on Youtube that gives you a feel for how it works. While it’s a blurry video, Brian Kellner’s description of what he’s doing is the really useful part. Brian’s final line is “in total, it’s a complete social computing solution built right into SharePoint.” Other demos / overviews are up on the NewsGator site if you are interested.

I will never be as good a writer as Amy. It’s always fun for me to read her view of a shared experience we have had. She’s got a lovely post up titled Bella Italia about our Q2 vacation to Positano and Lake Como that includes a bunch of fun pictures include breadsticks and a scorpion. If you want to live vicariously through us and get a sense of what one of the Q vacations is like, wander over to her blog and take a look.

When I ask someone what animal they visualize themselves I am often surprised. Not so with Dan Caruso – he is unambiguously a bear (That’s my animal also – you’ll understand this if you ever see me and Dan standing next to each other.) Since October, Dan has been doing a great job of blogging at BearOnBusiness and now has a must read entrepreneur blog. If you don’t know Dan, he was an SVP at MFS (bought by WorldCom), went on to be part of the founding team at Level 3, with a group of investors acquired, turned around, and sold ICG, and is now doing another telecom infrastructure consolidation called Zayo Group (one of the best recently funded / founded companies in Colorado.) He’s also an investor in a bunch of companies, including folks like Envysion (who also happen to have a good blog.)

I was going to call this post “Private Beta is Bullshit” but then I realized I might be wrong. Rather than decide, I’m looking for reasons to change my mind. Please help me. In the spirit of thinking out loud on my blog, I’m going to go through a history lesson from my perspective to frame the problem. When I started writing commercial software in the 1980’s, there was a well-defined “beta process.” Your first beta was actually called an alpha – when you had your friends and a few lead users play around with your stuff which was guaranteed to break every few minutes. But they were a good source of much needed early feedback and testing. Then came beta – you shipped your disks out to a wider audience, including a bunch of people you didn’t know but who were interested in your product, and they banged away looking for bugs. You had a bug collecting and management process (if you were really cutting edge you even had a BBS for this) and while there wasn’t a code freeze, you spent all of your time fixing bugs and hardening / optimizing the code. If you had a complex system, you started shipping release candidates (RCs); less complex went straight to a release (GA). Inevitably some bugs were found and a bug fix version (v x.01) was released within a week or two. At this point you started working on the next version (v x+1.0); if there were meaningful bugs still in v x you did small incremental releases (v x.02) on the previous code base.

There is some TechStars love this morning from the gang at FriendFeed (thanks guys!) They added two of last years TechStars class – IntenseDebate and BrightKite – during their FriendFeed Fix-it Day. I know this was one of the often requested features from IntenseDebate users and – while it could be hacked into FriendFeed through the magic of RSS – native support is sweet (and trivial to use.) No surprise – like most other services, I am bfeld on FriendFeed.

Some idiot (me) scheduled a 7am breakfast meeting on a day when he had a six mile run scheduled. Have you ever tried to get up at 4am (after going to sleep at 11:30pm) to get ready to go for a six mile run. Nope – it doesn’t happen. So – I gave up on the idea of a run and just did my morning email / web / blog routine. I’m running a marathon next weekend anyway so I’m supposed to be tapering (ahem).

Over the past few months we’ve been posting about the “themes” we invest in at Foundry Group over on our Foundry Group blog. I thought – with the most recent announcement of our investment in Smith & Tinker (our most recent human computer interaction (HCI) investment) – it was worth reviewing our current themes. For a view on how we think about themes, start with our post What Is “Thematic Investing?" We then cover four of our current themes:

A reader (thanks Austin) sent me two great failure links today. The first is from BoingBoing and is titled J.K. Rowling on the power of failure. It’s an excellent short segment from her excellent Harvard Commencement Address titled The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. The next is a sign made entirely out of push pins that says “Fail Harder”. I spent the afternoon at TechStars meeting with five of the ten teams. They are all dynamite, although some of them will fail at their current incarnation. Just remember – fail hard, fast, and then get up and try again.