I love my life. I get to work on fascinating things with really smart people. And every day is different. Plus I’m married to an awesome woman (but that’s a different post.) I spent the afternoon at the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. I’m on an advisory board for a new study on “Entrepreneurial Companies and the Patent System” being supported by the Kauffman Foundation. Tomorrow I’m speaking on a panel on the Symposium on Intellectual Property and Entrepreneurship.

This is the third year in a row that Rally Software has won the Jolt Product Excellence Award in the Project Management Tools category. The Jolt awards are one my favorite nerd awards handed out by Dr. Dobb’s Journal. If you are a software developer and have the word “agile” in your vocabulary, you should take a serious look at Rally’s products. I’ve been an investor in the company almost since inception and am tickled whenever I think about the amazing job the team at Rally has made in nailing the next wave of application lifecycle management. When Rally was starting out in 2001, there was a lot of “Agile what?” from people. Now Agile and software development – and Rally – are rapidly becoming synonymous.

Maybe. The upcoming en banc session of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit happening in May is an important one. Brad Stone of the New York Times has a nice short summary of what is going on here in New Patentable Idea: A Way to Invalidate Vague Patents. The End Software Patents Coalition has launched. Look for a lot more from me in the near future on this as my efforts to abolish software patents intensifies.

Dear all my friendly neighborhood web developers out there. Please don’t ever ask me for my Google login and password again. Instead, please implement the Google Contact API. While you are at it, please consider implementing the Windows Live Contacts API. I went looking for the Yahoo one (it’s probably in the Mail stuff somewhere) also but gave up and figured I’d just point you to the MyBlogLog API which has plenty of fun, juicy data available.

I’m at TechStars for a Day watching my partner Ryan McIntyre give a presentation on Excite where he was a founder. Each time he gives this presentation, it reminds me of the very first web spider – at least that I’m aware of. Can you name it? It’s the World Wide Web Wanderer (also known as W4 – which created the Wandex index.) The creator was Matthew Gray which was one of the co-founders of NetGenesis – my first angel investment. Matthew was one of the gang (including my close friend Raj Bhargava – now the CEO of StillSecure) who showed me the web (and Freshman Fishwrap) for the first time at an Athena Cluster in the Student Center at MIT in 1994. 

Today’s Tech-Support Nightmare is priceless. How many times have you had this particular customer support exchange? LOI WTF can’t speak sentence complete grammar bad. We used to have the Pepsi Generation. Now we are going to have the texting / SMS / Facebook generation. W00t.

In 2000, we moved into a large office office in Superior, Colorado that at the time we fondly called Hotbank. Incubators were all the rage and creating one seemed like a good idea at the time. Over the years we’ve shared space over the Old Chicago pizza joint and Superior Liquors with a number of different companies. One of the companies that started out in the space about the same time as we did was Veripost (which merged with Return Path in 2001.) At the end of 2002, StillSecure moved back in, moved out, and then moved back in again in 2004.

The newest blog post up on the Foundry Group web site is titled What Is “Thematic Investing*?"* In this post, we try to describe more deeply what we mean when we say “we are thematic investors” or “we like horizontal stuff.” “Our themes tend to be horizontal in nature and are often based on an underlying protocol, standard or market trend that we believe is on the cusp of widespread adoption that has the potential to drive a cycle of innovation and company creation for at least a five to ten year period. We try to focus on themes and their underlying technologies that are ready to be rolled out to consumers or the enterprise and are well beyond the science-experiment phase. To make this concrete, some examples of themes we are excited about presently and historically include email, RSS, the implicit web and human-computer interaction (HCI). Because themes are inherently horizontal, they have often have applications in the consumer and enterprise markets and can be delivered in myriad ways, whether it is via a web site, SaaS, a gadget, an appliance or good old-fashioned downloadable client or server software.”

Dave Drach from Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team has a nice post up titled Wow, Venture Capital in the Rockies, it gets better every year*.* I agree – I think year 25 was the best one yet.