If you are curious about the progress our investment in Zynga is making, Inside Facebook has a good blog post up titled Looking for the next big thing? Social gaming startups heating up*.* Zynga was founded last summer and has had incredible acceleration since it began (hint – the reach numbers are low – we should easily break 1m dailies by the end of this week.) It’s fun to be an investor in a company that has more money in the bank than the day it was funded. Fortunately, the company knows where to invest it to accelerate its growth even faster.

I got an email this morning from an entrepreneur that I know that has been trying to raise an early round from a “seed VC investor” for the past few months. He’s put together (and closed) a decent angel round and left it open for this seed investor. This morning the entrepreneur was told by the VC that they are “postponing their decision on investment until a future round” because one of the partner’s friends at BigCo “isn’t comfortable with the direction the startup is headed.” 

Starbucks announced that today that you can hang out, drink coffee, eat high calorie baked goods, and surf the web for “free” for two hours (assuming you are drinking coffee and eating high calorie baked goods.) This is due to a very smart move on AT&T’s part where they have displaced T-Mobile as the WiFi provider at Starbucks stores. I’m really surprised that T-Mobile let this deal get away from them. I happily pay $10 / month to T-Mobile for WiFi service – the two places I use it 99.4% of the time are Starbucks and the United Red Carpet Club. If AT&T takes the Red Carpet Club deal, T-Mobile is going to lose that incremental $10 / month from me. I realize that “free for two hours” at Starbucks might not have kept me paying this $10, but I probably wouldn’t have noticed (or done anything) for a while.

Today Microsoft announced that they have agreed to acquire Danger. Congrats to the gang at Danger who have created a dynamite set of products with a significant and passionate user base. Hats off also to my Mobius partner Greg Galanos who has been involved as an investor / board member in Danger from the very beginning.

I’ve been wandering around telling people that 2008 is the year that all of the consumer Internet innovations we’ve been blessed with exposed to will be finding their way into the enterprise. The Denver Post has a nice article titled Work, connected by social networking that describes (albeit at a high level) Alpine Access’ implementation of HiveLive. Knowing HiveLive well (I’m an early personal investor), they are a great example of how this is going to play out. One of our portfolio companies – Rally Software – has been using HiveLive to power their Agile Commons community for over a year (if you are a practitioner of Agile software development, take a look.) HiveLive has taken many of the innovations of social networking and reconfigured them in a way that is ideally suited for collaboration inside and across enterprises – and has done it using a SaaS model that is easy to quickly and affordably implement.

I love Mental Floss (both the magazine and the books I refer to as “mental floss.") I was proud to see that I’d made the list of 6 Curious College Donations. My CU Boulder Bathroom joined Andrew Carnegie’s lake at Princeton, P.T. Barnum’s dead animals at Tufts, Frances Crick’s attempted brothel at Cambridge University, W.K. Kellogg’s horse shows at Cal-Poly Pomona, and Bob Gibson’s science fiction collection at the University of Calgary.

I spent the morning and early afternoon running the Sedona Marathon. That was easily the most difficult physical thing I’ve ever done. But I finished. That’s me and Herb (who thoroughly kicked my ass) rejoicing together. 5:47. A new personal worst. There was nothing pretty about it, but I got it done. I was in decent shape and before I saw the course thought sub-5:00 would be pretty straightforward. We drove the course the day before and I started thinking sub-6:00 was a better goal.

Andrew Hyde has a fun post and some pictures up at Colorado Caucus where he describes his experience last night.

This was so predictable. As I mentioned in my post from a few weeks ago titled Can I Have Some More Crack Please? I am not a macroeconomics guy. I don’t watch the market nor do I watch TV news. However, I do get WSJ.COM alerts (mostly for my own amusement to see what they think is worth emailing out alerts about.) Here was today’s: Feb. 5, 2008 The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 370 points, or 2.9%, as investors’ anxiety about a possible recession flared following a bleak reading on the U.S. services sector and cautionary language about the economic outlook from a Federal Reserve official. It was the worst performance of the year so far for the blue-chip average in both point and percentage terms. Other major benchmarks also sold off dramatically. The S&P 500 Index plummeted by 3.2% and the Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 3.1%.