I got the following note from a friend at a big software company that was founded in the mid-1990’s. Having worked at the big companies it has always amazed me the energy that goes into creating the stack of patents. We have lawyers who we sit down with to go over new products and releases and they generate 10s or 100s of patent filings out of which a few actual patents will end up being granted in a few years. I have around 40 patents for what I would consider innovative work but 99% of them are just for the things anyone would have to do in order to solve the actual problem.

I get questions like the following on a regular basis: “I like reading your blog, and I’m amazed that you can get involved with so many things simultaneously and manage to get great results while living a balanced life. Could you talk a little about your time management techniques, and how do you prioritize your daily activities? I’m sure many readers would appreciate a post on these.” I sat down to write a long answer to this and realized that there is a whole category of self help books on this that takes up a ridiculous amount of floor space at Borders. I decided that rather than answer this in a blog post, I’d write another crappy time management book.

Today’s WallStrip might be the best ever. Julie and her friends act out what people that are heavy into public equities are thinking.

A day doesn’t go by without yet another stupid software patent appearing. At least people are writing about them. Amazon (via A9.com) just received a patent for Error processing methods for providing responsive content to a user when a page load error occurs. Prior art disclosure only goes back to 1999. This one should be easy to gut if anyone feels like it. The best part about this patent are all the entertaining comments on Slashdot about it!

If you don’t know what SERP is, don’t bother reading on. But – if you care about where your site shows up in the search engines, take a look at Ted Rheingold (CEO of Dogster’s) post on Recommended Free Online SEO Tools*.* I’d spend some time on this but I’ve got to go pet Brooks.

Intense Debate just did another release and wrote up some of the features in their post Comment System Makeover. They are on a regular release rhythm (about twice a month) and pushing a lot of new features and performance enhancements. In an effort to be recursive, please leave me comments on your experience with Intense Debate as a user as they are looking for as much feedback as they can get (both good and bad is helpful.) And – if you have a blog, while you are adding Lijit as your search capability, give Intense Debate a try as your comment replacement system.

I love it when companies I’m an investor in use an acquisition strategy. My good friend and long time co-investor Fred Wilson calls it a “venture rollup.” It’s very different than a traditional “rollup” or “consolidation” (which is typically revenue based.) Fred described it really well when talking about NewsGator’s acquisition of FeedDemon in 2005. When he (Feld) finds a sector where he’s early in the development of the market, he gets in, figures it out, builds a management team, and then gets busy convicing others to join the party. That’s the play book for the venture rollup.

When people find out that I’ve spent a lot of time in Alaska, they often ask me what it’s like. After struggling to describe it in a simple way that anyone in the lower 48 can relate to, I finally came up with something several weeks ago. Alaska is an order of magnitude larger than Colorado and has an order of magnitude less people. Plus it has an ocean.

A company I have a small investment in has been struggling to get the most recent version of their software shipped. A few weeks ago I ran into the CEO who grabbed me and said “we are almost ready to go live.” I looked at him and said “when is the release.” His answer was “Friday.” I gave him a Bronx cheer and said “when on Friday?” He looked at me like I was an alien. I clarified – do you mean “12:01am on Friday, 4:59pm on Friday, or 11:59pm on Friday.” I then clarified some more: “and I mean in Mountain time.” We agreed that 11:59pm on Friday was a good time (which they missed, but they got it out a few days later.)