Ahhh. This all changes tomorrow morning.

I’m getting dressed and about to head out to Boulder Open Coffee Club. It had been happening at Vic’s on Broadway, but they recently shut down. Today’s is now at The Cup (1521 Pearl) from 8am to 10am. The owners – Chris and Wendy – are great folks, it’s a superb venue, and the food is always great. As I was rolling through my feeds this morning, I noticed a few interesting Boulder-related things. It starts with Vic’s, and L’Absinthe, and The Reef, and Prima – four restaurants in One Boulder Plaza that abruptly shut down at the end of 2007. This isn’t a huge surprise to me – they were all chronically empty. The excuse of “no foot traffic” falls flat on me since they are two blocks away from the Pearl Street Mall. Something else was wrong, including rents that are probably much too high. Oh well – less short term choices for food and a reminder that the restaurant business is a bitch.

How about a portable turntable scratch pad for playing Guitar Hero. Or even better – using a real guitar to play something that looks like Guitar Hero. Nah – I think I’ll just stick with my Internet Connected Refrigerator that has an iPod port and a tablet PC connector. My veggies stay fresher when they are listening to Nirvana.

I love when we find magic technology that just does what it is supposed to. That – plus a handful of amazing people – are the underpinnings of the investment we just led in Memeo. My partner Ryan McIntyre – who joined the board – has a detailed post up titled Foundry Group Invests in Memeo. I’ve been searching for brainless backup and sync software for a long time. I’ve never been happy. I am now. I’m using Memeo to keep five Vista machines (going on seven) in sync and it just automagically happens. Oh – and my server is a Mac – how fun is that?

The Feld Job board is about to kick into high gear. Look for a handful of posts in January. The Silicon Flatirons program at CU Law School is looking for two research fellows. The first one is described on their web site. They are looking for an aspiring entrepreneur or VC who would work with the New Technology Meetup, the new Entrepreneurs Unplugged series, co-teach a class with Jason Mendelson, work with the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, and get to know who is who in the front range entrepreneurial community. 

When I was a doctoral student at MIT, my advisor was Eric von Hippel. I’ve had my fair share of mentors in my 42 years – Eric has been one of the best. I still remember during the first lecture of 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process – the first class I took from Eric – hearing Eric rant about how “users are the real source of innovation.” When Eric first started talking about the notion of user-driven innovation in the late 1970’s, it was a completely novel idea. Over the past 40 years Eric has build an incredible body of research as well as a large network of academics and practitioners who follow and extend his battle cry. Of course, a great instantiation of this concept that we work with every day is open source software.

Lijit released another version of their blog stats. With each release, the chocolaty goodness of Lijit gets tastier. I’ve now got a fancy summary page, real time geolocation from Quova (and fun Google Map and Earth integration), a top posts report from integration with AideRSS, and lots more data on my readers and the searches they do. Oh yeah – stats are the bonus part of the equation. Lijit’s blog search (and re-search) continues to improve with every monthly release as they tune their proprietary algorithms and eliminate their usage of Google Custom Search (which is nifty, but doesn’t generate publisher focused relevance very well because of its dependence on pagerank.)

Eh – shitty metaphor. But Bill nails it in his Dear Microsoft: Please Buy Plaxo post. I don’t have a nickel in Plaxo, but this has been an obvious fit for a lot of years. Hopefully someone at Microsoft is listening. While they are at it, maybe they can build a file format autoconverter into Office 2003 SP4.

For all you 24 fans out there, my now excruciatingly long time friend and third Feld Technologies employee Shawn Broderick (aka Mr. Doody) has a brilliant photo comparison up on his blog. In fact, it’s so brilliant I’ll just steal it and post it here. I’ll try to limit my overwhelmingly cynical political points of view to my Twitter stream, but I doubt I’ll be successful. Maybe Jack Bauer will be out of jail in time help us all.