A few weeks ago, Slashdot pointed out that a Critic of Software Patents Wins [the] Nobel Prize in Economics. I finally got around to reading the paper that Slashdot referred to – Sequential Innovation, Patents, and Imitation by James Bessen and Eric Maskin (the aforementioned Nobel Prize winner.) The paper was written in 1999 and is an MIT Economics Department Working Paper #00-01 (one of first working papers to be published at MIT in 2000.)

There are a handful of hysterical VC Holiday Cards. I think the best one is The Adventures of Gary Snoman (produced by Blueprint Ventures.) Gary travels the world this year and helps us understand how VCs think about different cultures (or at least loads us up with a bunch of new cliches from the past year.) The deleted scenes are a nice add on – watch Gary struggle in Paris and abuse his assistant for no good reason. Gary’s 2005 and 2006 adventures are also available. To the gang at Blueprint – nicely done!

Congrats, thanks, and welcome to my friends at Fuser for joining the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Fuser is the 11th Colorado company to join this year. The Colorado entrepreneurial community support for EFCo far surpassed my expectations this year – a big thanks to everyone that has embraced the idea. Now that we’ve got a solid base of great companies as part of EFCo, we will really crank it up next year.

Last week NewsGator announced that it had raised a $12m round led by new investor Vista Ventures and existing investors Mobius Venture Capital and Masthead. Greg Reinacker – NewsGator’s founder / CTO reflected on the progress from the first $1m investment that Mobius made and Jeff Nolan’s talked about our excitement of getting Lisa Reeves (formerly from SAP Ventures – now at Vista) involved. I’ve been an investor (via Mobius Venture Capital) from the very beginning of NewsGator. I wrote a post titled Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? in June 2004 shortly after making a $1m seed investment in the company (mostly in Greg Reinacker and his vision.) Reading back through it makes me feel simultaneously nostalgic and intensely proud of what the now 75+ people at NewsGator have accomplished.

Amy forwarded another 3QuarksDaily article titled Science Debate 2008, and Krauss on Science and the Presidential Campaign. Did you know that according to a 2006 National Science Foundation Study, 25% of Americans did not know that the earth goes around the sun? I had to stop and read that twice. I’m not talking about the age old “evolution vs. creationism” discussion that eventually devolves into a polarizing (and in my mind irrational) religious debate. I’m not talking about global climate change. I’m talking about basic science. How do plants grow? How do planes fly? What’s the difference between ice, water, and steam? What is the relationship between the earth and the sun?

An interview with my partner Jason Mendelson is up on the web. Jason gives some hints about what Foundry Group will be doing. Look for more after the holidays.

I’m three weeks into having my Kindle and I love it. 3Quarks Daily’s post Ode to Textuality: Sam Anderson on the Kindle prompted me to write about it. I’m currently reading Fatal Revenant (The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) on my Kindle, along with a handful of doc / pdf files I’ve been forwarding to it. I’ve got a nice library of stuff queue up and am delighted with the overall experience. I’ve got a few minor complaints about the form factor and the UI, but the magic of Amazon’s Whispernet makes it 10x more usable than the Sony eReader.

I just got a note and pictures two friends – one in Keystone and one in Aspen. Both said the most recent storms were incredible and the snow in the mountains in fantastic. The following is from Keystone. The note from my friend is “We got nailed with snow this past weekend. One of the top five storms I’ve seen after 15 years of living in Summit County. We are nearly 100% open and the skiing is great. Check out these photos from my back yard. We got about 2 feet in Silverthorne.”

I hate buzzwords. They make me nauseous. I just got an email to the link of The Office 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast which includes such beauties as search moptimization, wombagging, friendiligence, converstations, social mediation, we-bargaining, greenlashing, shamsparency, credlining, facelifting, blog groveling, world war 2.0, microtubing, and lipsmacking. I’m going to go lipsmack about buzzwords after I go vomit in my carbon neutral bathroom. (Thanks Greg.)