I’d like to welcome and thank my friends at Gold Systems for joining The Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Terry Gold – the co-founder of Gold Systems – was one of the first entrepreneurs that I met in early 1996 shortly after Amy and I moved to Boulder. At the time Gold Systems was about 15 people. Terry, his partner Jim, and I went for plenty of long walks in 1996 and 1997 as they tried to navigate the waters of growing a young business. As I got to know Terry better, he came to epitomize the ideal of a thoughtful and generous entrepreneur and person.

My investment in Shelfari has been a lot of fun. Josh Hug and his team are monsters – they get stuff done incredibly quickly. Plus I get to play with my books virtually. In addition to the Shelfari web service, they’ve got widgets up on Facebook and MySpace. Now they’ve got and OpenSocial implementation as well. If you are looking for real examples of OpenSocial, here’s another one. Demo starts at minute 5. Josh – you look very serious – time for a smile. Nice belt btw.

I have very smart friends. They challenge me all the time. One of them sent me the following email in response to my recent posts about the enterprise such as Get Ready For Selling To The Enterprise To Be A Big Deal Again. His question / comment was: What are the types of Web2.0 things you see moving into the enterprise? Or is it more “conceptually” rather than specific-product oriented? I see update of wikis; I think the EventVue type of nice app will be taken up; but the two biggest things in the last couple of years are the dominance of Google (which is already used in the enterprise), and Facebook, which just does not seem applicable in an enterprise sense (people use it, but kind of the same way they use LinkedIn. 

I’m usually an excruciatingly happy person. I’m a little cranky this morning because I have a cold and didn’t get a good night sleep the last two nights, but I’ll get over it. Oh – and even though I’m cranky, I’m still happy. Ted Leonsis just gave the morning keynote at the New New Internet Conference. I first met Ted in 1990 at the first Birthing of Giants event that I participated in. Ironically, five minutes ago, I bumped into Verne Harnish – the creator of Birthing of Giants and the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (that co-sponsors Birthing of Giants.) Since I’m now way off the rails on the actual content of this post, I thought I’d mention that Verne was the only guy I knew in Boulder when Amy and I moved there in 1995 – and Verne split for the east coast a few months later leaving us completely alone in our new mountain hideaway.

While I know a lot of entrepreneurs and folks in small companies read this blog, I also know that there are plenty of folks in big companies that do also. I ask those of you in a big company two questions: Does your organizations use packaged applications like Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, or SAP? Is managing the implementation, upgrades, and customization of these applications a nightmare, especially in a world of company and vendor consolidation? In case you are wondering, these are rhetorical questions. In 2002, Niel Robertson sat down with me and my partner Seth Levine and went through his vision of how the packaged application market was going to evolve. He had a few key premises, including:

I’m in Reston, Virginia today at the The New New Internet Conference. Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget Labs – invited me to speak on a panel after spending some time this summer in Boulder with the TechStars gang. A lot of my friends that live in Silicon Valley rarely stray out of Silicon Valley. “Center of the startup universe” is no longer a cliche – rather, it’s like a scab that has been picked so many times it no longer will heal. Silicon Valley is a critically important place in the world for creating companies, but it’s not the only place smart people that are doing interesting and important things hang out.

David Cohen – the creator and ringleader of TechStars – has started a blog series of his Top 12 Startup Tips from TechStars. His latest tip (#2) is titled Find and engage great mentors*.* I think this series is going to end up being required reading for any first time (and many multi-time) entrepreneurs. Tip #1 was Be the Best in the World at Something*.* Great stuff David.

If you do a search via any of the rapidly expanding Lijit search wijits, you’ll discover that it is now recommending me as an expert on the search term “wife.” I haven’t decided which is more disconcerting – that Lijit thinks I’m an expert on “wife” (I’ll leave that up to Amy to weigh in on) or that I’m slightly ahead of someone named “bitemycookie.” (Thanks David.)

Each day, consumers conduct more than two million online searches for user manuals and self-support information on products ranging from consumer electronics to kitchen appliances. Many of these searches end in frustration, because this information can be difficult to find. In our house, we have a “manual drawer” which quickly turns into a “crap drawer” that – not surprisingly – never has the actual manual that I’m looking for (picture gnomes stealing underwear.)