I’m about to head out to play an early game of tennis with my brother Daniel. He sent me the following picture from our recent trip to the US Open for inspiration. It’s pitch black outside but I’m sure the sun will be up around 7am when we hit the court. Note the snazzy belt I’m wearing – that was my September life dinner gift from Amy (she upped the ante in October – a lot.)

Disclaimer: I don’t know anything about cleantech and – more specifically – the ethanol market. However, I do understand basic economics reasonably well and have pretty good reasoning skills, although I’ve probably forgotten most of the math I learned in grad school about IS-LM curves. Oh – I’m also a huge tree hugging environmentalist. My PIDS (personal information discovery system – aka Amy) has continued to catch up on her RSS feeds and forwarded me an article by Daniel Gross in Slate titled Is The Ethanol Boom Going Bust? It was short enough for me to read on my handheld while filling up my car with E85 (just joking – I can’t seem to find a gas station nearby me that actually has E85 – it seems to kind of defeat the purpose to drive 30 miles each way to fill up with E85 – although the article was short.)

There are many great things about being married to Amy. One of them is that she reads piles of things – like Wallpaper – that never make it on to my pile. Not only does she read them, but she tears out stuff that she thinks I’d like. An article titled Cuter computers showed up on my “from Amy” stack with an interesting article about the NextGen PC Design Competition. Microsoft and the Industrial Designers Society of America are co-sponsoring it. The website appears to be borked right now (e.g. “Due to technical difficulties, we are not able to collect submissions at this time”) – hopefully it’ll be back in submission collection mode soon.

Ok – enough of that announcement stuff on a Sunday morning (although I can’t resist inviting you again to the CSIA DEMOgala 2007 event.) I regularly get emails that ask questions like “I wanted to ask if you ever considered writing a post on your blog about your method of keeping your priorities organized, deciding where to spend your time, and your ability to accomplish so much. If only the rest of us could be as productive as you! I thought of it as I read in your Q3 post, “this past year has required unyielding focus.”

Another week, another new member for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. My friends at Solidware have just pledged their philanthropic support for the future of Colorado. A big thank you to Sue Kunz – Solidware’s founder/CEO – and her team. Thanks gang!

If you are in Colorado this Thursday (October 11, 2007), I encourage you to register and attend DEMOgala 2007. This is the CSIA’s (Colorado Software and Internet Association) third annual day long conference highlighting some of the most innovative companies in Colorado. I’m giving the opening keynote starting at 8:30am at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Denver. I’m going to be sharing the stage with Colorado Governor Bill Ritter who – in addition to discussing the drivers, issues, and opportunities facing Information Technology and Software Innovation in Colorado – will be making a special announcement.

Charlie Wood reminded me in his comment to my post The Purpose of Numbers on a Y Axis that Greg Reinacker’s first pitch to me had a revenue graph lacking Y Axis values. For those of you that don’t know Greg, he’s the founder / CTO of NewsGator, a company that I was the seed investor in and am very proud of. Here’s that graph from the first presentation. Fortunately (for both me and Greg), he had plenty of other slides in that first presentation, including the money shot that was the vision slide.

Every day I get a fresh pile of emails containing executive summaries and powerpoint presentations (keep them coming by the way) inquiring whether I’d be interested in exploring an investment. I try to quickly look at them all and decide immediately whether or not I want to spend any time considering investing in the business. There is an endless list of nitpicky things I could suggest that would improve these executive summaries and powerpoint presentations. I’ll spare you those. There is also an endless list of substantive things I could suggest. For example, what is wrong with the following graph?

Semantic Web. Implicit Web. Web 3.0. Lot’s of happy new buzz phrases being tossed about. Of course, the academic one is “semantic web” – all the rest are made up trendy things. While there are plenty of abstract ideas about this, and lots more simple instantiations that are tiny pieces of the concept, Alex Iskold of Adaptive Blue is going after the whole enchilada in a way even my father would enjoy. I’ve known Alex for a while via his writing and my small investment in Adaptive Blue and I love the way his brain works around a variety of topics, including The New Rules of Technology VC.