Today’s announcement that Microsoft is paying about $6 billion to buy aQuantive is the latest ownership change of an advertising-related Internet company. Yesterday WPP Group announced that it was buying 24/7 Real Media for $649 million. And earlier this week Silver Lake Partners and ValueAct Capital announced they were buying Acxiom for $2.25 billion and taking it private. Three deals, $9 billion dollars of consideration, and another big shift in ownership and alignment of Internet advertising alliances. All sparked by Google’s $3 billion purchase of DoubleClick.

I’ve gotten to know David Cohen and David Brown through our work together at TechStars. DavidC and I have talked a little about Pinpoint (the company that the David’s co-founded) and I’ve had one meeting at ZOLL Data Systems (the company that DavidB runs that is a subsidiary of the company that acquired Pinpoint.) But I didn’t really know their story. DavidB took some time off (left ZOLL but then went back.) During this time he wrote No Vision, All Drive. I love self-told, first person, authentic entrepreneurial stories (one of my favorites was The MouseDriver Chronicles.) DavidB did a great job of telling the Pinpoint story – starting at the very beginning – and sticking to the story rather than veering into the prognostication zone that so many authors of business stories feel compelled to go to.

I was walking upstairs at 6am to go put my running clothes on and head out the door for an hour when Kenai started barking like crazy. I inferred that we had a visitor and looked out the window. That’s our driveway. It’s 6:30am and I still haven’t left the house. There’s nothing quite like living in the mountains.

If you ever have the chance to see Alan Greenspan do an hour of improptu Q&A in front of any audience (in this case 500 business people in Denver), do it. I went to the AMG National Trust Bank sponsored event today at the Denver Art Museum titled “Art, Alan and AMG.” It was awesome. AMG and the Denver Art Museum were superb hosts. Greenspan was amazing. He stood up for most of an hour and took random Q&A from the audience. His answers were cogent, direct, and powerful. It was fascinating to watch him think for a few seconds and then spit out a comprehensive, well articulated answer to question after question after question.

Sotheby’s is having a huge Contemporary Art auction tonight – you can watch it live online. The Rothko (White Center 1950) is unbelievable. Sotheby’s minimum price guarantee to David Rockefeller (owner of White Center) is $46m (Rockefeller paid less than $10,000 for it in 1960.) Now that’s “art investing.” My favorite picture in the auction is Christopher Wool’s FUCKEM. Way out of my league, but fun to fantasize. I used to call these things “paintings”, but it seems to be in vogue to call them “pictures”, so I’ll give it a try.

We had an NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) board meeting yesterday in advance of two days of NCWIT alliance meetings. I’m delighted with the progress this organization has made in the past three years. We held the meeting for the first time at the new CU Boulder ATLAS building. Bobby Schnabel – a co-founder of NCWIT, the Director of ATLAS (“Alliance for Technology Learning and Society) and Vice Provost for Academic and Campus Technology – has a good podcast up describing ATLAS titled ATLAS – Is It Technology, Art or a Coffee Shop. If you haven’t been there, it’s a cool, cool building.

I had lunch with Bijan Sabet at Spark Capital today on my way to the airport in Boston. We met at his office at 137 Newbury Street. I recognized the address and had a feeling it was the same building that one of my very first Feld Technologies clients – IHRDC – used to be located in. Not only was it the same building, but I’m pretty sure the floor Spark is on (8th) is the same floor that IHRDC was on (I remember them being on 7 and 8.) Since that was 20 years ago, I’m not 100% sure, but I got goosebumps when I walked into the front door of the building and remembered the elevator placement. 

I spent 12.1 years of my life living in Boston (and Cambridge) – from age 17.7 to 29.8. This morning I spent an hour having a picture perfect run around the Charles River, listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers on my iTurd (my podcasts are still not syncing correctly, but whatever), and reminiscing on my time here. I’ll always be defined by the seven years I spent at MIT (two degrees, one ABD ejection.) I lived in Cambridge for four of them and Boston for the other eight (Devonshire Place, Fort Point Channel, and Bay State Road.) I got married, got divorced, and met my soulmate. 

I love my iPod Nano. I hate iTunes. It’s like the two things exist in this parallel universe of good and bad. I suppose one explanation is that one is hardware and the other is software, but that’s not really valid as the second best part of the Nano is software. It could also be that I use Vista instead of OSX. But then that would be a conspiracy theory.