Me.dium had a release over the weekend – if you are a Me.dium user make sure you get the latest Firefox plugin. If you aren’t a Me.dium user, feel free to bypass the private beta by using my magic invite code. Phil Butler at Mashable has a nice blog post on the update. There are plenty of under-the-hood changes – especially around performance and scalability (the really hard mysterious stuff), but there are a bunch of neat UI enhancements on the Firefox plugin (including one that I really wanted – moving my logged in friends to the top of the friends list.)

My friends at FeedBurner have been cranking. Last week they released an updated version of FeedFoundry – their heavy duty feed management service for large multi-feed commercial publishers and blog networks. As part of this release they announced a couple of new customers including NPR and Circuit City. To see more, check out the FeedFoundry screencast. On Friday, FeedBurner announced that they are now managing all the feeds across the AOL Network. Yes – they are using FeedFoundry for this – and join an extensive list of other established companies including Dow Jones Online, Geffen Records, and USAToday.

As Judy’s Book has shifted from a Local Search site to a Deal site, several interesting vertical search opportunities have emerged. The first one is online coupons – and the folks at Judy’s Book have rolled out a vertical site called CouponLooker. Dave Naffzinger has a great overview of CouponLooker. While the web is full of “coupon sites”, no one does the hard work to search across them, dedupe them, rank them, and make it easy to find online coupons for specific items. Oh – and the coupons expire quickly so keeping the database fresh and current is non-trivial.

Nope – taxes (or extensions) aren’t due then this year. However, the deadline for voting for the Engaget Home Entertainment Device of the Year is 11:59pm on Sunday, 4/15. If you love your Slingbox as much as Ryan and I do, please vote.

Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion indicates that we aren’t in Kansas anymore. Fred has a good riff titled The Banner Is Back and the WSJ does a good job decomposing the return for private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. Finally, Paul Kedrosky weighs in with some interesting “Microsoft vs. Google” speculation and a suggestion that we are looking at a 12x FTM revenue multiple for ClickClick. For those of you too lazy to clickclick once through to the WSJ analysis, H&F bought DoubleClick for $1.1b in 2005, although it appears they only used $330m in equity for the purchase. They sold off several pieces of DoubleClick (Abacus for $430m and the email business for about $100m) resulting in a return of over $3.6b for an investment of $330m less than two years ago. 

I’ve been traveling a lot lately. A lot. So – I’ve gotten to experience airport security in many different forms throughout our beautiful country. Today’s experience in Boston reinforced how silly this whole thing has become. Amy and I are heading to Washington DC. The line is short as this part of Logan is pretty empty today (not many US Air flights mid-afternoon on a Saturday.) As a result, the TSA guy has come up with a few new rules and he’s repeating them as steadily as your favorite metronome. “Put your shoes, liquids, and bags directly on the conveyer belt. Do not put them in the plastic trays. If you have a drink, you can you drink it on that side security but you must throw it away before you come through. Put your id’s away.” Over and over again. Instead of getting through security in three minutes, it took about ten as everyone forgot to take the purses, their liquids, or their shoes out of the little plastic trays.

It seems like there’s a regular rhythm to the magnitude of “great posts from entrepreneurs and VCs” – Wednesday is the magic day. I woke up to a bunch of great stuff in FeedDemon – including: Dick Costolo (FeedBurner) on Legal Fees: Start Swearing Now – Dick’s views of lawyers. Matt Blumberg (Return Path) on Highs and Lows, Part II – Once you get big enough, you get to share the “high/low whiplash” with others on your leadership team. Matt McCall (Portage Ventures) on Using Scorecards with Your Board – report early and consistently. Josh Kopelman (First Round) on Do You Need to Switch Your Pitch – what type of pitch should you use when presenting to new potential investors? The sun is up, Camden Yards is out my window, I had a great run, and it’s time for another day.

The first Boulder OpenCoffee Club happened yesterday at Amante Coffee on Walnut Street in Boulder. I was in NY so I missed it, but I heard it was a lot of fun and had an interesting collection of people show up. The next one is on April 24 – same place at 8am (although Jason is thinking about trying a different location to accommodate more people.) I’ll likely be in town so I’m planning on showing up. Hats off to Saul Klein for starting this phenomenon.

My partner and co-conspirator at AsktheVC (Jason Mendelson) guest blogs tonight. Unfortunately, I (Jason) get stuck being the shareholder representative in our merger deals where we can’t find someone else to do the job. (Someone should start a company – hmmm.) We had a deal that over a year ago distributed the escrow, but the escrow agent wasn’t able to find a dozen or so shareholders and today, we still have $500,000 or so in the account.