While the SXSW crowd is a-twitter, I’m still thinking about the range of private emails I’ve gotten about my widget post. While some of the comments were assertions that I’m an idiot, there were a few that caused me to think harder about the opportunities (or non-opportunities) to build real businesses around the construct of widgets. In addition, Mike Hirshland wrote a post challenging several people (including me) to debate whether or not someone could build a company around “widget management systems” that could generate venture returns and one of Mike’s partner at Polaris – Sim Simeonov – wrote an extensive post titled Widgets, Widgets, Everywhere on his view of this.

As you may know, Denver is hosting the 2008 Democratic Convention. I recently met with a major media company that is looking to do a specialized political information site built around the 2008 election with an initial highlight on the Democratic Convention. I’m interested in talking to people that have unique software approaches to building out content and community in the political vertical. I am not looking for content providers, bloggers, or generic software vendors (unless you have a specific focus on the political vertical.) I am looking for new, exciting, and unique approaches to this vertical, especially if you can easily integrate into an existing web framework.

Jason is getting riled up about patents over on AsktheVC. I figured it’d be a good time to finish up the set of posts from John Funk suggesting an empirical way to evaluate whether software patents are bad (or good). If you haven’t read Part 1 and Part 2*, take a look at them first (they are both short.) Part 3 follows.* But I think there may be another interesting angle. It may be able to be answered with just interviewing software companies or it may require a broader context. Here’s how I’m thinking about it. Map a three-dimensional grid with X-axis being economic value of a patent (or even a software patent portfolio); Y-axis being form of value (e.g., consensual/collaborative money payment, consensual/collaborative cross-license [note: this would appear to be an end-run around the system as it is a forced equality of unequal assets], litigation inspired royalty payments, a successful cease-and-desist/block against competitors, etc.), and Z-axis being number of years since issuance.

I’ve never understood daylight savings time. My run this morning was borked as a result of my lack of comprehension of how it works, my 7am conference call with someone in Europe didn’t happen because I’m sure he (rationally) thought it was an hour later and – while most of my computers are set to the correct time because of the incredibly diligent efforts of Ross-the-IT-guy – my Cisco IP phone at home still says DST+1 (I’m sure the one in the office is set to DST.) I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of GDP that was just wasted preparing for this and the lost GDP that will occur today due to missed / rescheduled meetings. It sounds like Yahoo Mail also had a tough weekend – maybe they can blame it on daylight savings time.

NewWest.Net recently announced a new conference, the New West Summit on Transformation in the Rockies, which will be held June 6-8 at Big Sky, Montana. It’s an interdisciplinary event focused on the New West themes of growth and change in the Rocky Mountain West, with a special focus on four areas: political change, growth and development, energy, and entrepreneurship and the new economy. New West has put together a great line-up of speakers and an excellent schedule for this event.

Saul Klein of Index Ventures turned me on a few weeks to OpenCoffee Club – a new program he started in London that is quickly making its way across the world (including Palo Alto, Paris and Amsterdam. Sacramento, Dublin, Brighton and Zagreb.) Saul’s got a great overview of the first and second events on his blog. According to Saul, “the key is a regular place and a regular time – it’s not important who comes along, some days it might be no one – just that people know if they want to meet, this is the time and this is the place.”

In January, I posted Part 1 of an empirical approach to determining whether software patents are bad (or good)**. The essay was sent to me by John Funk, founder of Evergreen Innovation Partners. This is part 2 (please read part 1 first if you are interested.) As a quick reminder – the premise of the essay is: What if we attempted to craft a social policy hypothesis that would defend the existence of software patents, and then we went about creating an experiment that would attempt to disprove that hypothesis?

If you’ve ever been a management consultant you’ll love Consulting Demons by Lewis Pinault. My first company (Feld Technologies) did a lot of work for and with a major east coast consulting firm between 1988 and 1993 and I got to see the consulting industry from the inside. In addition to writing all of their back office software (stuff like accounting, recruiting, expense management, time tracking) we worked with them on a number of their client projects as their “IT specialists.”

Jason Wood has an interesting post up titled Failure: Can fearing it impede professional greatness? It’s consistent with the title of his blog (The Ponderings of Woodrow) – really good ponderings on failure here.