The New York Times had a great article early this week titled Fine Dining With a Hippie Past. It highlights the recent revolution in the Boulder fine dining scene. When I moved here in 1995, the casual dining scene was outstanding (think Santa Monica, but more casual) but there were only really two “serious” restaurants – Flagstaff House and Q’s. In the last few years, a number of new great ones have popped up including The Kitchen (owned by Me.dium CEO Kimbal Musk), Frasca, and Mateo. Earlier this week I had breakfast at Radda Trattoria. Yum.

NewsGator just released NewsGator Desktop and it radically changed the way I read my RSS feeds – again. NewsGator Desktop came out of requirements from one of the NewsGator Enterprise Server customers who needed a rich desktop notifier as part of their implementation. Voila – generalize an enterprise based feature to an app that spans all the NewsGator consumer and enterprise products. Iterate quickly, add some stuff like Keyboard Shortcuts (duh), and you’ve got something pretty amazing.

One of the great things about the exponential growth of web-based content (both professional and user generated) is that it enables you to quickly get deep insights from amazing people that were previously hard to find. Two examples beat me over the head this morning. I wrote about Lijit search yesterday – today Stan James (Lijit’s CTO) keeps the rhythm going with his Not All Links Are Created Equal post.

I love stats (I guess the “official” software term for it is “analytics.”) My very first angel investment was in a company called NetGenesis which was one of the first web analytics companies (back in 1994). It’s a regular theme in my investing – either directly in companies like NetGenesis and Service Metrics (where analytics is the product), or indirectly in companies like FeedBurner (where analytics is a byproduct and a core part of the value.)

Business 2.0 has a good article titled A startup’s best friend? Failure. on how to succeed by paying attention and responding to failure. Dogster, Google, and Riya (Like.com) are profiled. I got plenty of chuckles after I made an investment in Dogster. I look forward to the day when I can say “look who’s barking now.”

I owe David Cohen a cross-post on widgets in our Big or Bullshit series. This isn’t it – I’ll get to it. But – my hint is that while they are big, it’s more bullshit than big (think application packaging – we’ll talk more later.) In the meantime, a number of my companies continue to crank out stuff in and around the world of widgets. FeedBurner just integrated their Headline Animator widget into their publisher engagement metrics (stats for us nerds.) Lijit just started crawling blogrolls while Bijan simultaneously noticed that the Lijit Wijit (er “widget”) just started reporting some interesting stats on what people were searching on his blog. Todd Vernon reminds us how important measuring everything is and put up a screenshot of a huge Raindance milestone from Monday when Raindance crossed the 5 million / day of audioconferencing minutes (I remember how excited we were when this metric crossed 100,000 / day. Finally, Eric Lunt of FeedBurner spent some time having fun with User-Agents, once again showing how hard it actually can be to accurately measure stuff.

I am often asked “what the state government in Colorado should do to help promote entrepreneurship and innovation.” My answer is consistent – “education, education, education.” I went to school at MIT and saw first hand how one of the best “communities of higher education” in the world (Cambridge / Boston) directly impacted Massachusetts activity around entrepreneurship and innovation. While I’ve gotten stuck in the “public university / government / private university” discussion loop many times around this, I always suggest that we “take the discussion up a level” since the core question is “how can state government help?”

WallStrip’s edition on RIMM is priceless. Bijan – you are the man – how about them thumbs. Fred – more finger pushups for you.

Yesterday a group of us announced the creation of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. This is a project I’ve been working on since last fall that I’m especially proud of. The press release is a good overview, as is the short article in today’s Rocky Mountain News titled Young firms urged to give helping hand. The founding member companies are Collective Intellect, Me.dium, NewsGator, Rally Software, and Tendril. I want to thank the leadership teams, the employees, and the investors in these companies for their great support and help in figuring out a lot of the details of how this should work.