Chris Anderson notes that The Innovation In Gaming Isn’t On The Screen*.* Having just benefited from the incredible success of Harmonix / Guitar Hero and and having become fascinated with the Wiimote, I’m starting to search for the input jack on the back of my head.

One of my favorite CTO’s (Tim Wolters – CTO / co-founder of Collective Intellect) is on the road fundraising and has some posts out on the process and terms he’s starting to see as they move from foreplay to term sheet. Me and VC is a great quick rant on feedback (“why would you even meet if you knew geography would be an issue?”, Term Sheet Terms: On Good Terms is a setup (hopefully) for some additional posts on Term Sheet terms, and Travails of Travel is a priceless post channeling whatever anyone who has been on the road recently has been feeling (including yet another example of the business value of a Slingbox.)

Since I’ve been working with and investing in Internet-related companies, I’ve always been fascinated with what creates a community. Most of my investing activity has been around the infrastructure side of this problem – most notably companies that create the Internet substrate for creating, engaging, and managing community. Occassionally I’ll venture into a company that is trying to do something with an actual community. Recently, my head has been in this in two dimensions. I’ve got a couple of “substrate” investments, including Me.dium and Lijit. They started in different places but addressed a similar problem. As they have evolved, they are diverging even more, but helping me really understand two sides of a very complicated issue.

Yum. Snowcrash anyone?

I’ve been investing in Internet-related email stuff since 1995. I still remember when I got my first Internet email address (brad@id.wing.net) back in 1994 – shortly before I figured out I could set up email on brad@feld.com. Email has evolved in some amazing ways over the last 12 years while at the same time standing still in others (thanks Mr. SMTP – both directions.) In 2000, I started noticing spam again. I think the first time I heard “spam” was in college – one of the guys in my fraternity (John Underkoffler) loved to do all kinds of bizarre things with spam (except eat it) – at some point in the mid 1980’s I learned what email spam was. Between 1995 and 2000 I occasionally got some spam, but it usually just pointed me to an online porn site which was still a novelty at that point in time.

The MIT Enterprise Forum has an annual program called Venture Capital Outlook. If you are in Colorado, you can see a 40 minute digital presentation of this from MIT/Cambridge and a panel of Boston-area VC’s followed by a live panel of Colorado VCs discussing the same questions, namely the trends from 2006 and what they see happening in 2007. The Colorado–based VCs (in the flesh rather than digitally rendered) are:

Paul Kedrosky has an excellent summary of Mark Gilbert’s theories of modern finance using the two cow metaphor. He ends with his own special version for the venture capital industry.

If you go to Feld Thoughts, you’ll see a little widget on the right hand side that looks like the following: This is my “badge” for the FeedBurner Venture Capital network. This a network of all of the Venture Capital bloggers that I could find – I’m the coordinator so if you are a VC blogger and not part of the network, drop me an email. There are now 62 VC bloggers in the network with a daily subscriber reach of over 150,000 people (if you are an advertiser and want to target this audience, my friends at FeedBurner will be happy to help.)

One of my core strategies as a VC has always been to aggressively facilitate conversations between the entrepreneurs that I work with. Over the last 13 years, this has paid off in numerous ways, endless times. A while ago I realized that, in addition to being a lot of fun (usually for all involved), it was a way for me to learn an incredible amount by just watching where the entrepreneurs took the conversations.