Earlier this week eBay announced it was buying StubHub for $310 million. My partner Ryan McIntyre – who was an early angel investor in StubHub (congrats Ryan – dinner next time is on you) has an excellent post titled StubHub: the value of vertical specialization. While building a horizontal technology is often the starting point for many entrepreneurs and VCs, we continue to experience the incredible power of vertical specialization. This is distinct from “going after a vertical market” (say selling products to law firms, or manufacturing firms, or financial services firms) which is another classic approach of entrepreneurs and VCs (I can’t tell you the number of times in the past 10 years I’ve heard “we are doing X and are going to dominate vertical market Y and, after that, dominate vertical market Z.” Much of this emerged from the Geoffrey Moore bowling alley thesis from Inside the Tornado but was also a standard strategy of many of the successful software companies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Will Herman wrote a super post on The Leadership Power of Great Public Speaking*.* I’m a closet introvert, but I know the value of being a great public speaker (and am very comfortable – both as a public speaker and working a room.) Mitchell Ashley – one of the execs at StillSecure – wrote about their holiday party on his post How to Work a Room and the brilliance of Alan Shimel and his extrovertedness. I love Alan and can imagine the party even though I wasn’t at it. As both Mitchell and Will point out, a lot of it is in the delivery.

Q1 will see lots of fun features in the NewsGator Online Service. NewsGator Today was released last week – if you are an NGOS (NewsGator Online) user, click on the NewsGator Today folder at the top of your folder list. NewsGator has a longer description of how this works on their post The Debut of NewsGator Today.

I couldn’t agree more with Tom Evslin’s post titled Web 2.0 – Greater Initial Investment Required. If you are the founder of a company with the description “Web 2.0” somewhere in your executive summary then click now and read slowly. It also compliments the current “Web 2.0 Bubble / Deadpool” meme that seems to be going around.

NewsGator and Motorola’s Good Technology Group (acquired by Motorola in Q406) announced a partnership that will extend NewsGator’s enterprise RSS technology (“behind the firewall RSS”) to mobile users on all the platforms that Good supports. That’s a Good (and NewsGator) way to get your RSS wherever you want it and adds nicely to the NewsGator Mobile product set.

The 24th annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference is happening on February 20 – 22nd. In addition to showcasing a bunch of the emerging growth companies in the Rocky Mountain region, VCIR will feature keynotes from Greg Maffei, President and CEO of Liberty Media and Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association. In addition to a couple of great parties and skiing (all day Thursday), there’s also a new poker event on the night of the 20th. The last few years of VCIR have been great – I’ve heard that this year’s lineup of companies is superb – so if you are a venture capitalist living outside the Rocky Mountain region that needs an excuse to ski (or if you just want to come see my smiling face), come join us.

Just joking. But given that it was 70 degrees in Boston this weekend and it took me two hoursto dig my car out to get into the office today, the thought cross my mind (several times.) The weather here is completely fubared. We had a hurricane in our canyon in Eldorado Springs last night. Seriously. The winds topped 115 mph at 2am (that would be a category 3 hurricane for those of you following along at home.) Amy and I were pretty certain that we were going to end up in Kansas last night when we went to bed. We have a sculpture just outside our bedroom window called “The Vistors” – they are giant rocks on the top of 8 foot plus poles. I dreamed that one of them was blown through our bedroom window (floor to ceiling) last night. Thankfully, it was just a dream.

One of my favorite new investments (ok – all my new investments are “my favorites”) – Me.dium – has a pair of video interviews up on the Scoble Show. If you are interested, start with the demo – then go watch the interview with Robert Reich and Kimbal Musk. Look for the Me.dium widget on my sidebar soon (oops – did I say that?)

Our beloved dog Denali died on 12/22/06 at 11:20pm. I’ve written the story up on Denali’s page at Dogster. We got Denali when he was about six weeks old – he came to live with us about a month after we moved to Boulder. He was an incredible dog – beautiful, smart, happy, and loved by everyone. We’ll miss you Denali. Enjoy your stay in the big treat yard in the sky.