David Cohen has a great post up about the failure of one of his startup – iContact. Even though iContact failed, David and his partners still managed to return 78% of the investment to their investors. His two lessons: (1) control the distribution of your product and (2) start small and prove something before you start to scale up.

Scott Converse has an extensive post about his second board meeting. I’m a couple of months into my investment in ClickCaster and I’m very pleased with the progress Scott and crew have made. I’m particularly happy with how effectively Scott listens, processes feedback, and acts on it.

Nick Bradbury just released FeedDemon 2.1. It’s spectacular. I continue to use as many different newsreaders as I can get my hands on – FeedDemon is far and away the best for anyone with a large number (> 100) of feeds being monitored. Nick has plenty of details on his blog, but some of the new features include: Popular Topics: see your most frequently linked articles across your subscription list Subscription Search: search your subscriptions Security Lockdown: we’ve learned a lot about feed security at NewsGator and Nick continues to help lead the charge Keyboard Navigation: not only is there extensive keyboard nav, but you can customize it There are plenty more, especially for a x.1 release. Attention, search, and security – look for a lot more of this across NewsGator’s products.

When IE 7 and Firefox 2 came out, they both added a lot of RSS-related functionality. As part of this, they both implemented their version of “smart landing” pages for when a user clicks on an RSS feed link. While this is a nice idea, it broke cardinal rule number one of being “publisher friendly” – they both override any custom landing pages that a publisher (e.g. me – my blog) has put together. 

My dad just wrote a great review of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. We were both reading it at about the same time and had a couple of interesting conversations about it. When Rumsfeld got fired, I moved on to another book (I had about 100 pages left) – I figure Woodward had accomplished his mission. But – I never wrote a review of the book. Now that my dad has done it, I don’t have to.

I’m playing around with “extreme sync” these days – exercising as many platforms as I can simultaneously just for fun. My central mail / calendar / contacts / tasks live on our Exchange server. I’ve got sync working well across all my Windows devices (Office 2003 and Office 2007) along with my new Dash Windows Mobile PDA. My Macs “mostly work” – everything is doing great (via Entourage) except “tasks.” I’m a heavy Outlook / Exchange Task user so this is a critical one for me. Anyone out there solve this?

Amy and I love to sit around and make up names for bands. Etiquette of Suicide was tonight’s band name. It’s not our all time best, but I expect it to show up as a band name on MySpace any day now.

My partner Ryan pointed me to Mark Morford’s incredible review of the new MacBook Pro on SFGate. Actually – in Mark’s words – it’s not really a MacBook Pro – it’s a “brand new lick-ready smooth-as-love Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo Super Orgasm Deluxe Ultrahard Modern Computing Device Designed by God Herself Somewhere in the Deep Moist Vulva of Cupertino Yes Yes Don’t Stop Oh My God Yes.” Um, yeah – that’s not exactly how I felt when I got my new Levono T60 with Vista on it the other day. At least mine works, compared to Ryan’s.

On Tuesday night, I hung out in LA with my long time friends and frat brothers John Underkoffler and Kevin Parent, co-founders of Oblong along with Kwin Kramer and Tom Wiley. I hadn’t seen John and Kevin in a while, so it was fun to catch up with them. More fun, however, was seeing and playing with the amazing stuff they are creating. In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton is shown interacting with a computer on a wall using a futuristic user interface in which he uses hand gestures to manipulate images and video. Underkoffler created that – including the beginnings of a new UI paradigm and a language for describing it.