Earlier this week Intel announced Suite Two – an appliance that integrates NewsGator’s Enterprise Server product with SixApart’s Movable Type, SocialText’s wiki, and SimpleFeed corporate feed management. The products are being integrated by SpikeSource who will also handle maintenance and support. Another step in NewsGator’s “buy and deploy our RSS aggregator products however you – the customer – wants” strategy. Charlie Wood wrote up a quick anecdote about how he quickly integrated his Spanning Salesforce and Spanning Feed Builder products with Salesforce.com and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server to help a marcomm manager to send updates about her company’s marketing events from Salesforce.com direct to her executives BlackBerries. The company is already using Salesforce.com and NewsGator Enterprise Server – Charlie’s glue connected the pieces together and got things up an running in 30 minutes. Very neat.

The FeedBurner Venture Capital Network continues to expand with the additions of new VC bloggers Santo Politi from Spark Capital and Susan Wu from Charles River Ventures. I’m on the board of Me.dium with Santo and we’ve been having a good time working together – expect plenty of deep and insightful stuff from his blog.

Dean Karnazes just finished running 50 marathons in 50 days (one in each state.) He finished up with the New York Marathon on Sunday and then didn’t know what to do with himself on Monday, so he ran the New York Marathon backwards. On Tuesday, he still didn’t know what to do with himself so he went for a 26.2 mile run. Yesterday he decided to run home – from New York to San Francisco.

One of my portfolio companies recently put together a short video for a recent company meeting. The video consisted of a series of questions for each board member and a few key advisors and clients. One of the questions was “what could they improve?” Following is my answer: The pretzels were tasty.

BarCamp Boulder is happening on Friday (7pm – ?) and Saturday (9am – 5pm) with a party afterwards at Me.dium’s offices at 1738 Pearl Street, Boulder, CO. The attendee list looks great. If you are in town and like BarCamp events, check it out.

I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan (I can sing Dark Side of the Moon forward and backward and the worms still eat into my brain on a regular basis.) A friend sent me the Pink Floyd Back Catalog the other day. I just ordered my own copy from Amazon ( Art Poster Metal Framed Print – Pink Floyd-Back Catalog – Artist: unknown- Poster Size: 24 X 36). Beautiful.

As I slowly work my way through State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, the phrase “trust but verify” has appeared at least once. Now that Rumsfeld is no longer Secretary of Defense, I guess I don’t have to finish the book. However, the phrase jumped out at me after a conversation I had earlier this week with an entrepreneur that I’ve worked with in the past. In the conversation, something came up that happened three years ago. A third person made an attribution to the entrepreneur about me and a set of assumptions about what I was thinking at the time about the company’s situation. These attributions came from a fourth person. The entrepreneur processed this information, assumed it was true, and acted on it.

I spent the weekend in Louisville, Kentucky thinking about analogies (and how new things are like old things.) Amy and I took four friends to the Breeders Cup (also known as the Super Bowl of Horse Racing.) I’m not a horse person (I’m actually afraid of them), but I like to humor my wife whenever I can. We had a great time and – as I looked around the very expansive race track (that I’d been at once before for the Kentucky Derby) – I realized that horse racing is “NASCAR for Snooty People.” I was down $40 for the day (I quit betting after I lost my second race in a row – I still can’t figure out how to bet a trifecta.)

Given my attempt to run the North Pole Marathon, I’ve gotten involved in a project called International Polar Year. While this is a major worldwide scientific research project that’s occurring over the next two years, there’s a concentration of scientists in Boulder – including several of the people at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at CU Boulder. Mark Parsons – one of the guys at NSIDC – is deeply involved in figuring out how to manage all the data associated with IPY. A few weeks ago, we talked about the massive challenge associated with this project. I asked Mark to write up an overview so that we could start to think about who in the tech business might be able to help us deal with the massive amount of data IPY is going to try to organize. Following is his summary: