With all the focus and discussion around stuff like the Google – YouTube deal it’s easy to forget that there are lots of entrepreneurs out there working really hard to grow their businesses. The culture of the tech industry has caused us to think in “monthly” and “quarterly” performance and – whether you think it’s good or bad – it is. Q3 just ended so it’s a convenient time to look at some other macro indicators (e.g. how did private companies perform in Q3) to see how healthy the tech business is.

A long time ago (high school, college?) I remember reading a Scientific American magazine cover to cover that was about the brain (blue cover – picture of the brain on it.) While I don’t remember anything that I read (and – whatever it was – it’s probably irrelevant today), I was completely fascinated by it. When I was at MIT in the mid-1980’s, “Artificial Intelligence” was the rage. Cognitive Science (which has morphed into Brain and Cognitive Science) was also picking up speed at the time as MIT had a great collection of people thinking about neuroscience, biology, and psychology. For whatever reason, I never engaged in it, and my interest ended up being a simple surface level fascination that I never went anywhere with.

I’ve been getting a few fun toys in the mail to help with my marathoning efforts. A while ago Anthony Pigliacampo sent me a Gel-Bot from ventureDESIGNworks. It sat on my desk for a while before I started using it. Now that I’ve torn the packaging off of it and run with it a few times, it’s clear that it’s an intensely clever product as it combines a traditional water bottle with a gel dispensing thing. Sunday’s run was a three gel run – I wish I’d had this with me so I didn’t have to stop, tear the tops off the gel packs (with my teeth), make a mess as I tried to slurp the gel out of the gel packs, and then crumple up the sticky package and put it back in my fanny pack. They’ve also got a clever Press-Bot – imagine turning your Nalgene bottle into a french coffee press.

Ok – not really – but Dick (FeedBurner’s mostly hairless CEO) did a nice pithy short interview with Manoj Jasra for WebProNews. I adore working with Dick and his team at FeedBurner – it’s been one of the funnest investments I’ve ever made. If you want to get a feel for what’s behind the curtain, you can almost hear Dick talking during the interview. Oh – and he does drop a few hints about what’s next.

Congrats to Susan Mernit at Yahoo for completing her first half marathon. I had a long, miserable run on Sunday for about the same length of time (3:15). I almost bailed at 4 miles – I was tired, my left knee is inflamed and probably a little infected from my fall earlier this week, and I was up in Keystone at 9000 feet. My friend Paul joined me at mile 10 or so – when Renee and Amy dropped him off, all I could do was shake my head and say “man – this sucks.” 

NDA’s (Non-Disclosure Agreements) seem to be floating around this weekend. I guess whoever leaked the rumor of Google’ acquisition of Youtube hadn’t signed one. I got the following question from a reader: We have a partner that we want to work with. They have both overlapping technology but also crucial technology and knowledge that would take a great effort and time to acquire. We know for sure that this company has recently been or is in the process of being acquired. (by a top 10 media & technology company). Our partnership has never entered into a formal agreement but we are now at a point where we want it to be formalized. They want us to sign an NDA to continue the process, which in any other case would be totally normal. However, things have changed slightly and we’re not dealing with a startup anymore but a major media & technology company. Is there a way we can agree to sign an NDA and at the same time protect ourselves from the lawyers from their acquirer if (potentially) our technology, product or business models is conflicting with theirs? They don’t know that we know the details of the acquisition.

On Wednesday, the IRS announced what it called “relief” extending the “transition period” of compliance with 409A through January 1, 2008 (unless you are a public company and you are involved in a back dating scandal, then you are still hosed.) What the IRS really means (as translated by my trusty sidekick Jason) is “We still can’t figure out how to implement this puppy, so we are telling y’all to keep complying the best you can (in good faith) and we’ll get back with you fine folks once we figure out what we meant in the first place.”

Andy Sack – the CEO of Judy’s Book – has started writing about his experience of evolving Judy’s Book. One of the really “exciting” (substitute your favorite word here for this euphemism, including “challenging”, “stressful”, “painful”, “complicated”, etc.) things about being an entrepreneur (or an early stage investor) is the continuous reassessment of what you are building. Andy’s writing as he’s living it, which is very cool. About six months ago, we had a board conversation where two things were clear: (1) Judy’s Book understood how to continue to grow using the “local only” strategy they were using and (2) the cost of doing this didn’t translate into a compelling business (e.g. we could buy content and traffic (measurement: a “unit”), but the marginal value of each incremental unit purchased was not positive in the long run.) Overall, while Judy’s Book was making steady progress, it was unclear that the long term economics of what we’ve been calling “local only” worked.

Two weeks ago, NewsGator released NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. This is the product that resulted from NewsGator’s acquisition of Kevin Cawley’s company that created SmartRead and SmartFeed. NewsGator Go! is now a full featured Windows Mobile reader that tightly integrates with NewsGator Online Service, including full synchronization. If you are a Windows Mobile user, it’s by far the best thing I’ve ever seen for reading feeds on a Windows Mobile device – hats off to Kevin (and – oh – check it out.) If you want Greg Reinacker’s (CTO of NewsGator) view of how this evolved, he’s got a great post up about The story of NewsGator Go!