When I was at Microsoft last week, I once again noticed interesting art in the lobby of the buildings I was in. I’ve always liked the art at Microsoft and enjoy the typical five minute wait in the lobby as the person I’m meeting with (or their assistant) comes down to escort me to the meeting. This time I noticed a brochure titled Microsoft Art Collection: Redmond Campus: Spring 2006 Program. I picked it up and looked through it. While the brochure was informative, the link to the Microsoft Art Collection web site had piles of information on it. 

I got an email from a blog reader that said “there’s one attribute ‘missing’ from your list of needed characteristics for an entrepreneur – being a good salesman.” There is no question that being a fantastic salesman (not merely a good one) is a key attribute of entrepreneurial success. Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems – who is a superb salesman (without being “salesy”) – takes it a step further with a great post on hiring salespeople. Every entrepreneur should read this post carefully.

I’ve encouraged all of my portfolio companies that have an online service to supply both REST and SOAP API’s to their web services. This week, both Rally Software and NewsGator released REST implementations of their API. NewsGator’s API is a public one and has been gradually expanding is scope and documentation. It has been exercised extremely well since both FeedDemon 2.0, NetNewsWire 2.1 Beta, and the NewsGator Private Label solutions are using it extensively to connect with NewsGator Online. The SOAP implementation has been around since August, but a number of people have requested the REST API which is now out. 

In my Microsoft-only web diet, I’ve been pleasantly enjoying Microsoft Search. While some of the results are a little wacky (e.g. I was searching for the Microsoft Empower program yesterday and all I got were old links to the Irish and UK Empower pages – which were no longer active), it’s been generally very effective and I didn’t really notice any functional difference from Google. However, Microsoft Search seems to have been down for the better part of the morning. 

A few weeks ago, I got a note from Kunal Anand that he was doing a project to create a visualization of my del.icio.us tags and their intersections. I gave Kunal my del.icio.us info and he sent me the following picture yesterday. I asked him what it meant (besides being pretty) and this is what he said. Each dot represents a tag (aka a node) Each line represents an intersection between tags The center of the visualization (denoted by a gradient), represents the heavy set of intersections It looks like I’ve got a decent amount of intersections.

There’s an old joke about Microsoft that it takes them three major releases to get it right. So – when “version 3.0 of something” comes out – it’s time to pay attention. Microsoft shifted away from version numbers to year numbers a while ago – presumably someone in marketing figured out that the version numbering approach wasn’t effectively confusing customers about the maturity of products. Earlier today, Microsoft announced the road map and feature set for Microsoft Speech Server 2007 which is expected to be released at the end of this year. One of my portfolio companies – Gold Systems – has been working closely with Microsoft Speech Server over the past year and has implemented a number of projects with it. When I was at Microsoft last week, I spent some time with Richard Bray (Microsoft GM Speech Server) and Terry Gold (Gold Systems CEO) discussing where Microsoft was going with the product and how Gold and Microsoft could expand their relationship around Speech Server, Microsoft’s upcoming unified messaging product, and Microsoft LCS. It was a great conversation – Richard definitely gets it – and I expect Microsoft will really nail it with v3.0 of Speech Server.

I haven’t thought much about Microsoft’s Support for Linux Guest on Virtual Server 2005 yet, but it’s definitely noteworthy. Tristan Louis wrote a long, thoughtful post on it that’s worth reading if you care about this stuff.

This morning, I noticed on Will Herman’s blog that on Wednesday of this week, at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06 (at least in the US). I plan to be awake to see it. After three people sent me the same fact today (thanks!) I decided my obsession with numbers is starting to infect the universe (or maybe it’s the other way around.)

Adam Rubenstein – who writes a blog called Colorado Life Science Deal Flow – has started a guest blogger series to encourage some of his friends and collegues to dip their toes into the blogpond. His first guest is Harry Ross – a partner at Aweida Venture Partners which is just up the road from my office. Harry – c’mon in – the water is usually pretty warm (although it’s occassionally a little too hot.)