NewsGator and VNU announced today localized versions of NewsGator Online and NewsGator Inbox for Germany, Holland, Italy, Belgium, and Spain. These countries join the previously localized versions for the UK and France. Ah – the joy of a platform.

As a follow up to my MBA post from yesterday, I noticed an article in BusinessWeek titled “Can a Personal MBA Match the Real McCoy?” Interesting and provocative content, along with a few interesting links for those of you thinking about an MBA.

I got a fun question in my inbox recently from a long time reader of this blog. This answer is aimed at those of you who have ever thought about going to business school. I’m an entrepreneur, software developer, and occasional angel investor, who is thinking about going to business school. I’m looking for something new to do, either in VC or in finance more generally, and want to use business school as a way to change career direction. Since I live in the Bay area, I talked to the Stanford GSB admissions office, which recommended that I apply for their Sloan Fellows program. I did so and was recently accepted, but upon further investigation I’m a little worried because, as you may know, the Sloan program is a one-year program which results in a MS in Management rather than an MBA. My question to you is if you think that the fact you have an MS rather than an MBA has ever closed any doors to you? If so, which ones?

Yesterday I said I was going to make April “Microsoft Month” for my computers. After installing IE7b2, a bunch of Live.com stuff, migrating my bookmarks from Firefox to IE7, and then trying to use IE7 as my primary browser, I’ve given up after 24 hours. It occurred to me that this wasn’t going to work out the third time I had to restart my computer because something goofy was going on. 

In my ultimate quest for periodic pain, I’ve decided to take a page from Chris Pirillo’s Googlefasting playbook and segment my use over the next three months. Rather than using a mix of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft I’m going to spend April with Microsoft only, May with Yahoo, and June with Google. I’m starting the process today. I figure the first few days will be a transition from what I’m currently using to only Microsoft stuff. I haven’t yet decided how I’m going to approach the edge cases (e.g. does that mean I dump iTunes, what about all the tagging I do with del.icio.us, and I suppose I’ll have to see if I can get into the Microsoft AdCenter beta to replace my Google and Yahoo ads on my blog) – I’ll figure this out as I go.

It’s the last day of the quarter and eerily quiet in my office. I’ve received very feel emails (and no phone calls) from CEOs of the companies I work with. Since I talked with a number of them yesterday, I know this means that they are busting their butts to drag the last few deals of the quarter across the goal line before this Friday ends. Good.

Following is an email I sent to Seth mid-afternoon. I’ve heard this three times today. It’s got to be the current cliche. Gross. I was referring to the phrase “technology companies are bought not sold.” This unquestionably belongs on Fred Wilson’s VC Cliche of the Week post. While Fred didn’t have a cliche post on it, he did have a post in early 2004 that linked to Ed Sim talking about it.

I got the following email from service@cinemanow.com today. Brad, Thanks for posting comments regarding CinemaNow on https://feld.com/archives/2006/03/cinemanow-is-outstanding/. With regards to the comments about pricing/Netflix towards the end of the review; just wanted to take the time to let you know that we are working as hard as we can to provide our customers with the best experience possible. We are working to try to convince the studios that there IS a market out there for this kind of consumption of video, but ultimately they own the rights to their libraries, and dictate how/when/where/why regarding the distribution of their titles. Your review, and the comments of more consumers helps us greatly in this cause!

Slate has an outstanding article on a great Powerade ad you won’t find on TV. The ad itself is worth looking at, but the story is even more interesting. Thanks to Matt Branaugh – the Business Editor at the Boulder Daily Camera (who is rapidly getting blogging religion) for pointing it out to me.