At dinner last night, Chris, Jason, and I were talking about ice over dinner last night (as we were drinking our glasses of water – with ice in them.) Chris had recently seen this CNN clip about the “Dirty Ice Problem in Restaurants.” My favorite quote: “Fecal matter in ice is a serious problem.” Yuck. Room temperature beverages for me going forward.

One of the neat things about having a blog is getting feedback that actually teaches me something. I got a note from Brad Hugg that explained some stuff on 911 after I posted about the struggle I was having with Vonage and 911. Following are Brad’s comments, which are worthy of posting if only that he has a great first name. Back in 1995, I was one of two founding partners in a company called 911 Datamaster. We provided local PC/LAN based databases for 911 systems. Think of it this way, SCC Communications/Intrado provided data warehousing and database services for the Regional Bell Operating Companies (US West, PacBell, et al) and we provided the same service on a local basis to everyone else that wanted/needed to maintain local control over the 911 database….(an interesting side note for you is that a lot of Alaska landlines are actually covered by my old data base). Local phone companies, CLEC’s, military bases, nuclear facilities, etc. all were mandated by law to provide 911 services if they were going to provide local dial-tone. Before the Telecommunications Act of ’96, 911 services were farmed out to the Bell companies, and then eventually to Intrado. All we did was provide the same class of services to an entirely new market segment…nice opportunity!

I got a note from Jim Moore this morning that he, members of the Berkman Center, and the Berkeley China Internet Project have started a blog to keep pressure on Google regarding China. There’s plenty of meaty (and some entertaining) stuff there if you are interested in this issue. Hopefully, by posting this, I’ll get my blog blocked in China.

After trying a few different address combinations, I finally figured out that Vonage’s 911 address database must suck. Here’s the deal. I don’t actually have a legal physical address. I’ve mentioned this before in conjunction with issues I’ve had around the Patriot Act. I came up with a solution that solves the Patriot Act issue (that the USPS will accept without rejecting my mail). Occasionally it’s annoying (e.g. when someone tries to send a Fedex to my PO Box – yes – that still happens), but I generally ignore the fact that I’m theoretically off the grid since I have a T1 line coming into my house (thanks Qwest).

I got an email from Vonage today that they had completed 911 Dialing activation for my Vonage line. That’s good, I guess. However, even though my phone number is a (303) number (Colorado), they had my Alaska address on the 911 alert. I have no idea how they picked this address since both my Billing Address and Shipping Address on Vonage are Colorado addresses (not my home address – a PO Box.)

Jeff Bussgang – a GP at IDG Ventures in Boston – has a good post up on the dynamics – from both an entrepreneurs perspective and a VC perspective – on syndicating deals.

I invested in Judy’s Book around Thanksgiving and wrote a long post about why I made the investment. Earlier this week, Judy’s Book rolled out a major release which we’ve been fondly referring to “the facelift.” The front end is significantly changed (and improved based on user feedback) as are a bunch of things under the hood. In addition – like many good “early versions” – there were a lot of architectural changes made to make it much easier to rapidly roll out new functionality now that we have a pretty good sense of where we are going.

StillSecure – a company that I’ve been an investor in since 2000 – had a great week. Raj Bhargava – the CEO – and I are close friends who have worked on five companies together going back a decade to NetGenesis – a company Raj co-founded that I was the first angel investor in with Will Herman. StillSecure plays in the highly competitive security software market. They’ve got a family of three products that are nicely integrated – VAM (Vulnerability Management), Safe Access (Network access control / endpoint security), and Strata Guard (IDS/IPS). All three products are well regarded and have been reviewed heavily. On Tuesday night, we found out that StillSecure’s Safe Access was chosen over six other finalists for the SC Magazine Readers Choice Award for Best Endpoint Security Product.

What’s not to like about the following lead in for an article: What Toyota did for cars and Dell did for computers is what Rally Software hopes to do for application development. Rally Software released their new versions of their software life-cycle management solutions for agile development on February 13th. We had a board meeting yesterday and the first slide of the meeting was a recently received very large check from a customer. Nothing like setting the tone nicely!