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!

I always get a kick out of someone finding a Google easter egg in the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search option. Today’s was particularly amusing, especially given some of the recent tangles Google has been having with various governments around the world. Try the following: Go to Google Type the word asshole into the search box Click on “I’m Feeling Lucky” I wonder how long that link is going to stay live. As with my earlier post on the The Cynical State of The Union Address, if you like our president or are a fan of our current administration, don’t both with this – it’ll just piss you off.

Some days I feel like I’m juggling a lot of stuff – today is one of them. My partner Greg sent me a very timely email of a video of Chris Bliss juggling. The guy is absolutely remarkable, plus you get a good Beatles song out of it. I need to hire this guy to help me juggle.

If you aren’t happy with our president, you’ll get a good laugh out of this. If you are happy with the president, the current information, and the coverage you get on Fox News, please don’t look at it – it’ll just piss you off.

Valentines Day is one of those holidays that guys consistently screw up. One year it’s great; one year it’s not. Fortunately, Wikipedia has a wonderfully long history of it, which just makes me think the people at Hallmark love this holiday. Several years ago, a guy name Tom Birdsey created a comparable holiday for men. Since I’m a vegetarian, it’s only partly relevant for me. So – this morning – after 9 inches of snow last night, I emerged from the shower, got dressed, and wandered down stairs to clean the snow off my car so I could drive into the office. Amy was out there cleaning it off – when I shouted out the door “thanks – you’re awesome” – she responded with “happy steak and bj day.” Amy – you rock.

If you are in Boulder on February 21st and interested in blogging and RSS, the Boulder Software Club is putting on an event at Cooley Godward’s offices at 380 Interlocken Crescent, Suite 900 in Broomfield. The panelists are Howard Kaushansky (Umbria CEO), Greg Reinacker (NewsGator CTO), and Seth Levine (Mobius Venture Capital). Paul Gross from Cooley Godward is moderating. They’ll be covering the following topics: How can a company use the blogosphere to measure the buzz about itself and its competitors? Why RSS instead of e-mail – isn’t it just the same thing? Isn’t this just for bloggers? How have other companies used the blogosphere effectively? What are typical use-cases of RSS applied to the enterprise, what types of products are available to facilitate these use-cases and how do I get started? RSS sounds like another bubble – lots of companies getting funded that do something with RSS. Is there a business model in RSS and has there been too much investment here? Should my company have a blog? If you are interested, RSVP to sms@dimensional.com or call 303–642–7168.

One of my favorite examples of things newspapers do that baffles me is to print the stock tables every day. While I imagine there are a small number of people that continue to read these over the breakfast table, I can’t imagine the cost/benefit analysis of providing these in every local newspaper is worth it. Recently, there’s been a trend of newspapers deciding to dump the stock tables. Hint – there’s this thing called the Internet – you can get real time quotes for free all day long.

The following question appeared in my inbox the other day. “As you mention in this blog VCs never sign NDAs. Maybe you can also tell me why actually not? If I follow your blog does it mean that in most cases they simply want to check the startup out?” For starters, I’ll restate the assertion. Most VC’s don’t sign non-disclosure agreements. Guy Kawasaki had a good comment on it in his Venture Capitalist Wishlist post.