Western Union announced on Friday, 1/27/06, that the age of the telegram had officially ended. The Western Union website has the following comment on it. Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative. Presumably they don’t expect you to contact them via telegram (they provide a nice email form, physical mail, and a bunch of 800 numbers.) I imagine that someday in the future a similar message will go out on some other communication medium about “the death of email.” I wonder how that’s going to work.

George Gombas passed away yesterday. While you probably don’t know George, he was an entrepreneur with a big mind and an incredibly big heart. I first met George when he and his co-founder Steve Buck were pitching me – in 2001 – on the idea of a company they had created called Npulse. George, Steve, and a band of a few others had some really big ideas around monitoring, measuring, and managing application activity on the web. I was interested and immediately liked George and Steve, but suggested they spend some time refining the idea with Ben Wen who was working for me at the time.

I’m not a news breaker (I’ll leave that to guys like Mike Arrington and Om Malik) but I just noticed an announcement that I expect will get a lot of blog time tomorrow. Fon – a wireless startup in Spain – has landed $21.7m from Skype, Google, Sequoia, and Index Ventures. The Skype guys have a post up, Martin Varsavsky from Fon has his thoughts up, and Dan Gillmore – a US advisory board member for Fon has his thoughts up on Bayosphere. This will undoubtably land on the top of Tech.Memorandum on Monday.

Tom Evslin – founder/CEO of ITXC and author of hackoff.com – has started writing a series called “VC Primer from an Entrepreneur’s POV.” His audience is “an entrepreneur who hasn’t had VC funding – even a wannabe entrepreneur – read on. These posts are for you. “

I’ve been an unabashed supporter of Tom Evslin’s blook (online book) hackoff.com – An Historic Murdery Mystery Set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble. I’ve been reading it over the past few months as each episode (somewhere between 1/3rd and 1/8th of a chapter is published.) Each morning, one of the first things I read in FeedDemon is the latest episode, often with a smile on my face. As a result, I’ve gotten to know Tom’s publisher Kelly Evans at dotHill Press. She recently invited me to participate in an online book tour that she is doing by interviewing one of the writers on the tour. I read through the list and decided to interview Mark Leslie – who is a blogger in addition to being a writer – about the blook he is currently working on called “I, Death” – A Serial Thriller In Blog Format. The questions are mine, the answers are Mark’s.

Unless you don’t watch TV, don’t read the newspaper, and don’t watch Oprah (or you live under a rock), you have probably heard something about the James Frey / Oprah memoir lying thing. A few days after the rumors of this initially broke – and before Frey publicly admitted he was lying about some of the events in his books, I wrote that James Frey Should Not Be Hung Out To Dry.

Just Say No To Microsoft is a mandatory read if you fall into one of the following three categories: 1. Someone who wants to switch from Microsoft-based software to something else. 2. Someone who creates software that competes with Microsoft products. 3. Every single Microsoft employee. As you might expect, there’s plenty of snarky stuff in a book with a title of Just Say No To Microsoft. However, it’s extremely well organized, technically deep while being accessible to mainstream computer users, and often very entertaining. 

With a title like Sex and the Single Zillionaire, it’s either going to be really good or really bad. This isn’t my typical genre of mental floss, but since it is the first novel written by Tom Perkins, the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, I decided it couldn’t be missed. The dust cover got me started nicely with Rupert Murdoch weighing in with “Fun, fast – a great read!” and Newsweek commenting “Loved the sex scenes.” When Amy saw me pick it up last night, she said, “Tom Perkins – isn’t that Danielle Steel’s ex-husband?”

I’m becoming addicted to Eminem. I had a huge breakthrough when I started thinking of it as poetry instead of music, at which point I started liking the tunes. It helped to have a little Dido tossed in for good measure. I haven’t decided yet whether or not this new addiction is a good thing.