As part of my running habit, I typically run on a treadmill in the winter when I travel to a cold city (it’s just a lot easier than schlepping warm clothes around and finding my way around a strange city in the dark.) I woke up in Chicago today, headed downstairs to the “fitness room”, and spent some time on the treadmill. Usually I’d watch a movie or MTV, but neither was happening on the TV attached to the treadmill so I ended up being stuck with CNBC. Closed captioning was on because of the little sign on the TV that said “get headphones from the front desk” which was five floors below me and I was already a minute into my run when I figured out that a headset wasn’t going to magically appear (I guess I wasn’t the first person to be perplexed that there were no headphones easily available.)

A few days ago a Technorati watchlist for Quova turned up an article by The Register about their November 2005 circulation numbers. While The Register announced that they crossed the 4m unique threshold for the month (as audited by ABCe), I was more excited to see them quote their distribution of readers by country according to Quova. While this is a very simplistic use Quova’s technology, it made me think back to the mid-1990’s when I was on the netGenesis and I/Pro boards and I first pondered the analog analog of magazine circulation as applied to the web. At the time, this was really hard data to pull together with any accuracy, especially at the geography level, and I remember talking about different approaches beyond simply parsing HTTP_REFERED to get the country code in the URL.

Yesterday Oracle has a major set of presentations around its new Fusion platform to help celebrate the Fusion project’s one year anniversary. The headline for the event was “Oracle is halfway to Fusion.” This is a huge deal as it’s the base for Oracle’s integration of a number of disparate products and technologies from the acquisitions they’ve done in the past two years (PeopleSoft / JD Edwards and Siebel being the most notable.)

My current favorite 24 gossip site has an awesome description of Jack Bauer’s terrorist destroying Treo 650. This is no ordinary Treo – not only does it blow up terrorists, it also takes really awesome photos (much better than any Treo I’ve ever seen.) I’m guessing this is the new model, the Treo 650KA (“kick ass”).

Tim Wolters has written a post on anti-dilution clauses from an entrepreneurs point of view. Tim promises to write more on other terms like liquidation preferences, reverse vesting, dividends, class voting rights, “and any other terms that have bitten [him] on the ass before.” Tim is co-founder and CTO of Collective Intellect, a new company that just recently closed a Series A funding. He was previously the co-founder and CTO of Dante Group, a company I funded that was acquired by webMethods. Expect straight talk and some good insights from Tim.

USA Today has a great profile up of Ben Casnocha. Having known Ben for a couple of years, it’s an accurate (and inspiring) profile of him rather than an overreaching ego puff piece. If you don’t know Ben, he’s a remarkable young man who writes prolifically on his blog about his thoughts, life, ideas and experiences and a teenager, entrepreneur, and thinker. I was first introduced to Ben by Greg Prow. Greg pulled me aside one day and said “hey Brad – you’ve got to meet this kid – he makes me think of what I bet you were like as a teenager.” I responded that I hoped this wasn’t true for Ben’s parents’ sake, but that I’d be happy to get together with him. We had our first meeting a month or so later – which was a presentation on Comcate (Ben’s company). 

Apparently, yes.

David Jackson is now putting up conference call transcripts on his Seeking Alpha blog. He’s got a feed up that you can subscribe to for your daily dose of earnings call entertainment (and some of them are very funny.) Plus you can quickly get an extra dose of Overstock. Paul Kedrosky re-enforces the potential humor value with an old Mary Meeker question on a Microsoft Q2 2003 call.

I just received a memo from a name-brand Silicon Valley law firm in response to a board discussion that I was part of about 409A (the company granted some options today, obligatory 409A discussion ensued.) While I’m sure the law firm in question was trying to be helpful, the first paragraph of the memo says “But section 409A does not apply to Incentive stock options, or “ISOs”. Grrr. While this may be factually correct, it’s a logically false statement. The memo goes on to correct this notion on the bottom of the second page, ending with “Therefore, it will be advisable in the future to use care when valuing Common Stock, regardless of whether the options being granted are ISOs or NSOs.” Ok – thanks – but most entrepreneurs aren’t going to read past the first page!