The FeedDemon 2.0 Beta is officially up and ready for action. As a special bonus, I got the alpha of NewsGator Outlook Edition 2.6 today (2.6.1.129) loaded with new features and appearing to be very stable. I’ve got FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 1 syncing with NewsGator Online syncing with NewsGator Outlook 2.6 Alpha – all my read / unread states are being synced perfectly, I can modify a feed on one and have it ripple through, and all the platforms are running very quickly right now. 

One of my favorite entrepreneurial lines is “man – that was worse than going to the proctologist.” It you need to understand this concept more graphically, my good friend Renee Berberian has a solid explanation.

I love it when I stumble upon new uses for features from companies that I’m an investor in. This just happened with Technorati Mini. While it’s a relatively new feature, I’ve known about it since inception and have played with it some. However, I never really dug it until last week when my friends at FeedBurner say that they have it up on their screens all day when they make an announcement to see how it spreads throughout the blogosphere. 

I got a note from an entrepreneur (Steven Livingstone) who is pondering polyphasic sleep and asked the question: I’ve just blogged something looking for advice from successful people on sleeping patterns as an entrepreneur. I haven’t read much (if anything) on this and wondered whether you have an opinion on it. Being clueless on what polyphasic sleep meant, I was fortunately that Wikipedia exists. Stephen’s post pointed me to Steve Pavlina’s site where he’s 80+ days into a polyphasic sleep experiment. I was immediately intrigued because I’ve always been fascinated by sleep. Pavlina has a bunch of great writing on this – start on his Day 60 post and go to the older diary posts. Wacky.

Following is a question that I got from a reader of this blog on Friday. “I have wondered about the dynamics of a restart company and how it affects employees, options and the dynamics between existing money and new money. My company took about 30MM during the boom years, did not get anywhere, and there was a restart financing round for a new product/market. However, I feel a “bad” history has an overhang even in a company’s new life. “

I heard there was a performance by a legendary band called Full Ratchet in Atherton last week. Can you identify the members of the band? They were joined (or maybe they joined) Thomas Dolby who has been practicing ferociously for his upcoming tour. Have you been Blinded by Science lately?

I get a lot of questions about “the best entrepreneurship / venture capital books.” Q106 promises to be a good quarter for them as Tom Evslin’s hackoff.com: An Historic Murder Mystery set in the Internet Bubble and Rubble ships, followed shortly by Tom Perkins’ Sex and the Single Zillionaire: A Novel. The Tom’s are both well known in entrepreneurial circles – Evslin for his most recent company ITXC and Perkins for being one of the founders of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. While Evslin has been innovative in publishing his book on the web in advance, Perkins has taken a more traditional approach, including a fun puff story in the Wall Street Journal. 

I bet you can guess what I’m doing tonight.

Terry Gold – CEO of Gold Systems – has a great post up about his experience with speech recognition on the Palm 700W (and yes – he finds some documentation errors on the Microsoft website.) Terry has been working with the application of speech recognition to computing – both at a business and consumer level – for as long as I’ve known him and – if you are interested in this area – he’s a guy you should know and keep track of.