I periodically get questions from readers of this blog about business plans. I was pondering the best way to work through a “business plan series” (similar to the Term Sheet series and Letter of Intent series) when Dave Jilk – my partner in Feld Technologies (my first company) – dropped a few documents on my desk, including the original Feld Technologies business plan. A scanner, Adobe Acrobat PDF maker, and a little OCR later, I had the document in electronic format. 

So Brad was pretty bored by my first two reviews so I figured I’d tackle something a bit more complex this time around, the Roku PhotoBridge HD. In short the PhotoBridge HD allows you to stream audio, video, and pictures from PC’s connected to your network to your television/home theater – all in high definition, or at least that’s the idea. I got my PhotoBridge back in June while I was recovering from surgery. I was excited to get it as I’d been following this class of product for quite a while. I specifically wanted the PhotoBridge as it was the first (and only at the time) device that would stream video in HD – something that was key to me to use with my new plasma TV.

An MIT study delves into the reality of Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanies. Is it a great innovation? Is it a government plot? Is the FCC involved in some way? Or – is mind control in our future?

Dave Jilk passed on this article by Dominic Humphries explaining why Linux is Not Windows. The analogy that starts off the article is perfect: Linux <=> Windows is like Motorbikes <=> Cars: Both are vehicles that get you from A to B via the roads. But they’re different shapes, different sizes, have different controls, and they work in fundamentally different ways. They are not freely interchangeable. They have different uses and different strengths & weaknesses, and you should pick whichever is appropriate, not pick one and expect it to do everything that the other can do.

Dick Costolo – the CEO of FeedBurner – sent me a link to this great photo last night. FeedBurner exhibited at the Portable Media Expo & Podcasting Conference 2005 this weekend in Los Angeles and invited publishers using FeedBurner to sign the banner in the booth. This is what it looked like after the first day. I love it. These are just a few of the 139,039 feeds (including 24,669 podcasts) from 92,068 publishers that FeedBurner manages as of mid-week last week (11/09/05).

As a kid, my parents used to have a monthly gourmet group with a group of friends (they are still doing it monthly 35 years later) where they got together, cooked a fancy meal, and sat around late into the night talking. We joined up with about 15 friends several years ago and started a similar tradition in Boulder – we get together about six times a year for a fantastic evening we call Chez Gourmet.

I can’t stand fluorescent lights. I literally can’t sit in a room with them on for very long without noticing them. For years, people walk by wherever I’m working and ask me if I like working in the dark (I’ve got a long list of catty responses – all various derivatives of “being in the dark.”) Yesterday, I was a judge at the DaVinci Institute’s A Night with the Visionaries. I thought it was going to be a strange way to spend a Friday evening, but I ended up having a great time and being completely blown away by the inventions and inventors that were competing. The evening was extremely well done and Thomas Frey who runs the DaVinci Institute should be proud on the event his organization put on.

Fred Wilson has an awesome blog on The VC’s Customer. The first few sentences summarize the post. Many of the people I know in the venture capital business think their customers are their investors, called LPs in the industry vernacular. I’ve always thought that was dead wrong. The entrepreneur is the customer and the LP is the shareholder. That’s the only way to think about the venture capital business that makes sense to me.

If you like listening to me to talk (hi mom) or are interested in search, Eric Olson has his second VentureWeek podcast titled “Search” up. This one only had two Dave’s on it (compared to three on the first one). David Hornik (August Capital), Dave McClure (SimplyHired.com), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) provided some useful content while I tried to ignore the idea that it was 11:30 at night on the east coast and time for me to go to bed.