I was on a board call for a company today where we talked about “acceptable downtime” for their web-based service. This company has commercial customers that depend on its software to run their businesses and the software in question is delivered “as a service.” I’ve got a number of companies using this approach (vs. a straight software license approach) and I have a lot of experience with this issue dating back to investments in the 1990’s in Critical Path, Raindance, and Service Metrics.

Hysterical – John Travolta looks damn good as a bunny. Uma Thurman – not so good. Hat tip to David Beisel.

Killing Rain by Barry Eisler was dynamite. I continue to make one step forward and two steps backward through my shelves of unread books (Amazon delivers more than I consume.) After every few books I resort to pure mental floss – Eisler’s series on assassin John Rain is spectacular summer reading. When Killing Rain showed up via Dan the UPS Man, Amy grabbed it and wouldn’t give it up until she finished it. It’s the fourth book in the series – if you haven’t read the others, you must start with Rain Fall, the first in the series. The flyleaf review from Entertainment Weekly – usually shoddy stuff – is very accurate this time:

Spam is one of the flagship members of the Internet Axis of Evil – it sucks worse than War of the Worlds. I’ve been supporting the war against spam through my investments in Postini and Return Path and I plan to continue to do whatever I can to help eradicate this scourge from Planet Internet. While it would be nice if spam just disappeared, it’s not going to anytime soon. So – in addition to attacking spam, it’s time to really address the “legitimate email issue.” Return Path has been after this for a while and just released a new version of their email delivery monitoring tools. Today – TRUSTe (a non-profit dedicated to online privacy issues) launched an “Email Privacy Seal Program” – members of this program can confidently say “We Don’t Spam.”

So, earlier tonight, I turned to Amy with a twinkle in my eye and watched as she stared intently at something that looked suspiciously like Typepad on her monitor. The following conversation ensued: Brad: “Hey, Atom 1.0 is out.” Amy: “Adam Who?” Brad: “Atom 1.0 – the new feed format.” Amy: “I thought that was RSS.” Brad: “Yeah, yeah, there’s this other format called Atom that … (long unnecessary technical explanation followed).” Amy: “Uh huhnnnhh” Brad: “Stop playing with your blog – this is important.” Amy: “So – what does it mean – what do I have to do differently?” Brad: “Heheh – nothing – because you use FeedBurner and they automagically will format your feed for Atom 1.0 if it makes sense.” Amy: “Brad – you are such a nerd.” (As she continued typing on her computer).

BMC Software – a company that has been around for 25 years and has a major software footprint – announced today that they are using Rally Software’s lifecycle management software and Agile consulting services. This follows Rally’s announcements last week around Release 5 of their Agile software lifecycle management product. While BMC and Rally just announced this deal, BMC has been using Rally since the end of last year and the rollout and implementation has been superb. The BMC announcement is a big deal – it’s the first of several major software companies to have adopted Rally’s software tools.

About 20 days after the end of each quarter, Ernst & Young/VentureOne releases a survey on venture capital funding. At about the same time, PWC releases their similar survey (MoneyTree). A rash of articles are written over the weekend and usually hit first thing Monday in the business section of newspapers around the country (and – shockingly – in blogs) covering funding nationally, by city, and by market segment. On Friday, I got a call from Ross Wehner, a Denver Post staff writer who I like. He was calling to get my thoughts on the “numbers for the quarter.” After ascertaining which numbers Ross was talking about (it was a beautiful Friday afternoon in Homer, Alaska – I was not thinking about the E&Y / VentureOne survey), the conversation went something like:

I’m going to keep tonight’s term sheet post short and sweet, especially since I’m still reeling from the horrifyingly bad War of the World movie I just saw. Jason and I are almost done with the term sheet series (yeah, we know we keep promising that) but – like the Spielberg tragicomedy I just watched, it’s not over until it’s over (sorry – that cliche just snuck its way in – I was helpless against it – the aliens made me do it.)

I just wasted two hours of my life. At least I got to sit next to Amy and eat popcorn. As I’ve said in the past, we get two movies a week in Homer. Friday morning comes with great anticipation as we drive past the theater marque (on the corner of Main Street and Pioneer – how fitting) to see what we get to enjoy next. This week is War of the Worlds and Bewitched and I had low hopes for both of them. Since we don’t have a TV here, this is all we are going to get this week (no – I haven’t broken down to watching movies on my laptop yet.)