Adam Bosworth – one of the dudes behind a bunch of software products (including Borland Quattro, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Internet Explorer and BEA WebLogic application server), gave a brilliant speech at ICSOC04 which he posted on his weblog. He espouses his idea of KISS as it pertains to the Internet (and modifies it to “keep it simple and sloppy.”) It’s a must read for any exec of a software company.

My week felt like frame 3 of these pictures. Fortunately the weekend came just before frame 4.

A long time friend and entrepreneur – Terry Gold (Gold Systems CEO) – has started a blog. I met Terry several months after I moved to Boulder in 1995. As part of starting up the Colorado chapter of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization, I had an initial meet and greet event for at The Boulderado for about a dozen local entrepreneurs that were referred to me by a handful of lawyers and bankers that I’d met shortly after I’d moved. Terry – along with Paul Berberian – were part of the group that night.

I had a meeting yesterday with the VP of Consulting for one of my companies. The ostensible agenda for the meeting was to discuss how to accelerate their consulting / professional services business, which is a small, but growing and highly relevant part of what they do. As we got into the discussion, I realized that the construct of “consulting and professional services” was bothering me. A pet peeve of mine is that “consulting” and “professional services” are fundamentally different things, even though many people and companies interchange them. I once had a company that had a group called CompanyX Consulting and Professional Services – I could never figure out why we didn’t call it one thing or the other (CompanyX Consulting, or CompanyX Professional Services.)

I’ve been having this weird conversation lately. Last week, it happened again when I was being interviewed for an article titled Betting on Tools that Power Blogs in Businessweek Online. During the interview, the writer asked something like “so, why are you investing in this blogging thing where no one knows what the business model is yet.” My pithy reply, among others, was “Anybody in the industry who says people haven’t figured out how to make money on blogging is [are] being ridiculous.” After I hung up the phone, I went and banged my head against the wall a few times, fortunately missing the nail that was sticking out of a stud.

After sitting through five horrible previews, we totally dug The Incredibles. I imagine you’ll be hearing that plenty – if you haven’t seen it, go. I had to drag Amy (c’mon, can’t we go see Ray instead), but she was bouncing up and down as we left the theater.

Technorati came out with a major upgrade today. Dave Sifry listed the improvements here, so I won’t repeat them, but it’s worth checking out as the search engine and data are dramatically improved. Oh – and it’s much faster (and hopefully a lot more stable.)

This morning I hosted a presentation by the MIT Deshpande Center about their program to a group of Colorado VCs. I’m really excited about what the Deshpande Center is up to and will blog about that separately. Steve Halstedt from Centennial Ventures – a long time VC and one of the guys I’ve learned a lot from (we were both on the Raindance board together) – sat next to me and wrote the following down in the middle of the meeting and handed it to me.

One of my companies – Finali – announced today that they were acquired by Convergys. It continues to be a busy M&A time for us as public companies are definitely buying private companies again. Since the beginning of the summer, we’ve had a number of public companies acquire our portfolio companies, including Service Magic (by IAC/InterActiveCorp), Cyanea (by IBM), Dantz (by EMC), and now Finali (by Convergys.) Bob Burgin and his brother Dan started Finali in 1999 with the initial vision of creating a next generation customer care business. They grew it nicely through the bursting of the Internet bubble. However, in the last 18 months, the outsourced call center business (Finali’s original business) has come under extreme pricing pressure due to outsourcing trends to places like India and the Philippines. While we considered developing an offshore labor model (all of Finali’s employees are based in the US) our customers told us that they were much more interested in our call center analytics capabilities than our call center labor. As a result, Finali repositioned its business as a high-end call center analytics provider earlier this year.