I sat through about 20 PowerPoint presentations yesterday (feel free to snicker now.) As I was sitting in the audience, I noticed one thing that kept annoying me. A number of the presentations said Copyright “SOMETHING_OTHER_THAN_2004” in the footer. I’ve noticed this a lot recently, as footers seems to have “Copyright 2002”, “Copyright 11/02” or simply “4/12/03”. You’d think that PowerPoint would have an autocorrect rule for “Copyright.” I know this borders on “nerd pet peeves”, but there you have it. There’s only one correct way to copyright something – it’s “© YEAR Company_Name.” If the presentation contains multiple years of work, then you should include both the first year of copyrightable material to current day (e.g. © 2002-2004 Company_Name).

EDS put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes yesterday when they created the EDS Agilty Alliance. Foes: IBM and HP. Friends: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Xerox (listed in alphabetical order presumably not to indicate any preference.) When EDS acquired The Feld Group at the beginning of the year, Charlie Feld became EVP Portfolio Management – think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS’s case.) One of Charlie’s classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout of technology. I remember a few examples of the top of my head – he did this at Frito-Lay with IBM (I think at one point, Frito-Lay was one of the largest users of OS/2 in the world) and Delta with Tibco.

NewsGator released a new version of NewsGator Online – their web-based RSS aggregator. This version is free to consumers and includes new features including folders (manage all your feeds the same way you do in Outlook), per-post rating system, feed recommendations based on what you read, clippings (to save your favorite posts with one click), and smart feed enhancements including converting email-based alerts to RSS. NewsGator Online includes subscription level synchronization with NewsGator Outlook Edition, allowing you to manage one set of feeds across multiple machines (I have four different computers, plus the web version with synchronized feeds.) As a result, I don’t have to worry about making sure my feeds are the same on all machines – whenever I change something on one machine (in Outlook or on the web), it synchronizes to the other machines.

I screwed up. I was involved in a merger of two companies in Q4 last year. Post merger, I let both companies slip on completing their audits. I figured we’d do the 2003 combined audit after audit season. In an attempt to save money, the company let it slide into the fall. This isn’t a governance issue – I’m comfortable that both companies are clean – it’s a timing issue – we figured we’d get it done later in the year to save money and just hadn’t gotten around to it.

According to my mom, this is a “brag”, not a “blog”. Deloitte & Touche has an annual “Colorado Technology Fast 50” ranking. They rank the top 50 technology companies in Colorado based on their revenue growth over the previous five years. This year four Mobius-related companies made the list. I’m obviously proud of all of them. #2 ServiceMagic: 5500% growth. IAC acquired ServiceMagic in July. We invested in 1999 – ServiceMagic had “a little” revenue then. ServiceMagic was every VCs dream – they defined “hockey stick growth” – once they found it (in 2002) there was no stopping them.

Amy and I spent the weekend in New Hampshire. We stayed at a Stepping Stones – a bed and breakfast we used to stay at regularly when we lived in Boston – and hung out, read, slept, and looked at leaves. Once we crossed the New Hampshire border (from Boston – where we spent the night at XV Beacon – one of my favorite hotels in the world), we saw plenty of pumkins, corn, and leaves (yellow, orange, and red). However, my Sidekick immediately stopped working since apparently New Hampshire doesn’t have any cell phone towers (according to the locals.) Our B&B didn’t have high speed Internet either, so I decided to punt on email for the long weekend and read instead.

I gave a lecture on “Profitable Exiting” at the 30th Annual Venture Capital Institute in Atlanta on Tuesday. This is the major professional education event for the venture capital industry, co-sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and the National Association of Small Business Investment Companies (NASBIC). I had never been to a VCI event and didn’t really know what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised – I sat through several high quality lectures from very credible folks – aimed at an audience of 180 or so VCs. Most of the attendees were younger and/or relatively new to the venture business, although there were a number of corporate VCs in the audience also. The VCI event was extremely well organized and the content was substantial – covering a wide range of issues faced by VC firms and entrepreneurs. I was pleased to be involved in what I thought was successful event that definitely helps educate new VCs on the business they are in.

Several months ago, I posted an article that I’d written for the Kauffman Foundation’s Entreworld web site called “Financial Fitness for Entrepreneurs.” It discussed some of the basic financial issues entrepreneurs starting a company should pay attention to. ChangeThis just republished the article as one of their manifestos. It’s in a very friendly format – if you liked it, please feel free to circulate it. If you haven’t read it, take a look. And – if you have any comments about topics you think I missed, feel free to post them here or email them to me.

Ed Roberto – CEO of Newmerix – has started a blog. He joins Matt Blumberg (Return Path), Jim Lejeal (Oxlo), and JB Holston (NewsGator) as CEO bloggers in my current portfolio. I’ve added Ed to the CEOBlogList – which is a fun evolving list of CEO bloggers. I’ve known and worked with Ed since 1998. I fondly recall the first time we met – at Dot’s Diner on the Hill in Boulder. We got together to talk about starting a company to buy up ISPs throughout Asia. Ed ended up co-founding this company – called Asia Online – which we funded with a host of other VCs. Ed was the M&A guy – we bought about 25 companies in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, and India – putting together a $50m (going to $100m) south Asia-based ISP (we were the biggest ISP in Australia for a while.) CSFB was in the process of taking the company public in the summer of 2000 when the bottom finally completely fell out of the IPO market.