Technology

I’m officially in the daily deal business. Check out my new “Brad Feld’s Amazing Deals” store and shop online for some outdoor gear from Giantnerd.com . Rather than simply observe new things, I like to use them. I’ve been keeping an eye on the daily deal phenomenon and have had an opportunity to explore it in more detail mentoring Deal Co-op, a TechStars Seattle team. Deal Co-op is in the program via Alabama and has been running a profitable online deal company for the last three years. During one of our weekly mentoring meetings, they told me they could turn anyone with good business contacts and an online audience into their own Groupon. They asked me if I knew anyone that fit the bill, and I told them I did… me! ...

While at the amazing Tahoe Tech Talk, I heard Dave Morin mention a new service called Letter.ly . It’s a great example of brilliance through its simplicity. In my never ending quest to use all the things I find interesting, I’ve started an email newsletter called Feld On Work-Life Balance. While I periodically post on Work-Life Balance, Amy and I are working on a book called The Startup Marriage. There is also a chapter on Work-Life Balance in the book David Cohen and I just wrote called Do More Faster . This is a topic that’s long been important and interesting to me, especially as I travel around explaining to my completely unbalanced friends how they are actually balanced and they just don’t realize it yet. ...

About a month ago I wrote a post titled Trying Gmail For A Week . I haven’t thought about Outlook, Entourage, or Mac Mail for a month and I don’t think I’m ever going back. It took about a week to rewire my brain for how conversations worked and what the keyboard shortcuts were, but not that I’m there it’s just awesome. A few weeks ago Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Inbox Zero . In it he mentioned two Gmail services he found indispensable – Priority Inbox (from Google) and Unsubscribe.com (from James Siminoff who created Phonetag , another great service.) I agree with Fred on both of these, but have discovered a few extra things that are killer. I’ll list them below and for balance talk about a few shortcomings. ...

Now that my Apple and Google experiments have been huge successes, I thought I’d try an Android phone one more time. I like my iPhone 4, but it’s pretty weak with all the Google apps. Specifically, I badly want better contact integration, clean email sync, and Google voice. Plus, AT&T still blows in Boulder. Any suggestions out there for the “best Android out there today.” I was using a Sprint EVO for a while (and liked it a lot) until it was stolen by my assistant Kelly. So, I open to any choice – suggest away.

Every major software or web company I’ve ever been involved in has had a catastrophic outage of some sort. I view it as a rite of passage – when this happens when your company is young and no one notices, it gives you a chance to get better. But eventually you’ll have one when you are big enough for people to notice. How you handle it and what you learn from speaks volumes about your future. ...

Sometimes Colbert is priceless. Well – most of the time. This one had Amy and I laughing hard today. Enjoy your five minute break from monitoring your social media and email to see if something important is going on. Matt Galligan reminded me that this is oddly reminiscent of SocialThing’s TechStars Demo Day. The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Word – Control-Self-Delete www.colbertnation.com ...

I’m banging away on a bunch of new things these days. I’ve happily switched to a Mac, am halfway through my week of Gmail, and am contemplating what new thing to try next week. I’ve always been a tech junky and love to play with new stuff. I’m quick to set up an account on a new web service and try it. It’s the best way for me to understand something – much better than an executive summary or a presentation. ...

In 2009, the word that finally got on my nerves was “space”, as in “our product is in the X space” or “the space we are going after is X.” It seems like the word “space” managed to find its way into every paragraph. The annoying word of 2010 appears to be “platform”, as in “we are going to be a platform for X” or “our platform for X will solve the following problems.” ...

I had a new experience today. At 7am I had my first MRI at the Boulder Community Hospital . I was a little nervous, although I’m not entirely sure why. I was in and out in 45 minutes – it was fascinating. I hurt my lower back about five months ago (actually, exactly on March 13th at about 1pm at my parents house in Dallas). I went for a two hour run and then took my dad to Fry’s for his birthday to buy him a new color printer. As I unloaded the printer from the car, I lifted correctly, but then twisted left and immediately knew I’d screwed myself. I rested a week and started running again in advance of a marathon in mid-April in St. Louis. I had a great three hour run in Charlotte the first week of April and thought I was ready to roll. Amy and I drove to Santa Fe the following weekend; when I got out of the car when we got back to Boulder I had enormous lower back pain. I got a massage the next day (big mistake) and when I woke up Tuesday morning in a hotel room in Seattle I couldn’t get up off the toilet, nor could I completely straighten up. Four weeks of rest and three months of intermittent running with regular recurrence of back pain in the same spot after a few days caused me to finally decide that I’m hurt and need to figure out what’s going on. ...

Ever since I switched to the Mac, I’ve had N (where N is a suitably large number) tell me that I should switch to Gmail from Exchange. I finally decided to try it for a week and see if it works for me. Given my Mac experience – where I had to commit and really use it, I’ve decided to do the same on Gmail. For now, I’m just going to use Gmail (instead of Google Apps) because I don’t want to go through the hell of switching the feld.com domain since I’ve got a bunch of other people (e.g. my family members) on it in a variety of configurations. That’ll limit me a little as I won’t be able to use the Apps Marketplace, but the benefit is I’ll be able to mess around with a variety of other Gmail stuff. ...