A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

First off, we are surving the 2012 Snowpocalypse. Office traffic is light but folks are here.

On the business front, it was announced that we led a round in Symplified. Great company building some pretty essential tools to manage employee identity and engagement across the web, can’t imagine how companies manage their voice and presence without this.

We also joined the investor group behind Whiptail, who build high-scale SSD arrays to replace spinning disks. Spinning disks — seems like we will look back at these in 100 years and laugh, or at least class them as a steampunk kind of gadget.

Excited to work with both companies.

Also of note today is Bluestacks’ winning the CES best software award, and Splunk’s filing. Congrats to both teams on their progress.

One of the companies in our portfolio, Korrio, is bringing out tools to allow parents to monitor the brain health of their child athletes. This is a great step, I wish this had been around when we had young student athletes in the family. You don’t have to dig around very much to see the frightful effects of head impacts in sports, and anything that raises awareness of the issue and provides tools to manage is a very good thing. There is a lot more to do, I’d love to see impact monitors in helmets that track instantaneous and cumulative impact forces, but this is a great first step, awesome to see this work happening.

Rand details his recent fund raising experience. The guy is admirably open, much to learn from this.

I’m not sure I have it in me to be that open — partly thru painful experience, partly my bias that information advantages are valuable (which makes me sound like a jerk compared to Rand, which may be true). But Rand’s approach is inspiring and motivating.

I’ve fallen out of the habit of talking about Ignition portfolio news up here, but it has been a busy week and I am re-motivated to talk about some of these companies.

• Bromium has a great team and working in an exciting spacen — the intersection of security, cloud computing, and virtualization. I am very interested to see how this team evolves, I can personally see myself using their technology. 
• Continuing in the cloud space, ScaleExtreme is making it really simple to manage all your servers in the cloud, I am also excited to try this out. And check out the super sweet pic of Frank in this press piece!
• StorSimple integrates enterprise storage with the cloud, giving the benefits of local storage performance and cloud backup/archiving/tiered storage. Probably not something I can ever personally use, but a great space to be in.
• In a whole different direction, Glympse lets you share your location with friends and family. I’m not a big public checkin user (foursquare, etc), but keeping family and close friends up to date with my location is a lot more compelling to me. Great team and a nice intersection of our software and mobile investment biases.

Why Seattle VCs don’t blog – TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source — John Cook wonders why we don’t blog. Obviously some of us do — myself, Rich. We do it for personal reasons, not motivated by our business — we’d be blogging if we were still at MSFT, if we were running a vinyard, etc. As such, our blogs reflect 85% our personal interests and a little bit of business interest.

John asserts that “…there’s opportunity for a VC in town to explain what is really going on in the venture industry in clear and concise terms with no BS…“ However, this is not our business. Our business is investing, and to motivate a VC-focused blog, you’d have to be convinced that such a blog would a) improve your deal flow, or b) improve your exits. Not obvious to me at all.

Additionally you’d have to be certain you could sustain the blog — the examples of abandoned blogs that John mentions seems to be a bad outcome.

Had a great father’s day, got some cool photo tools, some books that look great, and a couple of games since I have played Left4Dead and Fallout3 to death. Here’s some stuff I didn’t get and probably for good reason.

Physical Stuff:

• Faux fountains via Scott Loftesness. Cool looking and an inspiration for Halloween.
• IP PBX tips for home. I was all excited about this several years ago but increasingly not so…having resident phone technology seems so backwards
• Projects Watches wristwatches. Cool looking but increasingly I have given up on wristwatches.
• Television emulator. I don’t know, I think the dogs would prefer to watch real TV.
• Olympus PEN. Having just hauled the Canon up and down a mountain Sunday morning, the idea of a smaller form factor camera with great lenses is appealing.
• Super Duper Denon pre-amp. Just can’t face all the cabling problems tho of disconnecting my current and connecting in a new.

Virtual Stuff:
* Mint.com. Like the idea of automated analysis of my financials, but I am just not going to give another party access to all my financial credentials. They should license these tools to financial service firms for use on their own websites.
* Cisco Network Magic. Nice review. Congrats to the former Pure Networks team.
* Filemaker Bento iPhone app. I regularly get sucked into thinking I need a database and this app is sucking me in again. I know tho I will enter 7 records and abandon the damn thing so I am holding off.

Cougar Mountain photos on Fotopedia – The Photo Encyclopedia — OK this is my first whack at this. I am not certain where Fotopedia will fit in my current suite of photo production and management tools (Canon Digital Photo Pro, Aperture, occasional Photoshop, Smugmug), but it is a great site and a veyr nice piece of client software. The integration with Aperture is nice. Hats off to the Fotopedia team (we are an investor).

• Advertising Opt Out | Tongfamily.com.  Done, not sure it will really make a difference
• Attaching sigs to PDFs.  Good stuff.
• URL shortcuts on iphone — hugely helpful
• ANd more iphone tips — Sleep+Home to take a screen shot
• Adeona.  Installed

Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Pure Networks: Financial News – Yahoo Finance.  Congrats to Pure Networks team, to Pure alums, Pure investors, and Cisco for getting a great asset.  Good luck guys!

Greentech Media | Fat Spaniel Launches Open Platform.  Congrats guys.  One nice example of the platform use here — another here — a bunch of these up on the fat spaniel site

up at PC Mag –

But Linksys needs to do some work before getting LELA 3.0 for free beats spending $49 for Network Magic .

GreenPDF has a ton of info about the carbon costs of paper, fun to read. i am not sure why they commingle the message with PDF adoption, that seems strange, but the numbers are fun. we’ve invested in a couple companies that combat the use of paper — Docusign, Earth Class Mail — so I feel kind of good that we are helping to fight the good fight

Seattle Startup Index here — thanks Marcelo — some good Ignition portfolio representation but kind of sad we missed out on Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?

PC Magazine coverage and ehomeupgrade coverage of latest Network Magic releases — love playing around with SpeedMeter Pro…congrats guys

• bcurtisBLOG » People are talking about water… — nice chart on where all our water goes. Only 13% for household use. A huge amount to thermoelectric power generation.
• Tom Evslin on energy policy. Great points — we need a country-wide BHAG with respect to energy — an Apollo-type program. And the government can lead through its own purchasing policies.
• Small scalable wind turbines — pretty cool looking.
• One man’s experience with solar thermal here in Seattle — the numbers look good.
• Ten fastest green cars on the planet — Karl’s car looks awesome
• REI trialing solar — I wonder if Fat Spaniel is part of the setup
• Solar shingles — love this idea, embedding green technology right into structural materials

‘Power 10′ ranking of top cleantech companies | Green Tech – CNET News.com — great company to be in!

Plugging into your system’s vital signs – San Jose Mercury News — nice coverage on Fat Spaniel today

Pure Networks – Software for Wired and Wireless Networks — cool router reset gadget.

Network Magic Coupons ~ Chris Pirillo — not sure where Chris found these but glad to see them!