The 2010 Glue Conference is a few months away (5/26/10 and 5/27/10).  Instead of happening in Denver, Eric is doing Glue at the Omni Interlocken Resort on the outskirts of Boulder.  For a taste, here are some of the speakers:

• Michael Barrett, CISO, PayPal
• Professor Eric Brewer, creator of the CAP Theorem
• Chris Hoff, Dir. of Cloud Solutions, Cisco
• Ryan Sarver, Dir. of Platform, Twitter
• Jonathan Ellis, Lead on the Cassandra project

Some of the sessions that are finalized include:

• The Cassandra Database: Inside Twitter’s Choice
• What’s up with OAuth/WRAP?
• 5 Things I Hate about your API Terms of Service
• The Apache Cloud Stack (Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, etc)
• App PaaS vs. Enhanced Cloud System Infrastructure
• Inside MongoDB: the internals of a NoSQL database
• Understanding User-managed Access

Take a look at the fuller speaker list and agenda if you want, but beware that it moves around a lot.  If you register for Glue now you can get an additional 10% off the early bird price of $525 if you register by 4/2/10 and use the discount code “twit1” (full price at the door is $695).  As a special bonus, CloudCamp at Denver is happening the day before Glue (5/25/10).  CloudCamp is free, but only 98 tickets are left. 

Sign up for both of them now.  I’ll be there for the whole shebang, along with my partners at Foundry Group.  Plus, May in Boulder is just awesome.  And be on the lookout for an announcement soon about a third conference that you’ll have to really focus on (yeah – inside joke – but you’ll appreciate it.)

Related posts:

1. Pitch Me At The Glue Conference
2. Glue – Our Sticky Theme
3. The Glue That Binds Things

Earlier today, Alan wrote an article on Standing Cloud titled Seeding the Cloud with Open Source, Standing Cloud Makes It Easy.  On Monday, Standing Cloud released their first version of their product (called the Trial Edition) which is a free version that lets you install and work with around 30 open source products on five different cloud service providers.  It’s the first step in a series of releases over the next two quarters that Standing Cloud has planned as they work create an environment where it is trivial to deploy and manage open source applications in the cloud.  Alan played around with Standing Cloud’s Trial Edition, totally understood what they are doing, and explained why the Trial Edition is interesting and where Standing Cloud is heading when they release their Community Edition at the end of April.

Alan’s also written several other articles about companies in our portfolio recently, including the open source work Gist has been doing with Twitter and a great review of the Pogoplug and how it uses open source.

I believe I’m one of the people that inspired Alan to start blogging a number of years ago.  Through his personal blog Ashimmy, the blog he writes for Network World titled Open Source Face and Fiction, and the blogging he does on security.exe (his company CISO Group’s blog), Alan is one of my must read technology bloggers.  And he’s often funny as hell, especially when he gets riled up.  Keep it up Alan!

Related posts:

1. Open Source as a Dumping Group
2. The Re-Rise of Open Source
3. Open Source or Closed Source?

We’re still changing some stuff, but if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs, please leave comments so I can tune things up.

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The Trial Edition makes it easy to test drive any of about thirty different open source applications on any of several cloud server providers.  Register with your email address, log in, pick an application, click Install, and in about 30 seconds you’ll be up and running with a fully-functioning application accessible on the web.  You don’t need an Amazon EC2 or Rackspace account, as with “appliance” providers.  You don’t need to learn about “instances” and “images” and security groups.  You don’t need to know how to install and configure a web server or MySQL, or download, install and configure software code.  You don’t even need to configure the application itself – Standing Cloud plugs in default values for you.  And it’s free.

Like the Pogoplug, the Standing Cloud Trial Edition doesn’t do anything that a motivated IT professional couldn’t do another way.  It’s just a lot faster and easier.  But for someone who is *not* an IT professional, it removes some rather high barriers to both open source applications and cloud computing.

The Trial Edition is just the beginning for Standing Cloud.  Soon you will be able to host, manage, and scale applications with the same emphasis on simplicity.  Give it a try and give me feedback.

Related posts:

1. Shimel Blogs on Open Source
2. Are You A Java Developer? Standing Cloud Wants You!
3. Security in the Cloud

Last week, David Cohen published all of the historical TechStars data.  39 companies have gone through the program to date (30 through Boulder and 9 through Boston).  The data that David published covers a lot of ground, including status by individual company.  Some of the pertinent summary data follows:

• In three years, about $16.5 million in seed-stage funding has been raised.
• 27 of 39 (~70%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability.
• TechStars companies currently employ 156 people.
• Four of the first ten companies from the inaugural 2007 class have already achieved positive exits.
• The most recent group of companies resulted in seven VC-led follow-on funding rounds and three additional angel-led rounds.

At the same time, Shawn Broderick, who runs the TechStars Boston program, just published the age demographics for the newest class of 10 companies that started the program at the beginning of March.  The numbers may surprise you as being higher than you might expect:

• Youngest: 21
• Oldest: 51
• Average: 28.3
• Median: 27

Our plan is to continue to update this data on a regular basis as we think it helps people better understand the TechStars program.  If there is additional data that you’d like to see, please feel free to suggest it.

Applications for the TechStars Boulder 2010 program are still open until March 22, 2010 at 11:59:59 PM Mountain Time.  If you haven’t applied but are thinking about it, apply now (it’ll only take a few minutes.)

Related posts:

1. TechStars 2009 Demo Day in Mountain View – 9/30/09
2. Why to Apply for TechStars Boston 2010 Today
3. TechStars Applications Are Now Open

Related posts:

1. What I Learned At The University Venture Fund Conference Last Week
2. Silicon Flatirons Conference: Re-examining The Patent System
3. Venture Capital Outlook 2007 in Boulder

Mr. Tysdal serves on the Board of Directors for the following Mantucket Capital portfolio companies: BrandJourney Capital and PRN Medical Services. His investment background includes venture capital, buyouts, restructurings, hedge funds, real estate, public equities, bonds and several entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to joining Mantucket Capital, Mr. Tysdal founded a private equity firm primarily focused on healthcare, media & entertainment and secondarily on real estate and construction services. Mr. Tysdal is also the founder of Sports Shares, a fractional luxury suite club. He began his career in investment banking with Alex. Brown & Sons, focused on corporate finance and mergers & acquisitions. Mr. Tysdal graduated with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA in Finance from Georgetown University

Register and come join us.

Related posts:

1. Entrepreneurs Unplugged With David Cohen on Monday Night
2. Monday Night’s Entrepreneurs Unplugged with Tim Enwall
3. Entrepreneurs Unplugged – Steve Halstedt and Nir Barkat

In the mean time, I noticed today that Dow Jones is running a seminar titled Negotiating an Angel Deal: What Angels, Entrepreneurs & VCs Need to Know.  My partner Jason Mendelson is one of the panelists, along with several other notable lawyers and angel investors.  If you are interested in this particular topic, I expect there will be a “robust” discussion as I know that the opinions between a few of the folks on the panel vary pretty widely.  If you are interested, sign up here.

Related posts:

1. How Many Angels is the Right Number
2. Open Angel Forum Is Off To A Great Start
3. New West Joins Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado and Beer

Most of the companies we invest in release software at least once a month.  Some release weekly, or even daily.  I’ve become a big advocate of true Agile development (partly because of my experience with Rally Software – the leader in Agile software development environments) and – more recently – the notion of trying to get to continuous deployment which has been popularized by Eric Ries.

If you are releasing at least monthly, it’s easy to do a full day hackathon at least once a quarter.  And, rather than have it be an “engineering thing”, you can (and should) make it a full company thing.  Here’s how:

1. Pick a date during the quarter for the hackathon.  Mondays and Thursdays are best.
2. Designate one person in charge of managing the hackathon.  This person has a budget for food and prizes and is encouraged to do whatever they want to publicize it throughout the company (easy for 10 people, not so easy for 1000 people).  The goal is to engage 100% of the company in the hackathon.
3. Form teams.  The teams should be between two and five people.  The teams should be self-selecting.  The Hackathon manager should come up with an easy way to manage the team list (hint – wiki).  Each team should have a name and, in advance of the hackathon, should spent at least one meal together talking about what they are going to work on.  People should be encouraged to work with folks they’ve never done anything with before, although this shouldn’t be a requirement.
4. The hackathon starts at 12:01am and ends at 5pm.  Whatever is done, is done.  Demos and awards start at 5:30pm.  Food is included.  The hackathon manager is responsible for coordinating all of this, including the mechanism for judging.

In the best hackathons, there is a wiki that is very dynamic during the hackathon.  This way all of the activity is captured and can be reviewed afterwards.  The goal is not to include everything from the hackathon in future releases; rather it’s to stimulate a bunch of ideas, generate some prototypes, end up with some useful code, but get everyone in the company thinking about all the products.

Not all of the hackathon projects need to be about code.  I’ve seen things like help systems, new web sites, better customer support processes, better management of social media activity, and lots of business process stuff created and implemented during hackathons.

After the hackathon is over, publicize what you’ve done to the world.  FeedBurner used to do a great job of this with a simple blog post that highlighted every project and the teams that worked on them.

Oh – and don’t forget to invite your board members.  If I can make it, I’ll always spend a day at a hackathon.  It’s one of the best ways for me to really engage in and help out the companies I’m involved in.  Plus it’s a blast.

Related posts:

1. Agile Can Work For Your Whole Company
2. Rally Software Development Ships v1 – On-demand solution for Agile software development
3. Seminar on How to Transition to Agile Software Development

In other patent news, Google and Facebook were sued over a social network patent.  This was a patent issued in October that apparently has something to do with how people join social networks on mobile phones.  Egads.

In better news, it looks like I’ll soon be able to buy a jet pack for $86,000.

Related posts:

1. Patents Continue to be Silly
2. Social Networks In Obvious Places
3. Can You Patent The Idea of Recommending Contacts in a Social Network?

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and I woke up to the following email.

Dear Colorado-based Amazon Associate:

We are writing from the Amazon Associates Program to inform you that the Colorado government recently enacted a law to impose sales tax regulations on online retailers. The regulations are burdensome and no other state has similar rules. The new regulations do not require online retailers to collect sales tax. Instead, they are clearly intended to increase the compliance burden to a point where online retailers will be induced to “voluntarily” collect Colorado sales tax — a course we won’t take.

We and many others strongly opposed this legislation, known as HB 10-1193, but it was enacted anyway. Regrettably, as a result of the new law, we have decided to stop advertising through Associates based in Colorado. We plan to continue to sell to Colorado residents, however, and will advertise through other channels, including through Associates based in other states.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

You may express your views of Colorado’s new law to members of the General Assembly and to Governor Ritter, who signed the bill.

Your Associates account has been closed as of March 8, 2010, and we will no longer pay advertising fees for customers you refer to Amazon.com after that date. Please be assured that all qualifying advertising fees earned prior to March 8, 2010, will be processed and paid in accordance with our regular payment schedule. Based on your account closure date of March 8, any final payments will be paid by May 31, 2010.

We have enjoyed working with you and other Colorado-based participants in the Amazon Associates Program, and wish you all the best in your future.

I’ve been a supporter of Governor Ritter since his campaign for governor and have worked hard to positively impact Colorado’s software / Internet / technology / entrepreneurial ecosystem.  Over the past two months, I’ve privately expressed my outrage over HB10-1192 and HB10-1193 to several people in Ritter’s administration.  I watched as numerous people in the software / Internet community tried their hardest to help our legislators, the governor, and their staffs understand why this is such a huge step backwards for Colorado.  I was told several times “don’t worry – we’ll take care off all the silly stuff.”  There seemed to be enough folks showing up to discuss this that I thought rational minds would prevail.

I made a huge mistake.  I should have come out very publicly about this when I first heard about it, made sure everyone that I supported during the elections that supported these bills (including one of the co-sponsors) knew my opinion and understood why they had the potential to be so detrimental to the software / Internet / entrepreneurial climate in Colorado.  Shame on me for not being more aggressive, although there are some days I definitely feel like there are only so many fronts I can deal with outside my very full time day job.

I’m not at all surprised by this action on Amazon’s part.  I expect the Internet Affiliate business in Colorado will completely die within the next thirty days (every company that has an affiliate business will turn off all of their Colorado-based affiliates.)

I then received the following email from Colorado Governor Ritter

Gov. Bill Ritter issued the following statement today criticizing Amazon.com’s decision to abruptly end its financial relationship with Amazon Associate businesses in Colorado:

“Amazon has taken a disappointing – and completely unjustified – step of ending its relationship with associates. While Amazon is blaming a new state law for its action, the fact is that Amazon is simply trying to avoid compliance with Colorado law and is unfairly punishing Colorado businesses in the process.

“My office worked closely with Amazon’s affiliates and associates to modify House Bill 1193 to specifically protect small businesses, avoid job losses and provide a fair, level playing field for on-line retailers and Main Street, brick-and-mortar retail shops alike.

“Amazon’s position is unfortunate, and Coloradans certainly deserve better.”

I’m especially disappointed in the Governor’s statement – it’s completely tone deaf to the actual issue and what Amazon is clearly stating.  I’ve heard several people saying “Amazon is the problem” or “well – this is good – now people will buy locally.”  Neither of these statements is valid – Amazon behaved like a rational company in the face of government regulation that had no upside for them and substantial downside.  Also, this has zero impact on consumer purchasing activity as this doesn’t impact the end customer of Amazon products in any way.

Rather, the many small businesses and solo entrepreneurs who make money off of Amazon’s affiliate program just lost a revenue stream (which, by the way, is used to employ people and pay state taxes.)  Colorado just got a big black eye in their historical effort to be a place that is friendly to business, especially high growth technology companies.  And our state government likely now has lost more tax revenue than it was going to gain through the bill in the first place while simultaneously damaging the revenue streams for many small Colorado businesses.

The only logical solution in my book is what Amazon says in paragraph 3.

There is a right way for Colorado to pursue its revenue goals, but this new law is a wrong way. As we repeatedly communicated to Colorado legislators, including those who sponsored and supported the new law, we are not opposed to collecting sales tax within a constitutionally-permissible system applied even-handedly. The US Supreme Court has defined what would be constitutional, and if Colorado would repeal the current law or follow the constitutional approach to collection, we would welcome the opportunity to reinstate Colorado-based Associates.

Related posts:

1. Searching For A CIO for The State of Colorado
2. Colorado Innovation Council
3. Colorado Governor Race 2006 – Technology Community Forum

Protecting the environment has been a priority of mine for many years.  Every now and then I like to call out a non-profit organization that I support that I think does an excellent job of helping protect the environment.

Colorado Conservation Voters is one of these groups.  CCV works to turn conservation values into Colorado priorities by educating legislators and the public about important environmental issues, helping pro-conservation candidates win their elections, and then holding our elected officials accountable. Most importantly, they do it efficiently as they are a group that has influence and reach much larger than their budget would indicate.

In the past six years they have built and protected a conservation majority in the state House, Senate, and Governor’s office. These victories matter – Colorado is a better place for CCV spearheading these pro-environment victories.  For example:

• Colorado now requires that 20% of our electricity come from renewable sources like wind and solar;
• More water is kept in our rivers and streams when they need it most and in crucial areas for habitat protection, protecting the health of our rivers;
• We have the strongest protections in the nation for our drinking water, wildlife, and communities threatened by oil and gas drilling.

This is a group that understands how to make change happen.  They use their money strategically and efficiently.  If you are interested in conserving the environment in Colorado, I encourage you to take a look at the Colorado Conservation Voters website as well as considering making a gift or even becoming a monthly donor.

Related posts:

1. Colorado Conservation Trust Acquires Front Range Alliance
2. New Websites – Colorado Conservation Trust and National Center for Women & Information Technology
3. Searching For A CIO for The State of Colorado

Boulder is a perfect city for this.  When I moved here in 1995 I didn’t expect to engage in much business as I was spending most of my time in Boston, NY, and San Francisco.  However, I discovered an incredibly smart community that was extremely computer and Internet savvy.  As the commercial Internet started to take off in the mid-1990’s, Boulder was a hotbed for Internet usage and innovation as we rapidly became an incredibly wired city.  I attributed this to the convergence of (a) a smart, well-educated population, (b) a university at the core of the city, (c) a bunch of national labs, (d) a solid legacy of tech startups, especially around storage, cable, and telecom, and (e) a strong culture of independence which was well suited to all things Internet.

What I didn’t realize at the time were two important metrics that underscore both the technology and the entrepreneurial energy in Boulder.  The two metrics are that on a per-capita basis, Boulder has the highest percentage of computer scientists and the highest percentage of Ph.D.’s in the US.  When combined with a vibrant entrepreneurial community that has deep software and Internet expertise, magic things happen.

We’ve seen a lot of this magic in Boulder in the past five years.  I’m proud of how the city I call home has arisen as one of the most important entrepreneurial communities in the US with much more activity, visibility, and influence than a city with a population of 150,000 typically has.  More importantly, the amount of innovation coming out of Boulder is extraordinary.

Google has put out a challenge to find communities that are willing to be a test bed for an experimental ultra-high speed broadband network to see what kind of innovation will emerge.  If you are a member of the Boulder community, even if you aren’t in the high tech or entrepreneurial sector, help us tell Google why Boulder is the best city in the US for this experiment.

If you are game to help, do the following things:

1. Go to the Boulder Fiber site and follow the directions – it’ll take five minutes.
2. Follow the Boulder Fiber project on Twitter
3. Fan Bring Google Fiber to the City of Boulder on Facebook.

Related posts:

1. A Scorecard For Boston’s Innovation Economy
2. TECH Cocktail in Boulder on March 6
3. Entrepreneurship in Boulder in 2009

"Paradoxically, the enduring competitive advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things – knowledge, relationships, and motivation – that distant rivals cannot match."

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this personally given all my work around the Boulder entrepreneurial community, TechStars, Foundry Group’s investments in different parts of the US, and the Startup Visa initiative. 

I’ll be on the first panel titled Entrepreneurial Immigration Policy with Lance Nagel (partner in Morgan, Lewis & Bockius’ Labor and Employment Practice) and Vivek Wadhwa (Senior Research Associate, Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and an Adjunct Professor at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering).  I expect we’ll get a good chance to cover plenty of ground, including several of the incredible immigrant entrepreneur loci and projects like the Startup Visa initiative.

The second panel is Place and Iteration: Lessons From Storage and includes several folks who have been involved in the Boulder “storage ecosystem” over the past 30 years, including Jesse Aweida (founder of StorageTek) and Kyle Lefkoff (general partner of Boulder Ventures, who has invested in several Boulder storage companies over the years including McData and LeftHand Networks).  Jim Linfield (partner at Cooley Godward, the founder of Cooley’s Colorado office, and counsel for a number of Colorado storage companies) will be anchoring the panel.

The third panel is Innovation and The Architecture of Geography and will explore broader lessons and insight concerning the role of place, regional architecture, and innovation.

Once again, my friends at Silicon Flatiron have put together a rich conference on a very important and timely topic.  It’s taking place at the Wittemyer Courtroom, Wolf Law Building, University of Colorado on Thursday, March 18, 2010 from 2:30PM to 6:30PM.  Register now and come join us.

Related posts:

1. Silicon Flatirons Event on Innovation, IP, and Entrepreneurship
2. Silicon Flatirons Conference: Re-examining The Patent System
3. Silicon Flatirons Roundtables