They’ve been receiving a flurry of great product reviews, including a 9/10 rating from The Inquirer in the UK and a five-star rating and an Editor’s Choice Award from Cnet-France.

Back here in the US, the pogoplug was just reviewed by Katherine Boehret in the WSJ in the Mossberg Solution. She also did a video review of the device, which you can watch below.

I’m also super-excited for a bunch of new features that will roll out for the pogoplug over the next couple months. Stay tuned…

FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, PEOPLE, NEVER EVER USE AN APOSTROPHE WHEN PLURALIZING A WORD!

Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. I don’t know what is so confusing about this, but I encounter this mistake many times a day. Because I had an excellent English teach in high school who was a big influence on me (thank you, Mrs. Noland), I am known among my friends and colleagues as a bit of a grammar nazi. In fact, I am a proud member of the Facebook group I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar. I am comfortable with this.

If you are writing anything for public consumption, using bad grammar and misspelling words makes you look, at worst, unintelligent, and, at best, careless.

While I can overlook many grammatical errors that result from misunderstanding subtler nuances of the English language, this particular rule is so easy, I can’t understand where the source of confusion comes from. Apostrophes are for contractions and possessives. Never for plurals.

I understand that keeping it’s vs. its straight can be tricky, since its is the one case where there is no apostrophe in a possessive, but this still has nothing to do with pluralization.

So get it straight, people. Please.

Repeat after me: I will never use an apostrophe when pluralizing a word.

Ahh, I feel much better.

I should also mention that I Judge You When You Use Poor Grammar has been turned into a very amusing book, which my friend Amy was nice enough to give to me a few days ago – she knows me well. I highly recommend the hard copy version.

Topspin was founded with the premise that the key to any artist’s success in the digital age will hinge on an artist’s ability to engage directly with their fans and build a meaningful and authentic artistic and commerical relationship with them. Topspin provides sophisticated artist-focused and data-driven tools to enable artists and their management to run their businesses online.

Now that Topspin has been working with hundreds of artists and has a couple years of real-world experience with their platform in production, they’ve built up enough data to start to share some of their findings about managing, measuring and marketing with data. Shamal gave an excellent presentation at the Midem Conference in Cannes last week, and the deck is packed full of Topspin’s learnings about best practices for running direct-to-fan campaigns.

Here’s the presentation, which is well worth a read for anyone interested in the latest thinking on music marketing in digital age. For a more in-depth discussion of these slides, check out Shamal’s post on the Topspin blog.

Rather than simply blog about my insufficient blogging, there are several things in my world (more specifically in the Foundry Group portfolio) today that merit a mention:

First, EmSense (one of standard bearers in our HCI theme) announced today that they’ve raised a $9m round, led by Technology Partners. EmSense has made a ton of progress this year establishing themselves as a serious player in the neuromarketing space, and I’m excited to have Technology Partner’s Roger Quy join the board. He’s probably one of the only VCs out there with a PhD in neuroscience, so his endorsement of EmSense is particularly meaningful.

Second, today Topspin Media announced that registration for Berkleemusic.com’s course “Online Music Marketing with Topspin” starts today. Berklee is one of the premier names in music schools, and this course represents a first step in Topspin expanding the reach of their software beyond the private beta they’ve been running over the past year.

Here’s a quick video preview describing more about the course:

Third, Oblong was featured last week in a Bloomberg TV series called Bloomberg Innovators. Oblong’s founders and technology are featured prominently in the show, as am I and my partner Jason Mendelson (and his Galaga machine). If you haven’t seen Oblong’s tech in action, now’s your change. Bloomberg doesn’t allow embeds of the video, so you’ll have to follow this link.

And, last but not least, I’d be remiss if I didn’t put in a plug for the Defrag Conference, happening next week in Denver on November 11-12. This is the third year of the Defrag Conference, and it gets better every year. Come join folks like my Foundry Group partners, Defrag founder Eric Norlin, Andy Kessler and Paul Kedrosky as we geek out in the mile high city.

Any of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook probably saw me post status updates as we did our food tour, but I didn’t always remember to do it at each meal. So I looked back at my calendar (and my news feeds) to try to reconstruct a (mostly) comprehensive list of where we went out to eat during our month in the Bay Area. While we tried a couple new places (La Ciccia and Range), our destinations were more oriented towards old favorites, honed over many years of living in Northern California. Here goes:

7/18 – Yank Sing, San Francisco (lunch)

7/18 – Kokkari, San Francisco

7/19 – Pizzeria Picco, Larkspur (lunch)

7/19 – Taylor’s Refresher, San Francisco

7/20 – Sushi Ran, Sausalito

7/21 – Golden Flower, San Francisco (lunch)

7/21 – Slanted Door, San Francisco

7/30 – Tres Agaves, San Francisco (lunch)

7/30 – Mijita, San Francisco (dinner)

7/31 – La Ciccia, San Francisco

8/01 – The Village Pub, Woodside

8/02 – Tacubaya, Berkeley (lunch)

8/02 – Little Star Pizza, San Francisco

8/03 – 21st Amendment, San Francisco (lunch)

8/04 – Quadrus Cafe, Menlo Park

8/04 – Spruce, San Francisco

8/05 – Sancho’s Taqueria, Redwood City (lunch)

8/06 – Stern Dining Hall, Stanford University (lunch)

8/06 – Straits Cafe, Palo Alto

8/07 – Tres Agaves, San Francisco (lunch)

8/08 – Ame, San Francisco

8/12 – Yoshi’s SF, San Francisco

8/13 – Gialina Pizzeria, San Francisco

8/14 – Fish, Sausalito (lunch)

8/14 – Isa, San Francisco

8/15 – Yank Sing, San Francisco (lunch)

8/15 – Range, San Francisco

We also made numerous trips (in person and takeout) to Pizzeria Delfina (Pacific Heights location), Bittersweet Cafe and La Boulange (Fillmore & Union St. locations), but I can’t recall the precise days we visited those fine establishments. The careful reader no doubt noticed my pizzeria and taqueria fixation. What can I say, they are two of my favorite food groups.

We also hit the world’s best farmer’s market (the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market) numerous times during our stay. Late July and early August are prime season for heirloom tomatoes and peaches and nectarines. And the king of all purveyors of stone fruit is, of course, Frog Hollow Farm.

The stand-out dinners for me during the month were La Ciccia, Ame and Range. The restaurant I’m most disappointed we didn’t make it to was A16, which we really enjoy, but somehow never made it there.

I’m always looking for suggestions of new places to try when I’m in SF (which is often). Please mention your favorites in the comments!

But, the feature I really want will have to wait for the Kindle 3: I want a touchscreen on the Kindle that responds to a stylus so I can write on my Kindle. This could mean allowing me to take notes on the margins of a book I’m reading, but the main reason I want it is so I can get rid of the last analog vestige of my day-to-day-life: the composition book. I simply want the ability to create blank pages on my Kindle and then scribble upon them.

I started using composition books back in 1995 to take notes, jot down ideas and generally manage my day-to-day life and have continued using them to this day. If memory serves, my inspiration for using the composition book came from Vinod Khosla, who at the time was at Kleiner Perkins and was an investor and board member at Excite. If the lowly composition book had any part in making Vinod so effective, I figured I couldn’t go wrong by trying to integrate habitual note-taking into my life. It turned out to be a remarkably effective tool for me, mainly because I find that (for me, your mileage may vary) the simple act of writing something down really helps organize and cement that thing in my mind. I still keep a stack of all my old composition books in my office drawer and sometimes refer back to a filled-up book months or even years later.

If I could simply take notes on my Kindle with a stylus, I’d be a happy man. I’d effectively have a composition book with an infinite number of pages, and, ideally, it would be backed up online and accessible on the web as well. I’d ditch my composition book, save a few trees and have a digital archive of my life available online. I don’t even need the Kindle to give me character recognition or anything like that. My handwriting is so bad anyway, I doubt any algorithm could ever be up to the task. But as long as I had the ability to tag pages, search and browse through them on my Kindle and online, possibly share individual pages with others, and perhaps even farm out some of the pages to be transcribed (no doubt via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk), I’d be even more enamored with my Kindle. Amazon, are you listening? This is my number one feature request for the next-generation Kindle. Whaddya think?

Entitled “The Ultimate Platform Hotness Smack Down”, the purpose of the panel was to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of four platforms: Facebook, the iPhone, Twitter and the native web / search ecosystem. Each of us represented one of the platforms, and I was the one who championed the native web / search ecosystem, no doubt given my history as a founder of a now-defunct first-gen internet search engine and portal. It was a fun event and it was great to hang out and talk platforms with folks from the Boulder/Denver tech community as well as my fellow panelists. Dave put up the slides from the panel, so take a look:

While I wait with eager anticipation to get my hands on the new iPhone 3GS, I’ve been enjoying a new gadget: the Verizon MiFi. The MiFi is a combination wireless 3G EVDO modem with an integrated router/hub and wifi, all delivered in a sleek black unit the size of a small stack of business cards.

I use a MacBook Air, and I had a Verizon EVDO USB modem, but the aesthetics of having the dongle hang off the side of my MBA bothered me, and then the unit stopped functioning, giving me an excuse to jettison it. The beauty of the MiFi is the ability to share the connection with up to 5 users — very handy (and a great way to make friends) while in the back of a car with colleagues, at a local coffee shop or anywhere that lacks free wifi. The connection is really zippy and Verizon’s coverage puts AT&T’s to shame.

Ironically, I sometimes even connect my iPhone to the MiFi because it enhances the performance and coverage I get over using AT&T’s 3G crappy network, which brings me to an opportunity to rant about just how bad AT&T is. AT&T is lucky the iPhone is a such a great device – the iPhone is so good it is succeeding in spite of the inferior network users are forced to subscribe to.

Apple’s iPhone 3GS announcement this week really put AT&T’s weakness in focus — they announced that iPhone software 3.0 would support MMS messaging and tethering functionality, two oft-requested features, yet Apple had to footnote their announcement to mention that both features were “coming soon” for those of us unlucky enough to be stuck with AT&T’s lame service.

I can imagine that Apple will be more than eager to jump to a new carrier when their exclusivity with AT&T ends. For shame, AT&T. You’ve got the most popular mobile computing device ever created tied to your infrastructure, yet you are squandering this opportunity with your lame network. I’m no network architect and I’m sure I don’t appreciate the complexities around build-out and capacity planning, but I’m guessing AT&T’s crappy network is not a result of unsolvable technical issues, but rather lack of will and general organizational inertia and incompetence. Or maybe a calculated decision to enhance profits in the short term by delaying capex. But neither scenario puts AT&T in a good light.

And yet, despite all this, I’ll be stuck with AT&T since I plan to upgrade to the new iPhone as soon as I can. I just wish I had a choice in carriers.

I may analyze Bing more in-depth in a later post, but for now I’ll confine my reactions to the first act that many people engage in upon using a new search engine: the vanity search.

Let me say one thing: Ryan McIntyre won the lottery when Bing launched. Not, me, but rather one Ryan C. McIntyre, a financial representative with Northwestern Mutual in Caspar, Wyoming. That Ryan McIntyre is at the top of Bing’s search result page when someone searches for “Ryan McIntyre” on Bing, but he’s several pages deep in Google’s search results. If Ryan C. McIntyre is watching his web traffic, he’s probably seeing a sharp increase in the number visitors coming from Bing as well as a bump in traffic proportionate to Bing’s market share.

I’m the second Ryan McIntyre who shows up on Bing, and I am the second Ryan McIntyre who shows up on Google, so in that respect the results are similar, though on Bing I show up ahead of another Ryan McIntyre who tops the results on Google…

Despite my blogging, my ownership of the URL ryanmcintyre.com, the stories in the press and other blogs that mention me, my bio pages at Foundry Group, Mobius VC and the many portfolio companies where I sit on the board (all of which result in more links to my blog and presumably better page rank), I’ve never been able to unseat my Google nemesis, Ryan McIntyre, who sits atop the Google search results page for “Ryan McIntyre”.

Ryan is a singer-songwriter from Waukesha, Wisconsin, he gigs regularly and has an active MySpace page, which results in concert reviews and venues linking to him on a regular basis. His profession, even more than mine, ensures a steady stream of links to his website, giving him major Google juice.

It is easy for me to understand how both I and Ryan McIntyre the touring musician wind up near the top of the search result on both Google and Bing, but I have to say I’m downright confused how Ryan C. McIntyre the financial representative came to be so endowed with Bing juice such that he shot to the top of MSFT’s search results page. Go figure.

Minus this surprising anomaly around my vanity search results, Bing seems like it delivers reasonably good results, though not markedly different than Google’s, which is a problem for Microsoft since changing user behavior around search is going to be difficult without delivering qualitatively and quantitatively better results to the user — which is what Google delivered when they first came on the scene, something that was once difficult for me to admit back in my Excite days, yet was obviously (and painfully) true.

This lack of a stark difference between MSFT’s and Google’s search results is going to make it challenging for Bing to deliver on their (methinks quixotic) quest of becoming verbified. Besides the search results themselves, the actual word bing will also hinder MSFT’s desire for verbification. If I email someone and explain to them that yesterday I xeroxed a document or googled myself, they will know what I mean, but when I tell them that last night I binged on jelly donuts (true story), they’re just going to think I have self-control issues with food.

Congrats to Foundry Group portfolio company Memeo for receiving a five star rating from cnet’s download.com for the new release of Memeo Share, version 2! Download.com just gave Memeo Share a five star editor’s rating, and they’ve got a nice more detailed blog post about the software here.

I’ve known Memeo’s founder, Hong Bui for several years and met him right when he was starting up Memeo. We hadn’t yet raised the Foundry Group fund at the time, but the stars aligned when Memeo decided to raise a venture round coincident with the close of Foundry’s fund, so Memeo was one of the first companies we invested in out of the new fund.

Memeo fits squarely into our digital life theme at Foundry Group and it has been great to work with the company as they’ve built on their vision to take a core technology for managing, copying, protecting, sharing and synchronizing files across multiple devices to deliver a suite of products that offers solutions for file backup, file sync and now, file sharing.

Version 2 of Memeo Share is a great leap forward in functionality and ease-of-use from their already-excellent version 1, and it makes sharing full-res photos and videos among friends and family incredibly simple and allows you to do it directly from your desktop, and gives you the option of avoiding sharing your photos on public photosharing and social networking sites, though it also provides tools that make it really easy to autopost photos on Facebook or to Memeo’s cloud-based backup service, if you want to socialize or protect your photos and videos.

Way to go, team memeo — the new version of share is looking really good!