Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Want to see a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone? Take a look at the Orbotix Sphero Sneak Peek Video below. Sphero Sneak Peek from Paul Berberian on Vimeo. My friends at Orbortix will be at CES in Booth #5422 North Hall from January 6th to 9th showing off real working robotic balls. So psyched.

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Video 124

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 16, 2010

Periodically I pimp the conferences we helped create with Eric Norlin – Defrag , Glue , and most recently Blur. If you’ve been to any of these conferences, you know why I get so excited about them – it’s a chance for me and my partners to spend two days immersed in a theme we are investing in while surrounded with some of the smartest people working in that area.

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Florida Software Partner Founder 119

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 28, 2010

On the heels of all the noise around Groupon’s $ 100m financing at a $7.5b (billion) post valuation, I thought I’d put out a call for “old VC term sheets – prior to 1990.&#. My partner Jason Mendelson and I are working on a book titled Venture Financings: How To Look Smarter Than Your Lawyer and VC. The final draft is due at the end of February (feel free to give us your sympathy if you happen to see us between now an then) and based on my previous experience with our pu

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Term Sheet Search Finance Valuation 118

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 10, 2010

Gist just released their Chrome extension for Gist in Gmail. Chrome is my browser of choice for Gmail and I’ve been anxiously awaiting this release. It’s just awesome. It’s tightly integrated with both consumer and enterprise Gmail. It’s fast, light weight, and takes advantage of the huge amount of data discovery that Gist does via the cloud (rather than in-browser).

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Cloud Email 116

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 22, 2010

CES is just around the corner and I’m psyched to be going again this year. Toss in a BigDoor board meeting early in the week in Las Vegas and I’ll be getting my annual allotment of sin city in the first week of the new year. Lots of my friends and a number of our portfolio companies will be at CES this year. Lest you think it’s just a VC boondoggle, one of my favorite moments of all time happened at CES in 2009 when my dad bought the very first Pogoplug.

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Las Vegas Cloud Portfolio Finance 115

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 15, 2010

I’ve been quiet since the weekend. It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say (that would be a first), but because I was absolutely slaughtered by the flu. I spent all of Sunday and Monday in bed. I managed to work yesterday and stay on top of the things flying around and today was more or less normal (with a long afternoon nap). But that was easily the worst kick in the ass I’ve had from a cold in many years.

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Partner Management 110

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 8, 2010

Wow – I had a deeply awesome week off the grid. I really really really needed a break. I had a magnificent birthday (thanks Amy and everyone who came and hung out), ran for 10 days straight (including Thanksgiving – boy does it feel awesome to be running again), and finally got enough rest to feel normal again (or at least as normal as I ever feel.).

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Video Restful Technology 104

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 22, 2010

David Cohen ( TechStars CEO and co-author of Do More Faster ) is blogging a chapter a week from the book on the TechStars web site. The first chapter he’s put up is “ Do More Faster &# (by David). TechStars is currently accepting applications for the Boston program in the spring of 2011. Do More Faster and go apply now if you’ve been thinking about it.

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Boston Programming Web 100

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 19, 2010

As a user, how often have you thought “I wish this web service was faster.&# As a CEO, how often have you said “just make it faster.&# Or, more simply, “why is this damn thing so slow?&#. This is a not a new question. I’ve been thinking about this since I first started writing code (APL) when I was 12 (ahem – 33 years ago) on a computer in the basement of a Frito-Lay data center in Dallas.

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Fractional VPE Fractional CTO SQL Database 142

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 24, 2010

If you are reading this on my website you’ll see a new bar popup at the bottom of your browser. It’s the BigDoor MiniBar. If you are a regular reader of Feld Thoughts, check in and join the community. We invested in BigDoor earlier this year as part of our Distribution theme. BigDoor’s goal is to “gamify&# any website. They’ve built a very deep and rich set of functionality around game mechanics via a programmable API – things like checkins, points, badges

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API Software Review Seattle eCommerce 126

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 27, 2010

January’s Tech Theme of the Month is going to be Python. I realize it’s still December; I decided to get a head start. Last month’s tech theme was videoconferencing. I learned a lot, including the unfortunate continued split between low end and high end and general lack of ability to have a single universal solution. Oh – and bandwidth still matters a lot.

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PHP SQL Ruby Bandwidth 134

Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 17, 2010

Standing Cloud , which makes it easy to deploy and run apps in the cloud, recently closed a $ 3m financing led by Rich Levandov at Avalon Ventures. Rich and I have known each other and worked together since the mid-1990′s and more recently have invested together in NewsGator and Zynga. Rich has spend a lot of time in the clouds lately, including his investment in Cloudkick which was acquired yesterday by Rackspace.

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Cloud Programming Partner Finance 109