Podtech.net announced their Series A today, funded by Venrock Associates and US Venture Partners.
A big CONGRATS to CEO John Furrier, who had the vision and the drive to make this happen.
(full disclosure - I am an advisor to Podtech)
I ran into Chris Messina at eTech yesterday and inquired about my Flockstar t-shirt
He took down my info just in case he didn't have it and this morning I received an shipping notification email from Giant Robot Printing (the guys manufacturing the shirts).
w00t!
Note to self - don't attend conferences when you have a stress fracture. Climbing up the stairs from lunch hurts way too much!
The Napa Marathon is this Sunday. I signed up to run with 4 other folks (all Relay veterans!) and put together an aggressive (but not insane) 16 week training schedule.
Things were going very well up to week 13 (when I hit a new PR at the SF Half). After the SF Half, I had an odd soreness emanating from the TFL on my right leg. Strangely, I couldn't stand on just my right leg without pain. My regular session at SMI helped a bit, but things didn't get better after a week.
My massage therapist suggested I head over to PAMF and see someone in Sports Medicine. Fortunately, I got in to see the highly recommended Dr. King. After 10 minutes of "can you move your leg this way? Does that hurt?" and a few questions, he told me he suspected a femoral stress fracture. A subsequent bone scan bore this out. Bottomline is that I am out of commision for 8 weeks to 6 months - it varies widely. A major factor is rest :-(
Instead of running this Sunday, I'll be on the sidelines, cheering on my wife and friends. Chris will be completing her first marathon and feeling a sense of true accomplishment that most people will never know.
Writing in the Moveable Type UI is painful enough that it is a big reason my posts are so infrequent.
I've read a lot of positive stuff about etco, so I'm doing a test post with it.
As intrepid reader Wally points out, Om agrees with my comments on the Yahoo/Google price decline story (i.e. why is GOOG getting all the talk when YHOO is down further?). Sadly, no props though :-(
(This was something Royal and I hit upon yesterday when talking about the Q1/Q2 VC outlook for the year.)
Rocketboom announced the winner of their first ad sale (BusinessWeek write-up) One week and $40k later, an ATM and photocopy service will now have their ad on Rocketboom for a week in March. This is interesting on so many levels:
- Public auction on eBay for ad inventory
- Advertisers *are* willing to buy ads on bleeding edge video
- Diminishing value of a broadcasting license
I watch Rocketboom via my Tivo. My experience has been that I hardly miss Rocketboom anymore; previously it was hit and miss, even though the feed was in my aggregator (Bloglines), etc. Tivo should do more of this, perhaps even go crazy and let *me*, the consumer, subscribe to my own video streams.
As I have noted previously, I'd be getting nervous if I were a broadcaster. That FCC license wasn't cheap and as the music labels can attest, once the distribution of content isn't monopolized, the value of the distributor drops. In the case of Rocketboom, the content is retrieved over IP (HTTP?), not through a major network affiliate.
Unfortunately, I have to take the drastic step of disabling trackbacks. The amount of trackback spam has become unmanagable (you bastards!)
On Sunday, I ran the San Francisco Half Marathon (ensuring I would be able to eat that extra nachos plate during the Super Bowl :-))
The race started at 8am, with 7700 runners (largest turnout to date) in Golden Gate Park. The start and finish are in different spots, so the race organizers run buses from the finish to the start. We arrived around 6:30, queued up for a bus and arrived at the start around 7am. The Park can be fairly chilly in the early AM and yesterday was no exception. However, by race time the temperature was a nice 55 degrees or so.
After the starting gun fired, we took a 3 mile loop out of the Park and along the Panhandle (Oak and Fell streets). We re-entered the Park, running almost due West to Ocean (Great Highway).
In past years, the hardest part of this race for me has been the out and back on Ocean. This part of the course is approximately 5 miles and I swear it is uphill both ways. (There always seems to be a headwind too) Fortunately, Ocean Beach is picturesque; the swells yesterday were beautiful and the sky was clear.
The last two miles of the run take you back into the Park to the finish line. Miles 12.5 - 13 are uphill, so even though the finish line is close, a little work is required.
All that training for the Napa Marathon must have paid off as I set a personal PR (1:48), blowing away my previous PR (1:56).
Overall, here's how the run rates in my book:
Organization - The race was very well organized - clearly marked and staffed. Grade: A
Course - Monterey and Santa Cruz are more scenic, but still fantastic. Grade: A+
Aid-stations - Well staffed and the Gatorade wasn't overpowering. Grade: A
Swag - Long-sleeve, cotton shirt. Grade: B (what, no dri-fit??)
Dave Sifry has posted some very interesting stats on the size of the Blogosphere
Clearly, blogs (and RSS in general) aren't going away. The challenges of keeping up with the growth look enormous.