Matt Winn has executed on a mashup idea I've had for some time: a VC database, searchable by keyword, partner, location and assets under management. He even has the option of searching for VCs who blog. I'm not sure how he's accessing the data (scraping NVCA, BOSS, ?) and some [...]

For those of you in Gainesville and Ocala, FL, what are you and your family doing Saturday morning, October 4 (note: Gators are in Arkansas)? What about my readers in Jacksonville (9/20) and Orlando (10/11)? How about a short walk, just 1-3 miles, for a good cause: The Alzheimer's Memory [...]

Given Florida's roots in agriculture, PurFresh caught my attention recently. Their product, PurShade, is an SPF 45 spray to protect fruit from solar radiation -- yes, sunscreen for fruit. Evidently, the sun can destroy 20-40% of some crops. In the words of a Florida distributor:"Growers in South Florida can experience [...]

Staying with my patent theme for the week, I noticed Etan Horowitz's interview with Celebration, FL-based Channel Intelligence CEO, Rob Wight. Channel Intelligence recently filed lawsuits against a variety of ecommerce companies, claiming patent infringement on some of their list technology.I don't know all the details, but I appreciate Rob's [...]

John Duffy has written an intriguing article over at PatentlyO about a set of recent cases/decisions putting all software patents running on general purpose computers in question; using Google's PageRank patent to demonstrate what's at stake. There's been a running debate in IP circles whether software patents would hold long-term, [...]

Just in time for ESPN's Titletown contest, Gainesville just landed another back-to-back national title to go along with it's back-to-back NCAA basketball titles, multiple NCAA football titles and reigning Heisman Trophy Winner, Tim Tebow. Gainesville's Buchholz High School Math Team just won its second consecutive national championship in Sacramento, CA.And, [...]

ChannelAdvisor CEO, Scot Wingo, wrote a great post today about their acquisition of RichFX. At first blush, RichFX appears to be all about sexy rich media sizzle (PDF), but Scot's post zeros in on the meat he's after: lead conversions.RichFX brings to ChannelAdvisor a stable of top internet retailers, but [...]

Comment, profile/reputation and activity-stream platform SezWho spilled the beans on a few big partnerships today. I was already aware of their SocialSpark partnership, but was glad to see the Entrecard and Creative Weblogging announcements. Allen over at CenterNetworks shared his thoughts here.SezWho is providing a piece of the SocialCMS I [...]

A friend of mine forwarded Lee Gomes's WSJ article questioning Chris Anderson's Long Tail theory, referencing a recent Harvard Business Review article by Anita Elberse.Setting aside Lee's original Long Tail skepticism, possibly because it suggested the blogosphere presented an opportunity to impact journalists at the head (e.g. WSJ columnists?); I [...]

I'm looking for a couple things that I'm surprised I cannot find, yet:1) New kind of CMS, turning your site/blog into your single profile/lifestream/social graph instead of maintaining those concepts across Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or elsewhere. There are some lifestream plugins for Wordpress and some one-off integrated design efforts, but [...]

I love when a product does what it's supposed to, elegantly, and with little additional, complicating function. That is an attribute of many successful products including the original Google search box and Twitter. I ran across another example recently: tinysong.com TinySong was created by the music-heads over at GrooveShark, a [...]

The never ending drama around puppets is just amplifying what I always suspected about the social media elites. No wonder Ted Murphy scared them so much, he took much worse and handled it much better. Those guys need to take it to a ring... (via @roder) Related posts: Mathew Ingram [...]

Wired is one of those rare magazines I usually read cover to cover during the month it arrives. Every now and then I get a nice surprise when I find an old article I somehow missed. Today is one of those days.David Byrne wrote a brief, yet informative, article about [...]

For those of you wondering why it's been awhile since my last post, blame Alaska. In honor of my in-laws 50th wedding anniversary, our extended family met in Seattle for a group Alaska cruise. Our time there was amazing, relaxing, and very "off the grid".I'm now digging out of email, [...]

Twitter/FriendFeed updates announced Amazon.com was down for at least an hour this morning. It has since come up and down a few times. CNet, Mashable, TechCrunch and, thus TechMeme, eventually realized it too. It's up for me now.I have no idea what happened, but I know Amazon gets a surge [...]

My daughter's kicking off a webshow, one nephew is a director and another is a parkour nut with his own blog/videos. I guess that explains why the HP Channelbee.com contest caught my eye over at SocialSpark. One lucky entrant of 3Minutes2Launch who creates a 3 minute video, enters it in [...]

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time, especially when the hammer comes out. Enjoy![It looks like MTV is forcing viewers to MTV.com -- I'll embed for now, in hopes they eventually ditch the shackles. Go watch it anyway!] Related images: ben stiller, jack black, robert downey jr, tropic [...]

On a tip from Greg via Doterati, I just checked out FastCompany's list of the dozen best cities on the planet for innovation. Only 3 of the cities were in the US, and kudos to Orlando for being one of the few. The full list, in no particular order, included:BeijingHyderabadMexico [...]

On a twip from @bcavoli, I just reviewed Scarborough Research's "Understanding the Digital Savvy Consumer, An Analysis of the country's most high-tech consumers: where they live, who they are, what they buy, what they watch/listen to/read"It was an interesting read, with the usual things you might expect about high-tech consumers. [...]

In between twitter updates tonight, I kept seeing replies to the same email pop up from my Outlook. That email came from an entrepreneur who was looking for "partners" or possibly funding. There's nothing wrong with that, right?Well, try blasting that to a large VC distribution list, with that same [...]

I woke up this morning to messages that IZEA CEO and friend Ted Murphy got jumped in New Orleans by as many as 8 guys. It sounds like IZEA's Travis Andrews saw the commotion and jumped in to help -- resulting in a beat-down of his own. Wallets and camera [...]

I received a couple more VC FAQ questions. This time from an entrepreneur and investment banker who saw Angie's List close a $35M round with Battery Ventures. That large funding, and others in the social media space, left her wondering how value is measured and created in online businesses.Her site, [...]

Steve Spalding from How To Split An Atom and History of Blogging has kicked off an interesting concept called the Startup Reactor. It focuses on very early companies (typically pre-launch), shares their story and kicks off a conversation about their businesses. It's an easy way to dive into some new [...]

As SocialSpark was in private alpha I wanted to try out their Spark feature. Even if you aren't looking to monetize your blog, Sparks allow you to highlight a hot topic, pose a question or share a good cause -- providing a true "marketplace of ideas" for bloggers to pickup [...]

So, today's the day Sparky is let out of his private alpha chains...IZEA's latest innovation is being unleashed today at Ad:Tech, San Francisco, and the stars of advertising and blogging are already lining up to meet Sparky and the world's first Social Marketing Network: SocialSpark.I gave you a hint of [...]