The fine folks at Cloud Engines, makers of my favorite consumer electronics gadget, the pogoplug, have been very busy in 2010. They launched at retail here in the US and Canada and followed quickly with announcing availability of the pogoplug in the UK and Europe. It has been fun to start seeing French and German showing up in the pogoplug twitter stream.

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…

Warning: grammar rant ahead…

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 teacher 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.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the fine folks at Topspin Media since I joined the board of the company when Foundry Group invested in Topspin’s Series B in 2008, and I’ve been fortunate to know Topspin’s co-founders, Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe since the late ’90s.

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.