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.

It has been a while since I’ve written a blog post. I think some of it is twitter-induced. Instead of a blog post, I simply tweet a URL and feel that I’ve done my part. Ahh, the lazyweb. Actually, there is now an official description of this phenomenon: the Gresham/Morgan Internet Law. My friend Howard Morgan pointed out on his blog that cheap tweeting drives out dear blogging. Guilty as charged.

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 are 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.

Last night, I had the pleasure of being on a panel discussion with Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier and Howard Lindzon, moderated by David Cohen of TechStars. This was a Startup2Startup event, graciously imported to Boulder for a night by Señor McClure, that guy with all those hats. We started the evening off with margaritas and dinner at Tahona and then retreated to the TechStars bunker for the panel.

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:

With all the hubbub surrounding the launch of Bing, I finally got around to spending some time with MSFT’s new search engine over the last few days. My behavior, along with millions of other search lookie-loos out there, likely single-handedly accounts for MSFT’s probably temporary increase in search market share since the launch of Bing.

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!

OK, I’m only half joking here, but I’m surprised no one has wired up an app to Twitter that lets you pass compressed/zipped text messages via twitter so you can send messages longer than 140 characters. The community should agree on a convention, for example, let’s say whenever a tweet begins with #ZT: (for zipped tweet), this app would assume the remaining 136 characters were a compressed text string.

Then apps could automagically compress / decompress the characters following the #ZT: , which would then enable tweets much longer than 140 characters since text compresses pretty well. Sure, you’d see a bunch of garbage text strings passing through your twitter stream when folks you follow choose to use this convention, but that would part of the fun of it, since only insider geeks would know what they would need to do to follow those (literally) cryptic conversations.

Has anyone out there built this? Seems like it would be pretty simple to do…

My partners and I at Foundry Group have been involved with Eric Norlin for the past few years, and he has put on two great Defrag Conferences in Denver over the past two years (the inspiration for which came out of our work on our Implicit Web investment theme), and now we’ve decided to add another one to the mix: The Glue Conference, which will be held on May 12th and 13th in Denver.

The idea for the Glue Conference came out of our work at Foundry Group on our Glue investment theme and brainstorming with Eric about how we could take the basic notion of the web as a platform and dig in at a fairly technical level into the problems, challenges and opportunities that arise when one assumes the web and the cloud as a given and as the fundamental platform going forward.

Glue’s got a great agenda, including keynotes from the likes of Mitch Kapor (Lotus founder), Bob Frankston (VisiCalc creator) and Josh Elman (Facebook platform).

And, as far as conferences go, it is a bargain, only $495 for two days, so go ahead and register here. The Foundry Group partners will be out in force, and Seth and Brad (and I’m sure Jason and I will join in the fun at some point) will even be sitting down to listen to pitches from entrepreneurs during the conference.

Today Netflix announced that they delivered their two billionth DVD, an impressive milestone. This brought to mind something we learned in the early days of Excite, which was to never underestimate the bandwidth of physical storage media sent via UPS, the USPS or FedEx. When we opened our second datacenter circa 1996 (on the east coast in one of AOL’s datacenters) we quickly found out that it was faster, cheaper and more reliable to simply FedEx overnight an archived backup tape copy of our search index to the east coast mirror site than to transfer the files over the internet.

I’ve always thought that Netflix’s business was a brilliant bet that the bandwidth and quality of a rental experience powered by DVDs sent via USPS was going to be cheaper and exceed the capabilities of on-demand via the internet for much longer than people were expecting, and of course this turned out to be true. And now that internet tech is finally catching up to the low tech method of shipping atoms full of bits around the country, I think Netflix has done a brilliant job with their internet strategy and distribution partnerships, which should enable a graceful (and still longer-term than people expect) transition from postal delivery to internet delivery.

So when I saw the announcement of the two billionth DVD delivered, I decided to do a quick and dirty back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much data Netflix has delivered to customers in the roughly 10 years since their subscription service launched. (Apologies in advance to all the sticklers out there who might point out the imprecision of this calculation since I’m using factors of 1,000 instead of 1,024 to measure my gigabytes and petabytes.) Here goes:

A DVD has a max capacity of 4.7 gigabytes. Since Netflix also ships TV shows and the like, which don’t fill a DVD to capacity, let’s assume that the average DVD contains 4 GB of data. So, that means they’ve delivered eight billion gigabytes, or eight million terabytes, or eight thousand petabytes, which boils down to an average of 800 petabytes per year over a ten year period. Multiply that by 8 bits per byte and divide by 31,536,000 seconds per year, and you get 202,942,669,000 bits per second, or a sustained ten-year average bandwidth of 200 gigabits per second.

Of course, that’s an average spread evenly over 10 years, and today’s outgoing bandwidth from Netflix via the USPS is many times higher, given the ramp from zero DVDs shipped in the early years and given the fact that Netflix is now shipping Bluray discs, which hold 50GB vs. the 4.7GB on a traditional DVD. And, finally, given they are actually delivering movies via the net, they are now using actual net bandwidth instead of theoretically derived, USPS-enabled bandwidth, though I’m sure their actual bandwidth consumption is still dwarfed by the discs in the mail.

But still, I was surprised by the 200 Gbps number and had to check my calculations a few times to make sure I was right. And it is conceivable that that means that their theoretical bandwidth today could be in the terabit per second range. Golly.