Good Mail

Last week’s AOL/Goodmail announcement was greeted by quite a brouhaha, much of which raised concerns about Goodmail’s email certification service.

I must be missing something, but I just don’t get what the problem is here. I know the Goodmail guys pretty well, and frankly I think it is a great idea. As my partner Bob Metcalfe has long maintained, spam is not a technology problem, it is a market discontinuity, and the best solution to it is a market solution, just like Goodmail’s.

As far as I am concerned, good luck to Goodmail!

(Full disclosure, I am not a Goodmail investor but wish I was!).

New York Media Dinner

Last Thursday night I hosted a Polaris Digital Media Dinner with a couple of my partners. On fairly short notice we pulled together a great group: Martin Nisenholtz, Scott Kurnit, Kevin Ryan, Jeff Jarvis, Paul Vidich, Denny Wilkinson, Dave Morgan, Seth Goldstein, Jim Warner, John Lack, Wade Davis, Ellie Hirschorn, Sara Levinson, Fred Seibert, John Diamond, Stan Shuman, Dan Burns, Mark Verstegen and Chris Russo.

It was a great night. Nothing better for a VC than to spend a few hours with a gang of folks alot smarter than me…

Already planning the next one, this time on the left coast in March.

Goin’ to the Grammy’s

Last week I had the chance to attend the Grammy Awards, courtesy of my good friend Dave Goldberg who runs Yahoo! Music. It was a good show — but not nearly as much fun as the Yahoo! post party, which really rocked! Hollywood parties are just a bit different than the typical Boston night scene…

Unfortunately, courtesy of Boston.com and some photographer who caught me in the background of a Missy Elliot photo, my coworkers caught my lame attempt at a Grammy’s outfit. They’ve been merciless. I think it is time for a vacation.

Sex, Drugs, Money: The Pleasure Principle

This article by Adam Levy of Bloomberg News, which is getting some buzz in the blogosphere, describes the emerging field of “neurofinance.”  The basic idea is that “the same neural network governs …. [t]he pleasure of orgasm, the high from cocaine, the rush of buying Google at $450 a share….In other words, stocks, like sex, sometime drive us crazy.”

Doesn’t sound too crazy to me…

Banned Super Bowl Ads

Today’s New York Times has an interesting piece on Super Bowl Ads and how advertisers are looking to get more life out these spots.

The gang at Heavy.com have come up with a different (more fun) twist: they have collected 16 Super Bowl ads that were rejected by the network and put them up for the world to see. Check it out.  (Any of you listening to David Lee Roth yesterday heard him raving about this idea).