This is the feature list, in no particular order, I want in my life.  Who develops on, on what platform, with what technology is totally irrelevent:

1) Walking into a store and asking, "Do you carry men's wallets?" is archaic.  I want a local search down to the individual SKUs at the local deli.  I want to know right this very moment who carries both Fuze and dental floss.

2) I want to be able to listen to any radio, XM or otherwise, and push a "buy this song" button.  Also, I'm waiting for iTunes to switch to an all you can eat model.

3) When I download a bands music, I should automatically get a feed of their upcoming concert dates in time for me to actually buy the tickets.

4) I want ONE profile...and it should be linked to everyone I touch via IM, e-mail, calling, etc. and they should move up or down in my "top 25 people contacted" list for easy reference accordingly. 

5) I should be seemlessly connected to all of the people in my activity groups...without me doing anything and without me needing to invite people to anything--Fordham alumni, Regis alumi, the Downtown Boathouse, Zog Sports, etc.

6)  I'd like my calendar linked to appliances and other electronics.  Like, my alarm clock should always wake me up either at 6:45 or 2  hours and 15 minutes before my first appointment of the day...  15 minutes to get out the door dirty, 45 minutes to bike to the gym, 40 minutes to work out, and 20 minutes to get showered and back to the office and 15 minutes of lost time that I can't figure out where it goes in this process. 

7) Tagging recipes in del.icio.us should queue up the ingredients in Fresh Direct...  in other words, there should be a standard protocol/schema around food.

8) WTF are location based search services taking so long?  I should be able to push a button on my Treo to find the nearest Citibank ATM, because those punks charge me $4 for a non-Citibank ATM transaction.  The same thing with Jamba Juice.  In fact, I'd like the button to just say, "Jamba me, baby"  (The same way my browser buttons currently say "Blog me, baby", and "Tag me, baby."

9) I'd like a wireless carrier to "open up" and let people pay month to month, change their plan whenever they want, and just spend gobs of money on customer service.  Why am I paying $90 a month to make a phonecall a day if I'm lucky, 4 texts a day, and get wireless internet that Good can sit on?  I'm getting hosed.  When does the carrier price war start??

10) Does Outlook need to be so damned clunky?  It takes me forever to switch back and forth between e-mail and calendar...   God forbid I want to check my sent mail.  Can someone invent a better front end for Outlook?

I don't know what Google wants to be when it grows up, but I'll tell you one thing it shouldn't waste its time on along the way: Google IM.  Sure, they did a great job with GMail, but e-mail is different.  There are no network effects with e-mail.  It doesn't matter what e-mail you use...your friends can always reach you.  Instant messager is different.  Trillian aside, you need to all be on the same system to instant message your friends.  It remails the stickiest app on the web... and probably the only thing keeping a lot of people at AOL.  I'll always use AOL IM because that's where all my friends are.  I might use Yahoo, too, but only with Trillian.

Now, there have been rumors that Google will develop its own IM client, but I doubt this will take off.  Perhaps they will offer Trillian like functionality--interoperability with other clients like MSN and Yahoo, but I doubt the other players will give up IM share that easily.  While AOL and others seems to have stopped trying to block universal clients, they might start being defensive again if someone like a Google tried it... which is why I'm not advocating that Google just byuy Trillian. 

But the #1 IM client in the US will be up for sale soon.  Its only a matter of time before Time Warner waives the white flag and gives up on AOL.  AOL would give Google a sticky IM client, and lots of content properties to run Google ads on... including all of those people still using AOL mail.  Plus, given Google's stock price, I think now would be  a good time to start using that capital for a big splash. 

I think Google is probably the right company to take a shot at doing AOL the right way.  All of their apps, be it AdSense, Maps, Gmail, have had a lot of time spent on them to make them as user friendly as possible--so from a user experience, I think the intentions are very similar.  Remember, AOL is what introduced a lot of us to the web in the first place--we just grew out of it because of broadband.

Any thoughts on who else makes a good mate for the little yellow guy?

Cool...  Lara was one of the friendliest faces on campus and is going to make a great contribution to the team. 

Link: Ram News.

Robert May from BusinessPundit is trying an experiment.  He's trying to create a fully opensourced business, from plan to execution.  Register so you don't miss the first "corporate" vote tomorrow!  This is pretty cool and I'd love to see some high profile people pickup on this and start following it.

Link: The Business Experiment - Home.

The Business Experiment is a site meant to explore three concepts:  wisdom of crowds, open-source business, and the distributed nature of work.  The goal is to have the registered users of this site collectively start and run a real business.  Business plans will be written.  Financing will be sought (if needed).  Employees will be hired.  Systems of accountability will be put into place.

All major strategic decisions will be voted on by the registered users, and must be implemented by the employees.  This will test to see if "the crowd" is really wise or not.  Who do we hire?  The crowd will vote on the candidates.  What is our marketing strategy?  Vote on it.  How do we price our product or service?  Vote again.  It could be cool, or it could be foolish.  But either way, it's definitely different.

If you're an entrepreneur, one of the best ways to get me using something is to give me a service I can run on my blog.  :)    Now I'm obsessed with Castpost.

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If you live in New York City, you probably get asked for money on the street at least once a day, if not more.  Sometimes, its from the homeless, which is an unfortunate situation.  Other times, its from organized bands of young people all wearing the same t-shirt.

Well, I've been feeling very chatty the last few days and, when I went out to lunch, I decided I'd stop and let one of them give their pitch.  This young lady told me about all of the great things that CARE is doing.  She was so excited that I let her talk, she could hardly contain herself.  I didn't know anything about CARE, but apparently its a pretty big organization, with over a half billion dollars worth of donations received a year--92% of which go to their programs.  That seems pretty high, and they have a good list of companies and boardmembers behind them according to their site.

The young lady on the street was pitching the monthly donation plan, which I wasn't interested in, but I will give them $25 because she did such a good job.  More importantly, I told her I'd blog about it.  Coincidently, I was also looking for a charity to include in my sidebar to test out Word of Blog.

This is going to be big:   Doing due diligence, helping people, and having fun all at the same time.

I get pinged with conference advertisements left and right.  By far, the most useful conference I've ever been to was the IPLA conference, where I got to network and exchange best practices with other LPs. 

GPs, however, play it a little closer to the vest.  They share deals with each other, but they don't exactly open the kimono the way an LP would, because competition for entrepreneurs is more prevelent than competition to get into funds.  Even when its a top tier venture fund, LPs don't really think of it as competiting against another LP.  I could tell you Mayfield is raising capital right now, but it doesn't really help you, because if you haven't already been talking to them, you'll probably get shut out.  Even so, a firm like that pretty much gets their pick anyway, regardless of how much you go knocking at the door.

That being said, I still have the urge to go to a conference, but so few of them look interesting to me.  I'd love to see more entrepreneurs, but a lot of these things are such VC pile-ons.   So what do I want?  I want to be enlightened, by my peers and by entreprenuers.  I'm there to learn and to meet people.  I don't want to be sold to and I don't want to sell myself. 

But this is a bigger issue--the issue of what professional services or just your own peers can do for you in general.  At Union Square Ventures, we want to figure out what we can offer entreprenuers that will help us attract the best ones and differentiate ourselves.  We also want to figure out what other kinds of firms are providing things that entreprenuers need, so we can network with those people to find the deals that match our thesis.

So, what do you want?  What are your needs?  As an entreprenuer, as a VC, as a technologist?  Are they being met?   How can a firm like ours be valuable?  How can I be valuable as a blogger, or am I just here for your own personal amusement?

What am I?  Some kind of clown?  Here to make you laugh?

Tell me how I can help you, or how Union Square Ventures can help you.  I'm curious what you people are out there looking for.  Be as general or as specific as you'd like.

I don't think this is going to make it to Fred's MP3 of the week list.  And yes, this is what it sounds like when I bike.

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I'm using Castpost (which is in Alpha) to blog this video. I have most of my other videos at Vimeo, but they have a limit on uploads, and no blogging tool yet. I'm sure they'll get there on it, but for now, I'll try this.

So last Saturday, I did kayaking swim support for the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim--a 28.5 mile swim around the city. I was helping out the "Mo Ladies of the Sea." They were a great group and its too bad the weather cut them short.

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Well, this is just hilarious...    Its an interview done from inside Halo 2.  First of all, can I remark about how ridiculously realistic video games have gotten since I was playing them?  Does anyone remember Contra?  To get extra lives, before the came started, you'd have to hit up up, down down, left right, left right, B, A and then hit start. 

Link: This Spartan Life - Episode 1 - Module 3.

I have SO MANY things I want to blog about, take pictures of, etc. but I have no internet at home yet, and on top of that, my Treo is busted.  I get a new Treo on Friday and internet on Saturday, so you should see a lot of posts this weekend.  In the meantime, I'll be just letting all this stuff build up.  If I seem distracted or I'm sitting uncomfortably (depending on the quality of the blog post I'm thinking about), now you know why. 

Its amazing how disconnected I feel without e-mail on my phone and broadband in the apartment.  I might as well be living in Saskachawan.

Link: Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

Colin Powell got named a "Strategic Limited Partner" at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers today.   Apparently, all it takes it get into that fund is a unanimous confirmation from the Senate. 

So Fred had a blog post stolen from him yesterday and Michael Parekh had the same thing happen a few days before.  Their posts are winding up on this blog.

By who?   Fred's post listed an author link to this site.  But who is A1Technology?  There aren't any people listed on the site.

So I did my usual hard target search and it turns out that the guy responsible is relatively easy to find.

Got texted early this morning, around 6AM...  it just said "London bombed".   I had no idea what I was going to see when I turned on the TV, but it gave me a flashback to going to CNN.com for the first time on 9/11 to see what all the fuss was about. 

I have one friend who is on my mind who doesn't really go in and out of the city too much, but I hope her and her friends are ok.   Aims...  drop me a line.

Broken Glass, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Punks... No respect for other people's stuff.

You've probably noticed that, while I've been moblogging, I haven't really been posting much of substance in the past week.  That's mostly because I've moved... well, sort of.  I'm staying at my friend Joy's apartment, who was on vacation for a week and is now consulting up in Hartford.  I needed to be out of my apartment last week, but I'm not closing on my new place until Thursday.  So, all my junk got moved into the new place, except for me and my clothes.  The owner was nice enough to let me keep stuff there before my close, but I can't move in until I actually own it.  So, I'm living this unfortunately temporary life that has really messed with my head.  This happened when I first moved into my place four years ago *wow* and I hadn't finished assembling all my Ikea stuff.  When I'm not settled at home, it really affects the rest of my life.  I have trouble thinking, trouble committing to decisions.  I could never be a salesguy on the road.  As much as I like my mobile/wifi lifestyle, I need a warm cozy hearth to return to at the end of the day.  It gives me somewhere to anchor my thoughts and frees up my mind to execute better.   

Here are some pics from last week's move... thanks to Pastore and Cory for helping out...

Utterly fucking ridiculous...

Link: WWF | Newsroom.

Chiang Khong, Thailand - Fishermen in northern Thailand have netted a fish as big as a grizzly bear, a 646-pound Mekong giant catfish

I'm lonely, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Brad and Fred are out at board meetings and Kerri went out to lunch.

And now, Bill Burnham (no relation to Brad) can move on to solving the next biggest VC mystery:  How can LPs actually get in to the next Sequioa and Kleiner funds?

Link: Burnham's Beat: Just How Much Did VCs Pocket On Google?.

Link: NY1: Top Stories.

A New York Times poll released Wednesday morning finds the mayor's approval rating has reached 50 percent – his highest level ever – though similar to improved numbers seen in other recent polls.

I just want to point out that, on June 13, 2003, Bloomberg had a 24% approval rating--the lowest rating since the NYT started taking polls in the first place.  It just goes to further prove my theory:

Self-made billionaires who couldn't give a crap what anyone thinks who have the business savvy to make tough decisions with the long term in mind make great mayors.