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Depaul New Venture Challenge Chicago

This was the second year I’ve had the honor to serve as a judge in the Depaul New Venture Challenge since its inception. I’m proud of my Depaul undergraduate degree roots and continued association with Depaul University College of Commerce and am pleased to serve. Its a great business school that is active in creating a positive community impact. As the number of startups that I’m involved with grows in regards to business plans and financing and viral marketing plans and to be involved with giving feedback to entrepreneurs is most exciting. Raman Chada and his team should be proud of what they of what they have created as it has great potential to spark a renaissance in Chicago. I look forward to being involved in future years and hope that one day I might be fortunate enough to participate in scaling a Chicago based company that was born in this process!

Jason Jacobsohn wrote a nice summary of the May awards event, so I won’t add other details other than to say that Rania El-Sorrogy is in amazing entrepreneur who will likely create many companies in her lifetime and that I hope to get to know her better over time. Keith Schacht was also in attendance at the event and said a little bit about it.

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Upcoming Chicago Internet Web 2.0, Social Media and IPTV Events

I thought you should be aware of these upcoming events.

June 19th, Jeff Pulver is having a party at the House of Blues in Chicago on June 19th from 7:00pm-11:00pm. You must RSVP. It’s rumored non-RSVP’d intruders will be escorted out the back door on Lower Wacker Drive and trust me those rats down there are mighty big so don’t even think about it!

June 20th, Kirsten Nicole, one of my favorite chat buddies that brightens my days, of Mashable is holding a gathering, buy your tickets by June 6th and get a 2 for 1 deal! The event is described as follows:
The web 2.0 technology community is experiencing a lot of growth in Chicago, and we would like to not only recognize this community, but help bridge the gap between Chicago and Silicon Valley and other traditional tech dominated locales, where there is a wealth of knowledge and resources for all things technology-related. The media sponsor for the event is Mashable.com. We expect to have 5-8 start-ups from across the country demo at the event and there will be plenty of networking!

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6 Reasons Google Did Not Need To Acquire Feedburner

Congrats to all the people I know at Chicago based Feedburner on the now official Google acquisition, but in all reality this deal didn’t have to happen! Let’s see why…

1. Google had already acquired the color orange when they bought Blogger!

2. Feedburner’s symbol is fire, which some folks relate to hell. If you believe this, Google will actually be acquiring evil.

3. Eric Olson of Feedburner (along with Frank Gruber and others) organizes Techcocktail, a tech community quarterly networking party in Chicago. Google could come to Chicago and throw a party all by themselves!

4. Google already had all of Feedburner’s IP because Rick Klau, VP of Publisher Services uses Gmail and Google Docs & Spreadsheets for all business deals! (Second source: talk at ABA TECHshow2007)

5. Google already has had adsense for feeds for a long, long time.

6. Once Google has access to the keys of legitimate RSS sources it will be able to determine the original source blog if it is using a Feedburner feed. When combined with Google Blog Search, Google could likely better control splogs in it’s blog search index which will reduce (MFA) made for Adsense site revenue!

Hey what is done is done though, I hope that funding for many more Chicago startups is now available!

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Technorati Suffers Major Data Accuracy Loss

My link count was 262 last night, this morning it’s 220?

This is just plain wrong as I did not have a major linking event 180 days ago. I’m emailing this to David Sifry and Adam Herst and expect a quick resolution of this issue and a restoration of my ranking along with an explanation as to how it occurred.

Technorati is rapidly becoming unstable. It’s losing data or not reading certain blogs while double or triple counting the links of other blogs.

UPDATE: This link was not counted this morning.

UPDATE #2: Adam Herst has contacted me to say they were doing a test of a new feature they are testing and did not know it was going live.