Here is the overview of the course and event. Gory details can be found here.

Speakers include: Eric Ries (founder of the lean startup movement), Dave McClure (the foul-mouthed, opinionated, and obnoxiously right-most-of-the-time angel), the KISS metrics team, Randy Komisar (VC/angel with Kleiner Perkins and author of my favourite book on venture capital – The Monk and the Riddle), Steve Blank (who recently wrote a fantastic blog post called “No Plan Survives First Contact With Customers” and many others. This is a top-tier collection of speakers.

This is going to be a kick-in-the-ass day that is going to make any startup entrepreneur rethink their entire business approach.So if you’re sick of limping along building your business 10 users at a time or “working to get the app just right before we launch”, get yourself and your team down to this event.

Sign up HERE. This event is $700USD in person. We’re providing the simulcast here for $50 FREE. Do it. You won’t regret it. And you’ll get to hang out and meet a bunch of other startup entrepreneurs who are all building their ventures. Great place to connect with like-minded folks.

Firstly Apple announced that the whole iPad thing was just a big April Fool’s joke. Those crazy kids.

Kleiner Perkins doubled down by increasing their iFund from $100M to $200M. Clearly, they didn’t hear about the aforementioned joke.

Apple is getting ready to tour people through the iPad with the oddly named “Meet Your New iPad” sessions. Surprising nobody, the marketing communications people are gushing that it will be an close look at “the most amazing features of iPad.” I’m pretty sure there will be lots of talk about “amazing magic” and “magic amazingness” in there too.

At 8:19am this morning, CNet wrote about the big names unveiling iPad apps including Netflix and EA. Then at 10:47am, Google announced that the Gmail team had released an HTML5 Gmail web app for iPad. Then a couple of hours later, InformationWeek’s Eric Zeman bitterly complained that the entire software universe had not yet instantly released new updated apps, particularly calling out uhhh…Google for not doing so. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Continuing on the market-readiness theme, there are rumours that the iPad will launch with 1000 iPad-specific apps. Meanwhile Apple has begun to create a list of websites that are iPad-ready. So far there are four. That leaves only 75 zillion left to update/catalog. Take that Adobe.

Speaking of Adobe, since Apple hates Flash, they need to line up organizations on their side of the fight. Seems like so far, they’re getting some bruisers into the game. CBS ABC, NYT, CNN, Sports Illustrated, Reuters, Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix, and MLB.com are all saying “screw you Adobe, we’re with Apple and HTML5.” Must be awkward at meetings when the NYT is asking for discounts on Adobe software.

The beleaguered magazine publishing industry launched their opening experimental salvos with a mix of free/freemium/paid offerings. Leading the pack in silliness was the Wall Street Journal with their offer of a $17.29/mo subscription. I’m not sure if that’s horrendous or brilliant. From a margin perspective, I suppose if they can get it, they’re laughing.

CNet finally beat the Onion news by writing the single best article on those creepy weird people who sleep in line-ups to buy first release products. Nice work CNet. Boo on you Onion News.

Mashable showed us how board games might be a killer app of sorts for the iPad. Finally, no need to dig those dusty boxes out of the top shelf in the spare room when the family comes over!

WordPress managed to build what I think might be the most useless app so far: a blogging app for iPad. I can’t imagine trying to build hypertext rich articles on the iPad. What a nightmare. I write my posts with 2 or 3 windows open and 2 monitors. Trying to do this in a single app with no multi-tasking would be horrific. Interestingly the almighty, ever-present and usually lucid Om Malik wrote a post titled “Why iPad will Change Blogging for me” in which he made the case that he wasn’t really sure it would and counted the many pains he could envision. Maybe he wrote that post on the iPad and that led to the cognitive dissonance.

Meanwhile in me-too land, a number of soon-to-be-forgotten players launched a number of indistingushable iPad alternatives. I’d give you the link, but really, why bother?

That’s the week that was on the eve of the launch of the iPad. Tomorrow a new era dawns.

Oh wait, there’s an iPad v2 coming with a camera? And multi-tasking? Okay, then maybe THAT’S the dawn of the new era.

Congratulations to everybody who came out. Check out the full race report.

Note: Blue the dog and I didn’t do the 50, we did our own custom length of 24k and ended up at Delaney’s for a mocha to warm up from the rain and wind!

I laughed when I read this because it’s so true. I haven’t heard anybody say “DAMN IT, I can’t send email because my inbox is full!!!” since working at a prior company where we used Exchange where 5000 people exclaimed that almost daily. What a colossal waste of their time. Only about 1/10 of 1% of them knew how to set up auto-archiving so it was a huge drain on the organization’s resources.

Good on ya Google. Nice simple ad, straight to the point.

I want to step into my “office” which would be more like a World of Warcraft world and it could be in a giant hamster ball on wheels so I could run any direction I want. And I should be in a fully immersive environment where I can run in any direction, and interact with my applications with big motions (must jump onto 4 foot box so I can see my email!) or if I want to talk to somebody who is in a different system, I should have to “run” to the other room to answer the inbound message. I want to be completely utterly physically exhausted from my day at work, not sore from a complete lack of activity and too many hours of no motion in the joints.

Or I suppose I could quit and become a labourer. But my work is so damned interesting and I love interacting with all of the people I know. I just wish I could do it while running, jumping, leaping, climbing, and crawling so I could work, have fun, and stay in great shape all at the same time. Maybe I should be quitting work in the web industry and working as a firefighter but I know it wouldn’t hold my mental interest!

My question is this. For all of us uber connected networking, writing, blogging, conference-going wonks, is your system as horrendous? What great ideas have you found to tame the chaos?

Current view:

And here’s the resulting Venn diagram of how my stuff just DOESN’T stay connected in one large meaningful (and simple) way.

Will somebody fix this please? It’s only going to get worse. I’d happily pay somebody a monthly fee to manage all of this, keep it clean and de-duped, analyze my email to capture email and phone number changes, and let me never think about this ever ever again.

And Skype team: WTF are you doing way out there in space?

Cool talk. Worth watching. Great job Seth. Good tribe-finding and leading yourself!

The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.

VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!

It was a crisp beautiful autumn day. I was the only runner in shorts, and one of the only runners out at ALL. There don’t appear to be many runners in Paris. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

On the way back home, I ran through a back alley and found this great cathedral.

And a few blocks from home there is a little shop with this sign. I liked the sign and thought that it was worth taking a photo.

There are a lot of tiny little shops near our place that have art in them. Wait what on earth is that in the window??

It’s a bust of Michael Keaton’s Batman. Creepy.