John Cook wrote a great piece on Jim Heckman here. My wife has known Jim Heckman a long time and introduced us several years ago. Several friends were investors in both Rivals and Scout. This article really touches on the main reason I think Scout was successful. Jim is one of those guys who doesn’t stop easily. He’s tenacious and he takes business success personally. He pushed the rock up the hill and he finally got the last word. It’s really great to see your friends do well.

Most folks in Seattle know that David Beckam and RealMadrid were greeted by a sellout 65,000 person crowd at Qwest Field this week. We were excited to have some signage down on the field.

If you’ve got a website, you’ll want to set up Google Analytics. Now, I realize they get a lot of crap for releasing a bunch of products nobody cares about lately (like Froogle). But Google Analytics is really worth playing with. Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. Seriously. It tells you where on your site people click the most. What pages are loaded the most. What country visitors come from. It’s free and really powerful. Check it.

Mika is a friend. We started at RealNetworks together and ski together whenever schedules will allow. So, I speak from the heart when I say that I’m really, really happy for him and the team that Viacom announces the purchase of AtomShockwave today. They really went through hard times. At one point, almost everyone had to get laid off as the company ran out of money during the dot com meltdown. But they were SO persistant. What I really admired was that Mika was always willing to walk away and feel ok with a possible negative outcome as he always felt like he gave it 100% every step of the way. In the long run, it really paid off. His first start-up was a huge success. Not many can say that. Most folks require a bit more practice

A great read from 37signals:

The biggest challenge for web designers is the unthinkably huge number of possible ways to solve any given problem. We usually don’t think of this because we have our habits and traditions to fall back on, but there are literally billions of possible pixel combinations for each page we make….

Read the whole article.

Looks like some folks find that it’s better to poke fun at yourself while adding that fine gradient touch to their latest boot-strapped creation. Might as well add an “r” on the end too. Aftr all, if you’re not a web 2.0 designr then your site is not likely to be coolr than all the other web 2.o sites. Remembr, the completed card MUST validate XHTML Strict. Now go forth and acknowledge your membrship.

August 4th felt like a great night to go out with some friends and have a few cocktails in Fremont. It was close to our house, nice and warm outside and El Camino makes some nice margheritas. Enjoy the pics.

My old friend and co-worker from RealNetworks, George Kliavkoff just left Major League Baseball to become the Chief Digital Officer for NBC Universal. Nice move George. Glad to see you movin on up to the East Side.