We announced today our investment in Next Big Sound.  The full official Foundry Group release is here.

Next Big Sound is an online music analytics and insights company located in Boulder, Colorado. They measure the growth and popularity of bands across major web properties and sell actionable insights around those data to band managers and other industry professionals. NBS has developed a scalable architecture that can quickly add new sources of information and aims to be the definitive source of quantifiable fan data surrounding the music ecosystem.

I’m really happy that we had the opportunity to partner with Alex, David, Samir and Walter, founders of the company.  They were part of this year’s TechStars class and were in a space right in the middle of our Glue theme, our belief in the inevitable change in the music industry and even had a little bit of our Protocol theme thrown in for good measure.

Gentlemen, welcome to the family.  I look forward to a productive, supportive and exciting relationship with many good days to come.  

Back in January, we invested in a company called FirstDocs.  Essentially, it was an investment in the Law Firm 2.0 thesis that I’ve been blogging about. 

I’m pleased to announce that they have renamed, re-branded and re-other things and are now Brightleaf.

Check out their new website and not only will you (hopefully) marvel at the new pretty graphics, but more importantly get a very clear idea of what they are developing just ahead of their public launch, which will be in the next month or so.

I’m really happy with the progress that Dan, Luke, Tom, Muthu and Anil have made and can’t wait until they are live and in public to share with those of you interested. 

Nice job, gents. 

Congrats to  Memeo for receiving a five star rating from cnet’s download.com for the new release of Memeo Share, version 2! Download.com just gave Memeo Share a five star editor’s rating, and they’ve got a nice more detailed blog post about the software here.  The accolades are well deserved.  I’ve been a huge Memeo fan with their sync products which keep all of my PCs up to date with whatever current content I’m working on. 

Version 2 of Memeo Share is a great leap forward in functionality and ease-of-use from their already-excellent version 1, and it makes sharing full-res photos and videos among friends and family incredibly simple and allows you to do it directly from your desktop, and gives you the option of avoiding sharing your photos on public photosharing and social networking sites, though it also provides tools that make it really easy to autopost photos on Facebook or to Memeo’s cloud-based backup service, if you want to socialize or protect your photos and videos.

Here is a great screen shot:

And no, it’s not some $500 device, rather the smart folks Cloud Engines have created a neat little $99 device that you can plug any storage drive into and "boom" it’s on the Internet for you to use and share.  It’s all damn easy to use, too.

And best of all?  It’s our newest investment.  Read on….

As reported by TechCrunch today, we’ve announced today our investment in Medialets – a company that sits right at the intersection of new advertising technologies and our glue theme.

Based in New York, Medialets is a mobile analytics and advertising company that helps mobile application developers track usage and other statistics about their applications and provides technology that enables them to monetize those applications via advertising.

We have a more comprehensive post on the Foundry Group site, that if you are interested will explain even more.  Welcome to Eric and team!

Today we announced our investment in Gist on the Foundry Group website.  This is a really exciting investment for us in that Gist is attempting to solve the "inbox problem" that we’ve been thinking about and living with for a long time.

If you are like me and have multiple inboxes and social networks, I spend a lot of time wondering "where" the particular information that I’m looking for exists.

Gist takes the users inbox and connects it with the flow of information on the web to make it more meaningful to the end-user. They’ve built a web service that integrates tightly with Microsoft Outlook, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition, a Microsoft Exchange server version is in the works and will be released by the end of the summer.

Gist does a magical job of dynamically building a user’s social network from existing information sources, using this to surface relevant information around the web in real time and then organizing and presenting it in a way that is useful both in the short term as well as over a longer period of time. Gist addresses both the issue of inbox fatigue / email overload and information discovery on the web, while doing it in a way that is unobtrusive to a user’s existing information flows.

As for my blog post title, I apologize to Will Smith (and embarrassingly this video still works for me), but figured that everyone else was saying that we got the "gist of it" and I wanted to be unique. 

If you are a lawyer and haven’t read Richard’s book, you should.  And no, reading the reviews and the articles about the book won’t suffice.  Buy the book, sit in a quiet room and read deeply about his predictions of the future of the practice of law.

The title is provocative, for sure and he doesn’t really argue that lawyers are going away, but a central tenant is that much of the legal services we use today will soon be commoditized.  In other words, many lawyers’ practices are headed downward as outsourcing (both human and technological) is rapidly on it’s way.

I’ve written a lot of what I see are the changes going to occur in the legal world in my Law Firm 2.0 series.    I’d say that Richard is at least Law Firm 2.5 to my 2.0.  He has many interesting thoughts, but two really struck home to me.

One of his first propositions is that lawyers aren’t getting paid to give legal advice, so why are we paying them for it?  He says that if you ask a lawyer (especially a corporate lawyer) why they are "successful" not one of them will say "because I know the law."  In fact, most technical lawyers are shunned to back rooms while the "relationship managers" make the big bucks and bring in the clients. 

I’ve seen this and even made the statement myself.  I never thought that I got ahead by knowing the law better than anyone else, rather knowing enough law that I could then give good business advice.  In fact, I subconsciously have always considered my legal knowledge "my commodity" while I considered my judgment my "secret sauce."  So I can see where Richard feels that the practice of "core law" is going to become commoditized.

Secondly, Richard believes that innovation in the legal profession will occur in two areas.  First, there will be innovative technologies that will change the way that lawyers practice.  We’ve seen it first hand with companies like Stratify in the e-discovery space and believe that we’ll see it again (soon) in the document generation space and have made an investment in FirstDocs.  He also predicts that other innovation will occur at the highest level of the legal practice – new theories, new ways to apply law to fact, new ways to deal with new legal structures, etc… – the stuff that you are willing to pay big bucks to top partner level people.

The big issue is where does that leave the "middle class" of lawyers (defined either as by ability or by seniority) if the top parts of the practice are being innovative and valued and the bottom parts of the practice are being commoditized by technology and outsourcing. 

This short review doesn’t even scratch the surface of the book and like all books there are plenty of theories that I don’t see happening, but it’s the most in-depth look into the future of lawyers that I’ve seen and a must read for anyone who makes their living by the billable hour.

If you haven’t heard, the Beastie Boys have remastered Paul’s Boutique and launched on the Topspin platform. 

According to the band, Paul’s Boutique now "actually does have enough bass to shatter your one frozen testicle."

While I can’t vouch for that claim specifically, I can say there is more bass. 

I think the creative and website flow are awesome on this release.  The "turn me up" knob on the left of the website is a control that I haven’t seen before and is really, really cool.

Go check out the website and let me know what you think.  And don’t forget to buy the new release. 

Every time we make an investment, we blog about it on our Foundry Group site.  Today, I’m especially excited about our latest announcement, as the company is a "bulls eye" in my Law Firm 2.0 thesis. 

You can read all about FirstDocs on the Foundry post, but what I’ll tell you shortly here is that they are a Westwood, MA located legal process automation company that I believe, are poised to change the way law firms and in-house legal department deliver value to their clients.

I’m particularly excited about this opportunity given that the CEO Dan Gaffney reached out to me after having read several of my posts about the inefficiencies in the legal ecosystem.

At the time, Dan thought it would be nice to get to know me, see if I could provide him any customer leads, show me the demo, etc.  Being a venture capitalist, I wasn’t sure if I was getting the softest fundraising sell of all time, or if they didn’t need any money, so I asked.   

Dan said they were all set for money and had customers.  I remember being a little sad, but still excited about what they were doing, so we kept in touch. 

Over the next few months, however, our conversations really intensified and the ideas on how to take their already released product to a completely new level began to take shape.  It was at that time, I began to sell the Foundry Group to Dan in hopes that he’d consider taking some money from us and thus, allowing me to join the board of directors.

I’m happy to say – mission accomplished!  I’m very excited to work with Dan, Luke, Anil, Muthu and the rest of the FirstDocs team.  Hopefully one day I’m writing a Law Firm 2.0 post about the increased efficiencies of lawyers!

For those of you who want to know about our portfolio company, Topspin, they’ll be at CES this week.  Foundry folks will be there as well.