Check out OpenCongress.org — an exceptionally important site brought to you by the same folks who bring you the very cool Democracy Player.
Sort of like a Wikipedia for US Congress, everything is hyperlinked, cross-referenced & RSSified.
It is a great way of figuring out what’s really happening in Washington, and I think is going to be a crucial resource leading up to the 2008 elections.
And it’s just another indicator of how incredibly cool the PCF & PPF folks are.
This is an important event — first time a woman has won the Turing Award, the ACM’s award for achievement in computer science. The award has been given since 1966, and many women have contributed in that interval, so it’s about time.
Yesterday was a fun day — between Mozilla & Reactivity, there were dozens of news reports on the web & elsewhere about things that I’m either currently involved in or was involved in not too long ago. Reactivity was always a pretty low profile sort of place — the ethos was to put our heads down and get things done. Great to see that rewarded. Mozilla is the opposite — someone sneezes in our office, and it makes headlines on news.com. Interestingly, the ethos is the same: people here are mostly focused on working hard and doing good work on behalf of users.
But the best thing about yesterday, by far, was the huge number of co-workers, friends, and people in related companies who reached out to say congratulations to me, see how everyone was doing. One of the very best things about my 7 years at Reactivity was the giant number of smart people who I got to spend time with, work with, argue with, drink with. It was really great to talk with so many yesterday, and humbling that so many of them took time out of their busy days to connect.
Also, my friend Adam Nash wrote a blog post today about something I had forgotten — I’ve written elsewhere about how we brainstormed the beginning of Reactivity together in Cupertino back in 1997, but I had forgotten that we used an old Mac of his as our mailserver, and his rather large color printer, named 800lb Color Gorilla in our office for a long time. Seems like a million years ago, and I guess it sorta was. Anyway, Adam wrote a nice post on his blog today about it. His blog is more professional than mine is. 🙂
We roll a little later in the day here than most — it’s a left coast type of thing. But coverage of Reactivity & Cisco is starting to pick up, like this this incredibly mistitled post about Cisco buying another Web 2.0 firm. Reactivity is most definitely not that.
But anyhoo. One of the things Matt points out is that Accel Partners, and Peter Fenton in particular, really stuck it out with Reactivity through some grim times. Peter supported us when it was clearly personally uncomfortable for him, and I’m really happy for this outcome for him. VCs often get (much deserved) criticism for short term actions, but I always found Accel and Peter to be longer term thinkers than that, and supportive over the long haul. Pete’s at Benchmark now, but remains one of my favorite VCs.
Cisco is announcing today that they’re acquiring Reactivity, a company that I co-founded with Bryan, Brian & Mike just over nine years ago, in January 1998. I’ll have more to say eventually on the subject, but for now, I’m very proud of the team that stuck it through for so long, and very happy to get to an outcome. More soon…
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