Theme: Protocol

During a run several weeks ago, I was pondering the arc of several of our investment themes.  When we made our investment in Gist, we talked about it being at the intersection of our Email and Implicit Web themes.  It turns out to also include our RSS theme (which previously included investments in FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati.)

I’d just finished reading A Semantic Web Primer and was thinking about the various semantic web protocols that were the basis for our Implicit Web theme such as RDF, OWL, and XML.  At some point I realized that the bucket of Internet and web-related protocols that we have been investing in since the mid-1990’s included SMTP, RSS, XML, and of course HTTP.

During one of our weekly partnership lunches, we talked about all the various protocols that we liked and realized that “Protocol” was a great label for our theme that includes Email, RSS, and Implicit Web.  So – from this point forward, our new theme “Protocol” will join the three other core themes we are currently investing in: Glue, HCI, and Digital Life.