Last year Alex wrote a post on the Texas Startup Blog announcing that a Texas based startup called eSports Partners (evidently backed by Jerry Jones) raised $5MM (the post is likely removed from here, but Google has a cache here). The text of the post is below:

According to Todd Anders from GuideCap, Coppell based eSports Partners raised a $5,000,000 senior credit facility from Compass Bank (GuideCap arranged the financing). Never heard of eSports? Todd explained, “The company is very low profile and wants to keep it that way.”

Run by CEO Michael McKay, eSports is a merchandise service provider offering solutions for NFL and collegiate markets. The company reported revenues of $31.5MM with 250 employees.

Their solutions include ecommerce (site design, content development and management), retail consulting (store locations, build out, merchandising and management), game day operations (venues to sell team merchandise), catalogs (creation and order fullfullment) and several other related services.

eSports’ clients (gathered from a quick Google search) include the San Diego Chargers, Washington Redskins, University of Arkansas Razorbacks, Miami Doplhins, University of Tennessee, Miami Hurricanes, Denver Broncos, Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Detroit Lions, Tennessee Titans, Indianpolis Colts, Arizona Cardinals and Texas A&M University.

He never took much notice, but evidently the post received a few negative comments and as a result the company requested that Alex remove the negative comments and provide the identities of the people who made negative comments. After talking it over with a couple of lawyers he was assured that he would prevail, but only after $20,000+ in legal costs. Alex contacted the company and their lawyers and suggested that he was willing to remove the post and the comments, but he wasn’t willing to provide the identities unless ordered to by a court. The company demanded that he backup the database and retain it in the event that the company can secure a court order for the release of the identities.

Do you think Alex is doing the right thing? Should he remove the post? What obligation does he have to stand up to companies who receive a few negative comments? We would love your comments (positive or negative). Letter below:

Alexander & I gave Tantek & Ryan an update on the hResume stuff we’d been working on, and while we were there we recorded a discussion about hResume and the success of Microformats in general. We’re just about ready to offer a WordPress plugin for hResume and an hResume generator. I also heard today that work has started on an MT plugin as well.

Listen to the podcast:

 

• At the Weblogs Worknotes page
• Download the file (~17 MB .mp3)
• Subscribe to the feed

Peter Davis has a great point when he notes that he can review 50 blogs in the same time he can listen to the average podcast.  He has a great point and one worth reading in full here.  But for me Alex has a more topical explaination of how podcasts can offer businesses a method for timeshifting important audio content.

For most companies conference calls are a fact of life.  Many of us sit in our office on several conference calls per week at peek work hours.  We could be connecting with partners and associates, but instead we are forced to listen to boring calls that often have nothing to do with us.  Podcasting offers a great way for businesses to allow their workers to timeshift conference call information.  Imagine being able to listen to a weekly conference call on the way home from work or being able to fast forward through parts not on topic to your function?  What if you could then use your cell phone to insert your own thoughts into a feed?  Alex details these features in his post titled, “Scoble is right, podcasting is inefficient!”

Podcasting is a great tool that can be used to save time or to waste time - its all in the application!

Alexander & I have been working a lot lately on all the Big in Japan tools. Lots of changes to PodServe, revamping FrankenFeed in Rails and with the new user experience tweaks we’ve been doing to all the tools, and launching the remaining tools. (Note to self: doing ten apps at once is not a good idea.) We posted up SocialMail for a bit of feedback, and we’re getting it.

What’s SocialMail? It’s a tool that lets you get any email as an RSS feed. Now, for non-geeks, that means you don’t have to keep piling on your Inbox just to stay connected with people. For me, and perhaps for many of you, email is just not as effective anymore. If I’m out for half a day, my email piles up so much that I’m not as effective in paying attention to things. I’m managing most of my projects through various Basecamps, and getting feed updates on new actions and such.

You can use SocialMail to:

• Forward any email to an RSS feed, tracking it in your newsreader or republishing to a blog. For instance, it might be handy to have all support@ emails republished to an internal blog where your team has better access to them.
• Create non-managed email discussion lists. Want to have a quick talk about Bay Area Hiking? Create BayHikes@biggu.com and let everyone interested subscribe to that feed. They don’t have to give you an email address, nor do they have to unsub and manage their participation when they tire of the conversation. They simply unsub from the feed. Then, again, you can republish the information to a blog, etc., making it more searchable, indexable, easier to interact with than typical email.
• Share common addresses. Instead of having one person responsible for sales@ or support@, create a SocialMail feed and let everyone in the company have access to these public emails.

I’m sure our users will come up with many more things, but we’ve started the ball rolling. Read Alexander’s write-up or check out what TechMeme is tracking on this new tool.