Welcome to CLSDF Version 2.0!

Happy New Year and welcome back to CLSDF, wishing you all the best in ’08. Though it had appeared rather quiet around this blog for the last week or so the elves have remained exceedingly busy, staying up late and working hard to deploy a more satisfying user experience. Hopefully the quality of the content shall keep pace with the technology throughout the year.

And now…how about a tour? Come along…I’ll meet you at the page header. There you will find the new CLSDF logo…ahhh…interesting, no? Let’s just say I’m no graphic designer therefore deriving this element was not without a variety of challenges. So what the heck is it you ask? Good question. Well let’s start with the color, green, it is not that I am green with envy, on the contrary I felt it both relevant and important to mesh well with the FBBp color scheme, for who knows…perhaps some day CLSDF may move on to the FBBp web site (here). The color has additional meaning relative to the catalytic needs of our eco-system’s seed-stage companies, that is obviously…capital, or as Jim Linfield, managing partner at Cooley often refers to it as the ‘green enzyme’. So now the shape…while growing up in the lab of Michael Klymkowsky at CU MCDB yeast played a very prominent role in my life, and though undoubtedly many of you are making beer jokes right about now it was in fact the yeast two-hybrid protein-protein screening assay that I am referring to. And the yeast fun (and beer) did not stop there, why it continued on with my exposure to Tarmogens™ derived by the folks at GlobeImmune which are whole, heat-killed recombinant Saccharomyces cerevisia yeast genetically modified to express one or more protein targets that stimulate the immune system against diseased cells. So then the shape is in fact representative of budding yeast (see buds in action here). But then why the circle, well rather simply the circle is representative of our Colorado life science community, whereby success begets additional success in the form of serial bio-entrepreneurship. For example when a company such as Myogen is acquired the intellectual and management capital remains here in Colorado to bud off new companies. And finally, the point in the center...is a metaphorical node, that is CLSDF and FBBp, I hope, function as a node in our life science eco-system where community members find their way to for information and assistance.

OK, that is the logo. Of greatest satisfaction is that those who view CLSDF in the Internet Explorer browser can now observe the sidebars in all of their glory, no more scrolling down till the carpal tunnel kicks in. Additionally, a second side rail was added enabling additional space to fill with juicy content. I’ve started by adding the CLSDF 2007 Company of the year contest so be certain to go vote. The winner is completely decided by the CLSDF readership. If you are reading this in a RSS feed or email update, one) thank you for your subscription and two) why don’t you come on back for a moment, take a look around and cast your vote. You will also notice an extensive ‘search by topic’ (don’t see your company listed? Then let me know!) and archive.

For those of you who note the clumsy url you can easily find yourself back to CLSDF simply by recalling the new url...http://CLSDF.com. Click on that and welcome to an infinite loop.

Finally, we have added a brand new commenting system thanks to our friends in Boulder at Intense Debate. The Intense Debate comment system is built to enable conversation within the comment section, the comments are threaded, allowing one to reply directly to an individual comment these replies are then formatted at different levels to make it easier to follow the various conversations.

So go ahead and leave a comment here about the new blog or anything else on your mind and become automatically entered to win a brand spanking new CLSDF t-shirt. Be the first on your block to own one! Contest ends 11:59pm Friday 11 January.

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