ReadWriteWeb

Investors get lots of emails. Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group wrote just this morning on how he wishes email were slower so he wouldn't suffer from what he calls "Email Compulsive Disorder." That being said, there are ways to write better messages when communicating with investors (or anyone who receives a lot of email daily) that will make the process simpler, quicker and will better your chances of hearing back from them.

This week we've got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back with their second book. Released earlier this month, Rework, a no-nonsense rethinking of how to successfully start and run a business, is the second book from Fried and Heinemeier who earlier authored Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application.

This week, 37Signals started to preview the upcoming update to their Backpack service, which received its last major update in July. Though most of the new features seem very useful, they also seem to transform the app from a simple organizational tool into something else entirely. We can't help but wonder, considering the company wrote the book on keeping things simple in software development, has 37Signals lost focus with Backpack?