ReadWriteWeb

This is the time of season when you can be on the road for eight weeks straight, filling up your time going to industry events and company conferences.

This is also when we get to see executives in a different mode. It's a time of year when they are on stage, trying to make their mark. It's always a show, no matter who the executive.

These are the executives who do influence the fate for how cloud infrastructures are built out and maintained. They are important to watch as their moves affect the cloud computing market.

On Wednesday, BusinessWeek released their list of the top 25 angel investors in the tech industry, naming Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon ahead of veteran angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. Conway and Hoffman are two of the most influential angels in tech, and have invested in some of the largest Internet companies known today, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Dixon, a younger, less experienced investor than Conway and Hoffman, snagged the top spot due to both his diverse investment portfolio and the superior financial performance of his investments.

"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. However this plays out, a lot of people will be affected, but the way in which it will play out is not at all obvious. This is too big a subject for one post, so read this as an introduction to a multi-post investigation.