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Let's face it - the traditional business plan as we know it (or as we knew it) is slowly slowly going away. Or is it? Startups and small businesses move at such lightning pace these days that a static document quickly becomes outdated, but the principals and lessons involved with its creation could be valuable in a new form. Many young entrepreneurs still think a business plan is a must-have cornerstone of their business, but as many venture capitalists have said recently, the traditional business plan is not the end-all be-all for startup success.

Net neutrality has been in a the news recently due to rumors, speculation and interpretation surrounding Google and Verizon's newly proposed legislative framework for the enforcement of net neutrality. The key principal behind net neutrality is ensuring service providers (like Verizon) cannot forge agreements with companies (like Google) to exclusively provide an unfair advantage by means of, say, increased bandwidth - thus maintaining neutrality. For startups and entrepreneurs, the debate is one to be monitored with a watchful eye, and some venture capitalists bloggers have begun to chime in once again on the issue.

The great thing about following the hundreds of venture capitalist bloggers is that every now then when one of them writes a rather poignant entry, several other VCs will latch on and provide their opinions on their blogs or in comments. Such is the case surrounding a recent article by Mark Suster of GRP Partners about the "agile board," a phrase he has coined to explain the techniques startups should use to keep their board members more actively involved in the business. Since being posted to Suster's blog, Both Sides of the Table, a handful of other VCs have weighed in with their opinions on the subject.

Back in February at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Miami, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson presented on his 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. For those not fortunate enough to attend the conference, a video and transcript of the talk and subsequent Q&A session with Wilson is now available online for the general public to learn what one of the leading east coast investors advises startups do to succeed on the Web.

When a startup entrepreneur tells the story of his/her mistakes and how they've corrected them, it's endearing. When an investment associate for one of the more prestigious VC firms does it, it's surprising.

Union Square Ventures' Andrew Parker recently started a Got It Wrong Series on his Gong Show blog where he identifies his own mistakes and mis-judgements about the industry.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.

When we wrote our year end posts for 2009, we should've added patent trolling to our list of trends. In the past year we've covered a number of patent disputes including the Word-blocking patent against Microsoft and VoloMedia's patent on podcasting. Union Square Ventures' Brad Burnham wrote an excellent piece today on independent invention and how patent reform can minimize trolls.

Disclosure: I love Fred Wilson's blog. Union Square Ventures (USV) has invested in some amazing ventures that were far from obvious (i.e. they took risks), and they have invested in my friend Alex Iskold's venture. So, I am a fan. Hopefully, I was able to be a good journalist, restrain my enthusiasm, and ask Albert Wenger some good, probing questions. Read on and judge for yourself.

Kwiry, a startup that built all kinds of functionality on top of SMS, emailed users this afternoon to announce that the company is giving up the ghost and it's time to get your data out. It's really a shame but we have to wonder - did this happen because people don't really want anything complex from their short messaging service?

I've enjoyed using Kwiry to text myself reminders and then subscribe to the RSS feed of items I sent in my Netvibes dashboard. When the service first launched it sent you an email with search results for the text of reminders you sent yourself by SMS. You could add movies to your Netflix queue using Kwiry and SMS. Other people did all kinds of things with it, like use it to turn off their computers remotely. In the end, it looks like only a few thousand people probably used the service regularly at all.

Union Square Ventures, the VC shop that funded Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, has placed its latest bet in the clouds. Cloud computing service 10gen has taken $1.5 million from the high profile early investors, both the fund and the company announced today.

Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.