1. This morning’s first Fizz item is about PubliCola. Big news here today:
We’re announcing that Rajeev Singh, president and COO of Concur Technologies (NASDAQ: CNQR), is buying a stake in PubliCola. Along with Urban Visions head Greg Smith, Singh is now PubliCola’s second major investor.
If you want to know about Concur, you should check out last Sunday’s Seattle Times where the Redmond-based automated travel management company was ranked the 12th best-performing company in the Pacific Northwest on the Times’ list of this region’s 87 top public firms. And BusinessWeek put Concur on its list of “Top 100 small companies to watch” in 2007. Good pick. Concur grew from $129 million revenues in ’07 to $215 million in 2008.
Singh, who cofounded Concur in 1993, is making a personal investment in PubliCola that will have no impact on the operations of Concur.
On the PubliCola side, I’m still the editor and majority owner—PubliCola’s other owners don’t have editorial or management control of the day-to-day operation of the site. But I’m happy to report that Singh will join PubliCola’s advisory board where his entrepreneurial and tech brain power will be invaluable. And he will definitely be involved in our strategic decision making about how we want PubliCola to evolve.
Rajeev Singh invests in PubliCola and joins Advisory Board
2. You have to figure that in the battle between the four Democrats vying for King County Executive, Eastsiders Ross Hunter and Fred Jarret are going to divvy up the endorsements in the Microsoft suburbs while city slickers Dow Constantine and Larry Phillips are going to get the nods from Seattle’s neighborhoods, like South Seattle’s 37th District, which dual endorsed the pair last week.
For all of them that means getting the support of the rural, big box, and strip mall turf of in South King County could tip the scales. Larry Phillips scored big last month when he picked up the sole endorsement of South King County’s 31st District Democrats—around Enumclaw.
However, Constantine evened the score last night. Constantine picked up the sole endorsement of the 33rd—the district that takes in Kent, Des Moines, Normandy Park and Sea-Tac.
Constantine and Phillips already split the 47th—SouthEast King County from Renton to Black Diamond.
That leaves the 11th District around Burien, Sea-Tac, Tukwila and Renton, the 30th around Federal Way, and the 5th—North Bend, Snoqualmie, and Issaquah.
(P.S. While the fight over South King County is key, there’s also some fun battles still brewing in Seattle’s 36th, 43rd, and 46th Districts.)
3. Speaking of the 33rd District—State Senator Karen Keiser (D-33, Kent) is off to D.C. today (as we reported yesterday) to be recognized for her work on health care reform.
However, Keiser will also be part of a delegation of state-level lawmakers from around the country that will hold a press conference with U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) urging President Obama to pass a health care reform bill within the year—a bill that sounds a lot like the one Obama already endorsed that includes a “Public Option Plan” for a government health care option.
4. What is it, 1975? What am I, on Angel Dust? I don’t know, but just like last week, when I recommended an article in Rolling Stone magazine (about the estate tax), today I’m recommending a piece in the latest ish of RS, man. It’s an article about how President Obama says he’s ending the drug war, but he’s really not. The article stars former Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske—now Obama’s Drug Czar.
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