[Another of my VC newsletters from 1999, this one waxing on about a piece of technology I’d just picked up at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: a RIM 850, the very first Blackberry.

Using it around New York, the response from my friends at investment banks, hedge funds, and law firms was unanimous: clearly, nobody outside of the world of high tech would ever, ever carry something like that.]

Yesterday, I received about two hundred email messages. To most normal people, that seems like an ungodly number. But from many people involved in internet businesses, the response is “yeah, that’s about right,” or “only two hundred?” Of those two hundred, three were spam and about twenty were newsletters and other updates. But at least half required some sort of timely response.

Regardless of the number, email has become central to my way of business. And most people that I talk with say the same thing. Many executives of internet firms even prefer sending email over talking on the phone. The difficulty, however, is that phones are available to executives on the go; email, by and large, isn’t.

I recently, however, discovered a solution: the RIM 850. About the size of a standard 2-way pager, the RIM sports a slightly larger than usual screen and a tiny Qwerty keyboard. But packed into the small black gadget is a lot of functionality. The RIM is a PDA, sends and receives email, and browses the web.

While the PDA is fairly simple, it does everything I need. And despite the keyboard’s small size, typing emails by thumb is surprisingly fast and comfortable. Unlike the Palm VII, coverage is nationwide, and because the 850 runs on a pager network, building penetration is quite good. The 850 is also better than the Palm VII for three other reasons. First, the 850 can check your existing POP account, instead of requiring a special yourname@palm.net address. Second, the 850 checks mail continually, and, like a pager, notifies you instantly, by tone or vibration, when you receive new mail. Third, the 850 is priced on a flat fee, equal to the Palm VII’s second cheapest plan. My two hundred messages would more than burn through an entire month’s worth of the Palm’s top plan in less than a day.

The little web browser is also surprisingly good. The GoWeb browser strips everything but text from pages and then compresses them for faster transmission. You can check headlines, stock prices and sports scores, get driving directions, and even search the yellow pages from the palm of your hand.

The best part, however, is that, by your instant responses, you appear to be a workaholic. You seem to always be waiting by your computer, when, in fact, you could be anywhere at all. Which is why I was glad to see that the RIM network has full coverage throughout Hawaii.

[My old Sharkbyte partner, David Fischer, recently emailed to say that one of his current tech companies is launching a newsletter, and to ask if I’d saved any of the similar newsletters I wrote back in my tech VC days for inspiration.

Indeed I had. As my ‘bleeding edge’ thinking from 1999 now seems painfully quaint, I thought I’d reprint a few of the editions here over the next few days. First up: the inside scoop on a brand new search engine, Google.]

When users open their browsers, they’re largely doing it to gather news and information. In fact, according to recent research by e-Stats, 87.8% of users engage in information gathering, while around 80% are involved in the loosely related activities of research or surfing. The next categories, like online gaming, chat, and shopping are considerably less popular – 30% or less of web users engage in them.

The common thread in the top three activities – information gathering, research and surfing – is a need for search. Users start out with a vague idea of what they’re looking for, and usually (about 85% of the time) they head straight to a search engine to find what they want. Most of those searchers head to Yahoo, others to Excite or Lycos, while particularly web savvy searchers sometimes head to Metacrawler, which aggregates the results of the top search engines. All of these searches, however, have the same shortcoming – they only search based upon the “relevance” of the page – in essence, the number of times your search terms appears on the page.

Enter Google. Google, along with relevance, uses quality in rating pages. A Google search, then, doesn’t just give you some pages that contain your search terms – it gives you the best pages that contain your search terms. Of course, the web is much too large to rate every page for quality, so Google uses a fairly clever strategy – start with a collection of quality web sites, and define a quality site as one linked to by other quality sites. It might sound circular, but the results are surprising. They’re so good, in fact, that Google has an “I’m feeling lucky” button which takes you directly to the first search result. The algorithm works so well that the first result actually has the information you need the vast majority of the time.

No, we don’t own a stake in Google. But we do watch the web very closely – that’s our job. After seeing how many of our friends still use older search engines, we decided to pass on what we’ve learned. It just might save you a bit of time and sanity.