Behind every successful mobile startup is a handful of power players guiding the founders. Smart and savvy investors may give you a kick start, or a corporate strategic partner might chip in some expansion capital and join your board. In celebration of these key insiders, AlwaysOn is seeking nominations for your favorite Mobile Power Players. 

The folks that have made the Mobile Power Players list so far are listed below.

I still remember reading this profound question on December 24, 2007 in BusinessWeek's cover article on Google and cloud computing like it was yesterday.  It was an interview question, posed by then senior Google engineer Christophe Bisciglia (later founder of red-hot cloud software company, Cloudera and more recently WibiData) to job applicants.

For the first time, I began to think through the practical implications of what the advent of the information explosion (now commonly referred to as “Big Data”) really meant to both individuals and corporations.  How would this onslaught of information effect decision-making across a range of industries, what were the practical implications to businesses and executives, and what were the resulting investment opportunities?

Over the past year, I’ve been systematically trying to change the way the board meetings work for the companies that I’m on the boards of. I’ve done a bunch of experiments and continue to learn what works and what doesn’t work.

Ever since I started investing in the mid-1990′s I’ve been exposed to a concept called “board observer rights.” When we did investments at Mobius Venture Capital, in addition to a board seat, we always got board observer rights. This was a way for us to bring another person to the board meeting other than the board member (usually an associate or a principal but sometimes another partner), or have someone sit in for the board member if the board member wasn’t available.

It’s Wednesday late afternoon. I’m aboard Delta flight 1833 from Cincinnati (actually, Northern Kentucky for what it’s worth) to Los Angeles.

I had a very enjoyable day in Cincinnati meeting many local entrepreneurs, angels and accelerators. I was here to see one of our LPs (limited partners are the people who invest money in VC funds) called Fort Washington. They’ve been a long-term investor in our fund – GRP Partners – and it was important to me to spend time with them in their home market and meet the people with whom they deal locally.

AlwaysOn has officially kicked off its second annual OnMobile Top 100 Private Companies Competition. We're looking for the top emerging mobile companies that are creating new business opportunities in the high-growth mobile markets. This includes private companies that are demonstrating significant market traction and pursuing game-changing technology in the following sectors:

Today, we’re announcing an investment in Schoology, a next generation collaborative learning platform that combines the elements of a learning management system, a social networking platform, and enterprise resource system all in one hyper-intuitive interface.

I’ve known the Schoology team for some time, having spent the last year getting to know them. It’s a testament to the power of building enduring relationships.

I didn’t know whether I should chuckle cynically or slow clap the recent hubris of an Amazon executive, quoted in InformationWeek, with a tech prediction set to be fulfilled in a mere ten years: Amazon: Era Of Data Centers Ending:

The era in which most big companies operate their own data centers is coming to a close. Instead they’ll turn, slowly but surely, to the cloud. That’s the bold prediction Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of product marketing, sales, and product management, made Thursday at Amazon’s Web Service Summit 2012 in New York.

When a blockbuster deal happens, a lot of people get excited. The press is all over it, money comes pouring into startups in search of the next one, people quit jobs and school to get in the game. It's a gold rush.

But there's another reaction that I have heard a lot in the past few weeks that is quite different. It is "why not me?" The title of this post is from an email between me and an entrepreneur I know who will go nameless.

It sums up the emotion so well for me.