It is with great excitement (and relief!) that I proudly introduce you to the new AlwaysOn network! As any web publisher knows, re-launching a new website is an arduous task that never happens on time, never on budget, and is never exactly the way you want it to be on day one. But, hey, we’re up! And for those of you who joined our community and attended one or more of our events on the AO World Tour since we founded the company in 2003—thanks! We also ask, with as much humility and grace we can muster, that you will use the new site to provide your invaluable feedback (and a little Q&A, if you are so inclined). We know we are not perfect out of the box—so we are all ears.

I also want to thank the AlwaysOn team—most of whom have not been with us a very long time. Not only did the team stick with us to get this puppy launched, it kept a great attitude as the web launch schedule slipped and slipped. I would also like to bring attention to our stellar web development team up in Vancouver, Canada. Appnovation (www.appnovation.com) is one of the hottest Drupal shops you can find. To Arnold Leung and his team—thank you! And I also want to give a shout out to our illustrious art director who has been with me since Red Herring, Arno Ghelfi (a.k.a. Starno - http://www.starno.com), whose made the site, like all our stuff, look clean and pretty.

Harkening back to my old Red Herring days, I am starting to feel my editorial juices simmering again, and we look forward to offering up some of the coolest and most actionable content you can find in the Global Silicon Valley. Specifically, while it will take us some time to completely step up to the full task, here is what you can expect from us.

We will continue to have a maniacal focus on “breakout companies”—the enterprises that not only jumped the first hurdle of raising some capital, but are also the ones beginning to distinguish themselves in the marketplace with breakthrough technologies or innovative business models.  The AO Events department is one of the first media brands to honor the likes of salesforce.com, MySQL, Skype, YouTube, and Twitter. We will continue this great tradition in a more real-time fashion with the new AO network.

We will continue to keep the top venture capitalists and strategic players at the Big Companies firmly in our crosshairs. As all entrepreneurs know, fundraising is a never-ending process for the first several years, and our job is to help people identify the partners and firms that are playing at the top of their game in the digital media, on-demand, and greentech spaces. We will also be sure we are talking to all the folks at places like Google, HP, Cisco, and Microsoft, whose job it is to identify, buy, or invest in new companies.

Finally, the new AO network will be a place where you can keep up with the best industry bloggers in the world. As you can already see on our home page, we are working with folks like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley and the Maverick Marc Cuban to aggregate their best work onto AO. We are working with more than 50 of these leaders—and the list is building every day—so you can expect that, in addition to our original reporting, you will hear from the best and brightest. If you would like to join this distinguished network of Industry Insiders and let us re-purpose your best work—e-mail me directly at tonyperkins@mac.com.

I promised myself I would keep this short, so I will. Let me once again thank everyone whom I have been privileged to touch during the last 25 years through all my incarnations at Silicon Valley Bank, the Churchill Club, Upside, Red Herring, and now AlwaysOn. My professional goal in life has been pretty simple. To show the good Lord above how grateful I am that he let me grow up in Menlo Park and play a role in Silicon Valley—the Athens of the Information Age. The job of championing the entrepreneur across all the brands I helped create has truly been a blessing!