People who attended the “D6: All Things Digital” event in May know that I asked Jeff Bezos an impertinent question. Why, I asked, did Amazon insist on using up the primo spot on my landing page to promote Kindle, when I already owned one and Amazon knows that I own one. (For those who haven’t taken the plunge, Amazon actually pre-configures your Kindle with your customer information when they ship it to you. So presumably they know who has one and therefore doesn’t need to be promoted to buy another one.) Bezos’s response was classic: “Because,” he said, “you only have one.”

Bezos sent me an email today, asking me to check out Amazon.com. Lo and behold, the ad for Kindle had been replaced with what you see here. Promotion for Kindle content based on my history of purchases (I’ve bought both Elmore Leonard and Arturo Reverte-Perez titles on my Kindle previously. Plus, of course, an exhortation to buy more Kindles for friends and family.

Now that’s great customer service! And with a sense of humor! :-)

This week, TopSchool Inc. is introducing itself to its world, which is the world of for-profit, post-secondary educational institutions. That’s a mouthful, but it’s a significant mouthful because those schools, ones designed to address specific educational needs and to make a profit while doing it, have grown into about a third of the entire college-level educational system. That’s right: A third of the money paid by people attending school after high school is not paid to the institutions we all identify as our college and university system.

Instead, there is a large and vibrant system of schools — small and large, broad or narrow — that are run as profitable businesses. And our company, TopSchool, has developed the software to provide a service to these schools that is both their core function (keeping track of their students as customers) and that is still largely locked behind client server systems developed as much as 20 years ago. By providing that software as a service, TopSchool will also enable these schools to go beyond “merely” keeping track of their customers into new and innovative ways of recruiting new customers as well as providing service to existing customers. (We even think that eventually we can provide a Facebook application to our customers’ students that will help them register for classes and manage other aspects of student life.)

TopSchool is a great entrepreneurial story. The company was started several years ago by an engineer, Harout Kertajian. Harout got the basic idea right, which was to provide a school information system as a service rather than as licensed software. But he needed an aggressive, business guy to help him get the company financed and ready to roll out and that guy is Leon Lo, the entrepreneur whom we bet on in making our investment in the company.

The most remarkable part of this story is that Leon actually replaced himself as CEO of the company before we even had a chance to invest in it. Leon recruited two top executives from eCollege, now a division of Pearson Education, to become respectively the CEO (Matthew Schnittman, former president of eCollege) and SVP Sales & Marketing (Justin McMorrow, former VP Sales & Business Development of eCollege and a thought leader in alternative forms of secondary education to boot). Leon also up and moved him and his family from Southern California to Denver to create a new home office for the company. We love that Leon has the drive and vision to do everything that is necessary to help a great new company started, even if that involves relocating his family and reorganizing himself into a new job.

And we’re thrilled to be helping a new company bring the software-as-a-service revolution to a fast-growing industry that is on the leading edge of inventing new way to educate and train us.