June in Boulder
June 30, 2007
it’s been a fun June in Boulder. Not just with the first 30 days of TechStars, but in general. Last week I went to the Fuser open house (I hear there are still some closed beta invites available), but had something come up right before the Lijit open house, so I couldn’t make it over the celebrate their recent round of funding. However, I did send one of my spies who grabbed a few pictures for me.
Tom Higley (iggli.com), Stan James (Lijit.com), Alex King (Crowd Favorite), and a few TechStars get their game on at Lijit.
Then, last night I headed over the the Six88 Rooftop Finale. These guys have thrown some pretty fun parties on Pearl street in the last couple of years. Congrats to Six88 (first covered here) who due to continued success is moving to newer, much larger offices in Boulder. But sadly, not on Pearl, and without a rooftop.
Bill Flagg (RegOnline) and Jason Eckenroth (Six88) mug it up
Boulder is just a fun place for startup junkies. It looks like at least four of the eight out of state TechStars teams have already decided they’re not leaving, no matter what. Every day, I seem to be reading about another, another, then another move to Boulder by really interesting folks. The energy here just keeps growing.
On to July.
Startup Weekend approaches
June 30, 2007
Next weekend is Andrew Hyde’s Startup Weekend in Boulder. About 50 people are registered so far including me, several of the TechStars gang, Alex King, Brad Feld, Danny Newman, Dennis Yu, Devin Reams, Kevin Cawley, Michael Sitarzewski, Seth Levine, Stan James, and a bunch of other amazing folks. You can see the list of attendees with blogs/web sites on the sidebar of StartupWeekend.com.
We’ll be getting together on Friday night July 6th, and basically going nonstop until we launch a product by 11:59pm on Sunday night. We won’t select the idea until Friday night and then we’ll crank all weekend towards a release. Everybody who participates fully will get an equal share of the founders stock in the company. Hopefully it will be interesting enough that somebody will want to keep running with it after the weekend.
Andrew is now looking for startup ideas that we can implement next weekend, and the discussion is going on here. Why not add that web site you’ve always wanted but will never build yourself?
We’ll be blogging like crazy next weekend as decisions are made. Be sure to subscribe to the feed if you won’t be there in person. We’ll also have some cool ways for you to interact from home that we’ll be announcing on the StartupWeekend.com web site on Friday night.
Wish us luck. Or better yet, sign up and make your own luck.
Fuser - a special sneak peek
June 28, 2007
Last night, I went to the Fuser open house in downtown Boulder. Fuser is the first product from Confluence Commons (founded by Jared Polis) which has been stealthily cranking for about a year now.
I’ve been using the product to “unify my email” since the first alpha about 4 months ago. Disclosure: I was on the technical advisory board at Fuser, but I am not an investor.
I can certainly see the use for it if you have a bunch of email and social messaging accounts in a bunch of places and would like one interface for everything.
The challenge, obviously, is that this unified interface has to be just as good or better than what you’re using today. That can be a pretty high bar.
But judge the progress for yourself. Colorado Startups readers have been invited by the company to participate in the closed beta version. You’ll need the registration code “costartups” to gain access during the sign up process. Sign up quickly, because they’ll only allow the first 100 users to gain access. All they ask in return is your feedback. Note: Mac users need to use Safari instead of Firefox, for now.
Fuser is a fun company and a great addition to the downtown Boulder startup scene. I’m anxious to see where this goes and how fast. Thanks Fuser! We had a great time playing Guitar Hero and trying to name the robot mascot.
Startup math
June 28, 2007
You know how companies often try to describe themselves in terms of other startups? As in.. “I heard about this great new company - it’s like MySpace + YouTube.”
Oh brother.
Startup junkies please note. This is not a good way to describe your company. You are saying “I am derivative” instead of “I am innovative.”
Just today I was introduced to a company by someone (not the entrepreneur, so she’s off the hook for now) who said it was like “YouTube + Second Life + Del.icio.us + Joost + MySpace + MapQuest” (a few terms were changed to protect the not so innocent). Now you tell me - what the hell is that? Bookmarkable broadcast-ready geo-tagged videos containing 3D representations of peoples friends cats? - huh?!?
Instead of thinking in math, maybe they should think in colors. Red + Blue + Green + Purpose + Orange = a mess.
How about telling me what problem your product solves or what you make that everybody is going to want to use? Better yet, how about just giving me a URL and saying “check this out.” I’d much rather hear about it or see it than try to figure out all of the operands in this silly sort of math.
Toys in the hood
June 26, 2007
Colorado has at least two startups vying for the eyeballs of you and your neighbor. I’ve covered eNeighbors (Longmont) once previously, and now Nayburz (Denver) wants to be the heavy on your block.
While the models are not exactly the same, both products aim to help you make friends with your neighbors. eNeighbors employs more of a “closed network” approach where the customer is really the community itself which in turn invites residents to join the network. In contrast, Nayburz takes the approach of defining a community (such as Denver) and then allowing users to meet each other across a connected web of neighborhoods.
So, the eNeighbors approach is to sell a community a tool that they can use to attract residents, improve the community, etc, like this:
eNeighbors started as a site offering customized communities for neighborhoods, and has recently released “version 2.0″ which according to founder Chris Stock is more like a “Facebook for Neighborhoods” that is more template driven. eNeighbors now has about a dozen such communities as customers so far.
In contrast, Nayburz uses the concept of your “bubble” (area) that you belong to. You decide - this can be specific (such as a building) or generalized (such as downtown Denver). It looks more like this:
Nayburz has yet to launch, but plans to on August 1 and will focus specifically on Denver initially. Founder Paul Davis told me that the plan is to expand to other communities such as “Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland and Phoenix” in the next phase.
While the ideas behind these sites are certainly not new, there does seem to be a bit of a resurgence of social sites aiming to connect neighbors. Personally, I prefer the simple data-driven approach of sites like Fatdoor (assuming it would work in Boulder). Maybe that’s because I don’t really want to write on my neighbors metaphoric wall so much as find out who they are and what they’re all about, so I can decide who to bump in to next time I walk the dog.
From the user perspective, I think the place for sites like these might really exist inside of Facebook these days, where everyone is already hanging out - assuming they want to meet somebody new at all. Of course, there’s the Facebook problem staring you in the, um, face.
What ever happened to bribing your neighbors with cookies and getting off your ass, anyway?
Lijit funded
June 25, 2007
Lijit (all my past coverage here) announced today that it has received 3.3M in funding in a round led by Boulder Ventures. The company recently turned one year old. They’re so cute at that age, aren’t they?
The Lijit widjit is on the right side of my blog. It lets you search through my eyes - either just my content or the content of my trusted network. If you’re a blogger, you can get one too.
Lijit is holding an open house this Thursday at 4pm (details here). You can come check out their digs and hear first hand what they’re up to. But don’t get too familiar with their current space in Louisville. Rumor is they’re Boulder bound in the next few months - woot!
I talked to Todd Vernon briefly about the funding, and he was very excited to have Peter Roshko and the gang at Boulder Ventures on board. He was also excited about the new positions they plan to add in the short term.
“We are lucky that an old time Raindance’r will be joining the team in 2 weeks, Mike Merideth. He has lead the IT team at Raindance for years and will be joining us Director Information Technology. We are all doing backflips over him as he will be key to our fast growth and system operations, he is simply the best guy in town and in addition an amazing photographer. Of course, we’re hiring and we need a rock star DBA to join the team as well as a few more software engineers.” - CEO, Todd Vernon
Congrats to Todd, Stan, and everyone who’s too Lijit. Well deserved - I can’t wait to see where you take it next.
TechStars REALLY IS cranking….
June 23, 2007
Brad said it best. TechStars is really cranking now.
Of course, we’re blogging away about it on that blog. But since it’s pretty relevant to the Colorado startup scene, here are some highlights in case you haven’t been following TechStars closely this summer.
- 8 of our 10 teams are from outside of Colorado. 2 of those 8 have already decided they’re not leaving Boulder after the summer.
- TechStars.tv is growing every week, and already has lots of great video content from our sessions and the TechStars HQ. I’ve embedded just one video that’s available there at the bottom of this post.
- Eric Marcoullier and Todd Sampson, the founders of MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo recently) spent some time with the TechStars last week, as did Noah Kagan (formerly of Facebook and now with Community Next and Mint.com
- Based on feedback from our amazing mentors and special guests, eight of our ten teams have significantly altered their idea in the last month.
- We held an open event called “Funding your startup”. This was one of our 40 or so regular sessions, but we invited everyone to attend this one. Over 200 people showed up by we riffed on the subject for over 3 hours with tons of audience engagement. By popular request, we’ll run another session in public this summer. Stay tuned to the TechStars blog to find out when. Video of that event is also coming soon.
Several of the teams are now in active beta, and a few more will be this coming week. In fact, we’re looking for a few good beta testers. If you’re willing to be a guinea pig, don’t mind a few things blowing up in your face, and you match one of these profiles - please contact me. I may have some goodies for you.
- Bloggers with less than 1,000 subscribers (include what type of blog you run - e.g. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, etc.)
- People who manage and run events on a regular basis with 100 or more attendees (describe the events)
- Heavy (and I mean prolific) Facebook users.
- Lawyers who have hung out a “shingle” (or are part of a firm of 5 or fewer partners/lawyers)
Ah, “Summertime” (from TechStars.tv)…
Second Annual New Media Summit
June 19, 2007
On May 31, I took some of the TechStars down to the Second Annual New Media Summit at the Denver Press Club. Metzger Associates presented this event and the panelists were Phil Weiser (CU Law), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Veronica Belmont (CNET.com) and JB Holston (Newsgator). The topic was emerging trends in New Media.
The discussion was diverse and covered music, blogging, identity, privacy, newspapers, the law, computing infrastructure in general, and much more. The audience questions were interesting as well.
Video courtesy of Endoze Design. Second Annual New Media Summit from David Cohen on Vimeo.
Asking for Giveness
June 19, 2007
Giveness is a nifty-named Longmont based startup that quietly launched in March of this year as “a social network for philanthropy.” The site has managed to sign up about 90 charities thus far. The flash intro full of marketing speak doesn’t do much to explain how it actually works, but it’s worth a look anyway as you do get to see the girl in the foreground with the freakishly large head.
What happens here is that a charity can register, and then promote items for sale. They can also use the site as a presence for their community by adding such features as blog syndication, videos, photos, commenting, friending, and more. The charity can then promote the site and ask folks to buy items from their Giveness profile. Giveness then directs 100% of the commissions from those sales back to the charity.
Basically, Giveness is simply claiming otherwise non-existent commissions on behalf of the charities that refer traffic to them. Here’s how it works for the Rochester County JCC, for example.
I asked the obvious question - why not skim those commissions as a business model while still returning most of the value to the charity?
“Our model is interesting in that we have a potential revenue stream coming from the commissions generated through the purchases made through our site. We’ve made a conscious and ethical decision not treat these commissions as a revenue stream for Giveness. We look at the work involved in generating, managing and distributing these commissions to our charities similar to the bandwidth expenses incurred if we were developing a free video streaming service like YouTube.” - Founder, Richard Waldvogel
Richard went on to explain that Giveness is for profit, but hopes to create a “win, win, win” for organizations, merchants, and individuals interested in these charities.
“We view the concept behind Giveness as a different way to think about how you can conduct business. We’ve all worked at jobs where our only goal was to make a profit. We’ve all volunteered our time during our personal lives where we’ve tried to make a difference. The ideal situation is to “mash up” these 2 philosophies where you can make a living and make a difference at the same time.” Founder, Richard Waldvogel
When I asked Richard about the number of users on the site so far, he explained that they have created a zero friction process by which the people who want to help the charity simply need to click through to the merchant with no registration required. To Giveness, it’s not about the number of registered users. It’s about the number of purchases they can drive through the site that would otherwise occur from natural traffic to these same merchants.
So how does the company plan to make money? Through sponsorships and advertising and premium upgrades. The Web 2.0 way, of course.
The company is currently angel funded and plans to seek additional investment in the future.
The trick here is obviously going to be to land some charities with large existing communities that can be the target of promotion. Then Giveness will have to provide the tools to distribute the profile links in interesting ways across those user bases. I smell a social widget in their future.
It’s Me!
June 11, 2007
Me.dium (first covered last October) just announced a $15M Series B round this morning. I couldn’t have been more excited for Robert, Kimbal, David and the gang. Their progress lately has been fantastic, and they’ve gotten tons of buzz. This should just full the next generations of what Me.dium can become. Me.dium is already really cool, because it lets you see the activity going on behind your browser. You can interact with others as you surf together as well as discover interesting stuff going on on the web. It’s neat to see crowds rushing to a web site in much the same way as you see crowds around awesome street performers like the Zip Code man here on Pearl Street in Boulder.
Coincidentally, I’ve been selected as the “Me of the Week” on Me.dium. For some reason, those guys seem to think I might have some interesting stuff to talk about this week. Hopefully I’ll dig up some cool stuff to share about TechStars and more this week.
If you’re not already signed up for Me.dium, here’s my invite link which also automatically “friends” me with you if you use it. Then you can see everything I surf, which will just be immensely interesting, I’m sure! Check it out!
Disclosures: None, I am not an investor in Me.dium. I just think they’re bad-asses. You think I have that kind of money? ;-)
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