Browse > Home / Archive for August 2008

Aloha Summit on social media in Boulder, Oct 6-7

August 28, 2008

On October 6-8, the second Aloha Summit is happening here in Boulder, Colorado. This is an event put on by Dave Taylor and Andy Beal. The Aloha Summit is very much a one-on-one event, and only 25 attendees are accepted.

The Aloha Summit offers a “once-in-a-lifetime chance to spend two days in an intimate setting learning exactly how to use social media tools to increase your profits”, “No boring PowerPoint slides and no sales pitches”, and “A full day of teaching and a full day of consulting. Every attendee will receive one-on-one time with the experts.”

Featured participant/speakers include Om Malik, CEO of GigaOM, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter.com and Peter Shankman, founder of Help a Reporter Online, Susan Bratton of Personal Life Media, Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell) and Roxanne Darling (host, Beachwalks With Rox).

The fee to attend is $2499, but you can use the special “Friend of David” discount code (enter “fod”) and save yourself $250. Register or learn more here if you’re interested.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

Interview with Mark Solon on VCIR Fall

August 26, 2008

The following is an interview with Mark Solon of Highway 12 Ventures regarding VCIR Fall, which takes place Sept 9-11 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Q. Mark, for those who don’t know you, can you introduce yourself?

I’m the founder and managing partner of Highway 12 Ventures in Boise. We’re an early-stage venture firm focused on investing in high-growth companies in the fasting growing region in the country, the mountain west. I also used to have a pretty decent curveball until ‘cuff surgery a few years ago. All I’ve got left now is a decent wrist shot in our local ice hockey beer league…

Q. What’s your relationship with VCIR?

I’ve been attending VCIR since we started Highway 12 in 2001. From my perspective, VCIR in Beaver Creek each February is the premier event in the region each year. If you’re involved in any start-up activity in this region, it’s the “must attend” event of the year.

Q. VCIR is always a great annual event. Why was a Fall event set up for the first time this year?

After attending and participating in too many small regional venture events from 2000-2006 without the needed critical mass for success, I knew the region needed a flagship event; you know, a rising tide and all that. In 2006, I approached some of my colleagues who were members of the board of the Colorado Venture Capital Association to talk to them about the idea of expanding their footprint to become a regional association and to my pleasant surprise, they had already begun discussions about the idea. After the CVCA expanded to become the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association (RMVCA) in ‘06, I was asked to join that board and pleaded my case to expand VCIR to twice a year. I suggested keeping Venture in the Rockies in Beaver Creek each year given the national prestige that event had attained, but proposed adding a second VCIR event which would rotate around the rest of the region, highlighting all the other great startups in those states. For instance, each year in Idaho, we have a small handful of companies that are “venture-ready.” The problem is, we just don’t have enough of them to support a meaningful annual event on our own which would draw venture investors from outside the region. Other States like Montana, Utah and New Mexico were faced with the same challenge. Anyway, the board embraced the idea. Of course, it was like waking a sleeping baby; “you wake it, you take it.” Hence, I’m chairing the first VCIR Fall and we’re doing it in my home state of Idaho.

Q. How will the fall event be different?

We thought it was important to differentiate the two events somewhat. Venture Capital in the Rockies has always had 20-25 companies presenting with multiple tracks. Knowing that it’s going to take some time for VCIR Fall to attain the same notoriety as Venture in the Rockies, we wanted to create a more intimate feel with no tracks and everyone in the same room. Also, we’ve reduced the number of companies presenting and increased the content. We’ve got a handful a world renowned speakers. For instance, Bob Maynard – chief investment officer of PERSI will be talking about the private equity markets. Bob manages Idaho’s $11B pension and was recently named public pension manager of the year. Our keynote speaker is Wade Davis, a cultural anthropologist and explorer-in-residence at national geographic who will teach us about the effects of technology proliferation on vanishing cultures. When I saw him earlier this year, his presentation left the audience awestruck. Lastly, we’ve got senior managers from HP, Google, Yahoo and Amazon who will be speaking individually and on a panel together. However, the biggest difference will probably be the wardrobes. The overwhelming majority of folks registered have signed up for various activities the day after the conference. We expect to see more golf, mountain biking and fly-fishing outfits at the fall conference. Honestly, there may not be a more beautiful place in the world than Sun Valley, Idaho in September.

Q. Will there be two events annually going forward or is this an experiment?

The RMVCA is committed to putting on two events a year. The plan is to keep the hugely successful winter event in Beaver Creek each February and rotate the fall event throughout the region. We’ve already selected Park City, Utah for VCIR Fall ‘09 and we’re looking at places like Big Sky-Montana, Jackson Hole-Wyoming and Taos – New Mexico for future events. Lets face it, folks that have succeeded in places like Silicon Valley and Boston are flocking to this region because it’s no longer just the greatest place to live in the world, now it’s becoming the greatest place to start a company. The RMVCA firmly believes that we’re at the beginning of a wave of innovation in the region that’s going to create tremendous value for investors over the next few decades.

Q. Can you explain the transformation that VCIR has gone through from a Colorado-focused event to more of a regionally focused event?

We believe that VCIR Fall is going to showcase the rest of the region much like Venture in the Rockies did for Colorado. It’s evident to me that just expanding the CVCA to the RMVCA is already fostering a more collaborative working relationship among the regional VC’s. I know that VCIR Fall will do the same for mountain west by bringing entrepreneurs, service providers and investors together from throughout region.

Q. How is participation from out of state VCs looking?

We’re thrilled with the number of investors who have registered from outside the rockies. We’ve got VC’s registered from Boston, Silicon Valley, New York, Texas, the mid-atlantic states, Seattle, and more.

Q. What are you most looking forward to at VCIR Fall?

Personally, I love that VCIR gets us all out from behind our screens for a few days and talking about our businesses and our lives in a cool and interesting setting. The technology business seems to have less face-to-face interaction every year and I always see more business actually getting done in the weeks following an event like this. The energy from VCIR always recharges my batteries and reminds me how lucky we are to do what we do and be doing it in the mountain west.

Learn more and register to attend VCIR Fall from Sept 9-11 in Sun Valley, Idaho here. Thanks Mark!

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

MapBuzz shows DNC Events

August 26, 2008

The guys from MapBuzz pinged me to tell me they’re powering the DNC events map on Politics West. They’ve partnered with The Denver Post and Zvents to create an interactive map of all the events.

Check it out: http://www.politicswest.com/mapbuzz

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

Don’t just make fun of em, Razz’em

August 25, 2008

Razzem.com allows users to create funny photos or animations and then use them to make fun of people (celebrities, your friends, whatever).

The company intends to deploy Razzem through other social media sites like Facebook and YouTube. For example, if you are a Facebook member you can Razz your contacts with a few simple clicks and keystrokes. Isn’t that what half of us are doing on Facebook anyway?

“With millions of people using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, we intend to engage them in the virtual world by helping people laugh at each other and themselves in the real world,” says founder Suzanne Duret.

When you visit the site, you’ll be greeted by the cute little logo shown in this article. The it will make a funny sound. That’s pretty cute the first time, but after the 5th time it gave me a really good reason to quit coming back to the site. Hopefully they’ll cookie me and only do this once in a while after the first time.

Suzanne is also the founder of GoToTheDogHouse.com, a site which allows you to air your complaints and then have the community decide which participant goes to the dog house.

Time will tell if anyone takes these sites seriously or not. Or not. Seriously.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

IQ award winners announced

August 15, 2008

The winners of the 9th annual BCBR IQ (innovation quotient) awards were announced last night at Folsom Field.

They were:

Business: Envysion
Communications: Tendril Networks
Computer: StillSecure
Consumer: Quintess
Internet/Software, Business: HiveLive
Internet/Software, Consumer: Socialthing (acquired by AOL yesterday)
Medical & Health: Tensegrity Prosthetics
Nonprofits: Crayons to Calculators
Sports and Outdoor: Optibike
Sustainable: Eco-Cycle

Congrats to all the winners and finalists.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

AOL buys Socialthing

August 14, 2008

AOL has acquired Socialthing, a TechStars company from 2007 which built a popular digital life manager.

TechCrunch, Somewhat Frank, and Mashable all have coverage of the news, as does the TechStars blog in case you want more details.

Disclosure: Through TechStars, I was a small investor in Socialthing.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Lijit raises an additional $7.1M

August 12, 2008

Lijit continues to rock as it is now reporting that is has raised an additional $7.1M in venture funding from The Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures, and High Country Venture. This brings Lijit’s total funding to around $11M (it raised angel money and 3.3M previously) . Lijit will use the money to to launch their search powered ad network.

To me, Lijit is a great example of a company that “got the right people on the bus” and then “listened”. It started life as OutFoxed, which I covered here in mid-2006. The company quickly morphed the product from a plug-in which enhanced search results with social context to one which helped publishers to become the focal point of search, allowing them to expose a search box (like you see on ColoradoStartups.com) which leveraged the trusted network of the individual publisher to return more relevant results to the searcher.

Over time, Lijit developed the idea of “re-search”, which allowed publishers to intelligently include lijit-based search results as readers moved across enabled sites and pages. Here’s an example of what this functionality looks like:

As you can see, anyone who has searched for “colorado startups outfoxed” using Lijit and was led to my content gets to automagically see other content that is in my trusted network that might be related. The magic of this is that it tends to increase page views for me and those that I choose to include in my network.

More page views tend to be good for publishers, especially when more capability for the reader is being provided. Dave Taylor is a good example - he’s reporting that the re-search functionality on his popular AskDaveTaylor site is generating about 150,000 extra impressions each day.

The next challenge for Lijit is to build out the ad network which will allow targeted ads to be placed in these search results. This will allow publishers to monetize these extra impressions simply and effectively.

Congrats to Todd, Micah, Tara and the gang at Lijit on this next step in their evolution. It’s great to see VC money continuing to be deployed widely here in Boulder.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

Tom and Ben - a great little chat

August 10, 2008

Here’s a great little chat (7 minutes) on the importance of co-founders, evaluating ideas, being skeptical of customer feedback, and much more. Ben Casnocha was visiting TechStars and was having an impromptu conversation with Tom Higley. Andrew Hyde jumped in to record some of the conversation and threw it up on the TechStars Community site.

Subscribe to the TechStars community for more tidbits like this. You can also ask your own startup questions and many of the mentors in the program will often answer.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

Server virtualization conference

August 9, 2008

In case you are not like me and have a clue what server virtualization is all about, you might want to know about an event being planned in Denver for September 29th. Here’s an email I received detailing the event.

The Rocky Mountain Windows Technology User Group (www.rmwtug.org) Virtualization mini-conference in Denver on Sept. 29 demonstrates the state-of-the-art with server virtualization technologies. CIOs, CTOs, managers, developers and system and network administrators are invited to spend a half-day with the RMWTUG. Expected attendance is 400 - 500 people. The main presentation will be performed with real servers, networking and storage infrastructure on the stage, courtesy of Demartek. On the stage will be four identical, large, name-brand servers (dual-Xeon, quad-core, large memory) along with enterprise-class networking and storage infrastructure including iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage. Loaded on the servers will be ESX, Hyper-V and possibly other virtualization technologies. Sponsors, prize giveaways and more details at: http://www.rmwtug.org/Virtualization_Event.htm.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog |  

Happy birthday - Boulder New Tech Meetup turns 2.0

August 9, 2008

Larry Nelson of W3W3 sent me some great photos of the New Tech Meetup this past Tuesday. The meetup is now two years old.

How time flies. I remember going to the first meetup and presenting EarFeeder at the second one ever. Me.dium hosted these early meetups in their office and somewhere between 15 and 30 people would attend. The meetup quickly outgrew that office and eventually moved to CU. The other night I’d conservatively guess that about 300 people were in the room. I was curious so I checked: Boulder’s New Tech Meetup is now the fifth largest of its kind in the country!

Thanks to Robert Reich of Me.dium and sponsors such as Silicon Flatirons, ViaWest, and W3W3 for making this happen. Our new tech meetup is just another great thing happen for the startup scene here in Boulder. If you haven’t been to a new tech meetup yet, or haven’t been in a while, I’d encourage you to join us for the next meetup on September 2nd.

Written by David Cohen · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Next Page »