While San Francisco and New York get a lot of attention for their startup scenes, there are other cities around the U.S. that deserve some attention for the amazing companies they produce. One of the most notable is Boulder, Colo.

Boulder attracts startups and talent because it has a vibrant community that’s enthusiastic about tech, a small-town vibe that some people prefer to big cities, a wealth of outdoor activities, and a lower cost of living relative to some other tech hotspots. On top of that, it’s the home of prestigious accelerator program TechStars and major VC firm Foundry Group.

Foundry Group managing director and TechStars cofounder Brad Feld told VentureBeat that he considers Boulder the home of an “incredibly open and collaborative startup community.”

“[It] is lead by entrepreneurs, who have a long-term view, are inclusive of anyone who wants to engage, and we have a continual set of activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack,” Feld said via email.

Feld also notes that Boulder has an intense density of talent that makes the city unique.

“Boulder has an incredibly smart population — while small (100,000), it’s got an extraordinary entrepreneurial density (entrepreneurs + people working for startups) / total working population) in a tight geographic area,” Feld said. “As a result, there is a huge amount entrepreneurial activity per capita. Entrepreneurs here use a ‘give before you get’ mentality — we are willing to help anyone without an expectation of what we are going to get back in the short term. This creates a powerful long-term dynamic.”

With so many cool startups doing work in Boulder — and the city not getting enough attention — we decided to spotlight some of our favorites. We had many to choose from, so we focused on startups that are fiercely practical and innovative. So while agile development startup Rally Software and mobile game maker Backflip Studios didn’t make the list, that doesn’t mean they aren’t incredibly smart businesses.

Here are the 10 startups in Boulder we’re most excited about right now. Let us know in the comments what we missed.

Epic Playground

The importance of analytics has increased enormously over the past few years. With more data, you can make better decisions. Media companies and website administrators are especially hungry for data because they want to better understand their customers.

Epic Playground aims to be “the ChartBeat for media analytics.” Its Mediagauge tool can help companies measure the use of video across websites. You can know exactly how many people watched a video embedded on your site and how much of the video they watched.

“We want to be the go-to analytics service for media creators,” Epic Playground CEO Michael Sitarzewski told VentureBeat in October. “It’s important to know how many people on your page actually clicked the video or song on that page and how many times it is clicked.”

On top of measurement, the company wants to help media companies with high-level engagement. Let’s say people usually stop watching your video after two minutes. Soon, the company will let you send a message or advertisement at the perfect time (under two minutes in this case) in order to get people more engaged with your product.

Epic Playground graduated from the TechStars Cloud program in May and followed that by spending time with SoftLayer’s Catalyst program for mentoring startups. It has raised $925,000 to date from investors, including DFJ Mercury.

FlixMaster

FlixMaster wants to make enterprise-focused video creation and editing way easier. It offers a drag-and-drop editing platform that people can use for entertainment, educational, e-commerce, nonprofit, marketing, and customer-support purposes. You simply upload videos, build a project, share it, and then monitor it.

HBO used its technology recently to create an online experience for the new Cinemax series Banshee. And over the summer, USA Network used FlixMaster’s technology to power the web experience for Covert Affairs.

“Brands need to produce interactive video experiences that draw viewers in and keep them there,” FlixMaster CEO Erika Trautman said during its latest funding round. “And companies need to be able to produce those experiences at scale and at a reasonable cost. That’s what FlixMaster offers.”

The company recently raised $1.1 million from Golden Seeds, bringing its total raised to $2.2 million.

Gnip

Does your company need serious social analytics tools to keep track of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms? Gnip knows you do.

Gnip got a big boost in attention when it launched its Historical PowerTrack for Twitter in September. That tool lets developers search, find, analyze, and compare every tweet ever written. While Twitter seems to be its biggest customer demand, Gnip also offers “firehose and filtered streams from dozens of sources,” including LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Google+.

The company has raised $6.6 million to date from Foundry Group, First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, and others.

Mocavo

I would love to know a detailed and (maybe) rich history of my ancestors. When exactly did they come to the United States? How far back can I trace my history? What is the most interesting place my family came from? Mocavo might have the answers.

While Mocavo seems similar to Ancestry.com, it uses a powerful search engine and big data to help people connect the dots about their genealogy. It now claims to have “the largest genealogy search engine,” with names for more than six billion people in its index. On top of helping everyday folks piece together their histories, it also wants to assist genealogists with research.

The service’s promise has attracted $5 million to date from Foundry Group, Dave McClure, and others.

Precog

“Big data” is a term we hear a lot in tech these days, and everyone wants a piece of it. Precog, one of the more interesting startups in the space, wants to make big data simpler and cheaper for app developers. Some folks have compared it to Twilio, a startup known for its love of APIs and enabling cloud-based communications.

“Precog allows companies to ask very deep statistical questions about their data easily, without having to rely on cumbersome big data infrastructures or use complex tools,” Precog CEO John De Goes told VentureBeat recently. “Our vision of redefining how data is captured, stored, and analyzed is a tremendous engineering challenge.”

Precog launched out of beta in September with a cloud-based platform for data warehousing and analysis. It also offers tools like the front-end analysis app LabCoat, and a layer-reporting app called ReportGrid.

The company has now raised more than $2 million from the likes of RTP Ventures, Resonate Venture Partners, and TechStars’ founder David Cohen.

SendGrid

One of the biggest names on this list is SendGrid, one of the fastest-growing startups in Boulder.

SendGrid focuses its efforts on cloud-based email infrastructure and management. It helps big-name customers like Pinterest, Airbnb, Twilio, Spotify, and Pandora send email to their customers. All those important emails like sign-up confirmations, shipping notifications, and “likes” are all handled by SendGrid’s service, making the lives of its clients easier.

“E-mail is not a fun thing to deal with,” SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin told us when it last raised funding. “We alleviate the pain of dealing with e-mail.”

The company has raised more than $27 million in total funding to date from investors like Bessemer Venture Partners, Foundry Group, Highway 12 Ventures, SoftTechVC, 500 Startups, and Bullet Time Ventures. It also has offices in London, Frankfurt, Denver, and Anaheim, Calif.

SolidFire

Solid-state storage business SolidFire is another big name on this list, mostly because it has raised $37 million in funding since it was founded in 2009.

While SolidFire isn’t quite a cloud company, it often gets thrown in with the category because its ultimate goal is to help cloud providers by giving them killer solid-state drives (SSDs) and software. Using those superfast hard drives in turn can boost the performance and reliability of those services and help them win customers.

“Sometimes people label us a cloud company, but we’re really selling the systems to cloud providers,” CEO Dave Wright told VentureBeat in November. “We’re an infrastructure company at the end of the day.”

SolidFire launched out of beta recently and is seeing a lot of interest from infrastructure-as-a-service providers.

TeamSnap

While trying to come up with solutions to help team sports organize themselves might seem like a small problem, it’s actually quite huge. Countless leagues and coaches around the world need software to track their teams’ schedules, rosters, and give them a place to connect.

Enter TeamSnap, which recently raised $2.75 million in fresh funding on the strength of its premise. It now supports nearly every sport you can think of and even has a large number of nonsports organizations using its tools. TeamSnap has customers in 170 countries.

Trada

Trada offers up what it labels a “crowdsourced online advertising services marketplace.” Basically, it puts more than 2,000 online ad experts to work for companies’ ad campaigns. The experts do the hard work of the campaign setup, buildout, research, and optimization but your company can still track the process.

“These businesses and their budgets require intuition, human ideas,” told AdWeek during its last funding round. “And [we believed] that a group of people working on these campaigns, first starting in the search side of the world, could end up getting better results than anyone individual[ly].”

The company has collected $17 million to date from Foundry Group, Google Ventures, and other investors.

Ubooly

Yes, the name Ubooly sounds a bit silly, and the cute doll it offers looks like a goofball. But Ubooly’s product and the way it’s helping children learn are actually quite smart and serious.

Ubooly offers a toy doll for $30. After you buy it, you place an iPhone or iPod touch into the doll, giving it a “face.” Turn on the Ubooly app and the doll comes to life with interactive games, puzzles, and jokes.

Ubooly seems like a brilliant idea in a world where we increasingly tech our children learn through digital tools. An old iPhone or iPod touch can easily become Ubooly’s brain and help get your child to learn and solve problems. Just think about all those folks who have an old iOS device laying around that could become a platform for their child’s education.

Ubooly graduated from TechStars in August 2011 and has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including SoftTech VC, 500 Startups, and PJM Advisors.

Boulder Downtown photo via DowntownBoulder.com, Ancestry photo via Shutterstock, Green energy image via Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Sports team management startup TeamSnap has raised $2.75 million in new funding to help it bring its apps to more coaches and teams around the world.

TeamSnap is one of a handful of hot startups in Boulder, Colo., which has a thriving startup community. Coaches and other leaders use it to manage teams or groups using the web or mobile apps for iOS and Android. Specific tools include scheduling, rosters, and message forums. It supports nearly every sport you can think of and has a large number of nonsports organizations using the tools.

It got its first injection of cash back in June 2010 with a $700,000 first round and later collected another $910,000. Now TeamSnap can make its biggest push yet with this new round and find new customers.

“TeamSnap has experienced high triple-digit growth for the last two years, and yet this market is largely untapped,” TeamSnap CEO Dave DuPont said in a statement. “Sports in particular are huge. In the U.S. alone, nearly 27 million children between the ages of 6 and 17 participate in at least one youth sport every year. Millions more participate in other leisure and community activities ranging from Boys Scouts to marching bands to dance groups.”

The new funding round was led by Canada-based media organization Torstar with participation from Trinity Ventures, eonBusiness, Toba Capital, Hbam LLC, and others.

People and leagues can use TeamSnap for free with a basic plan, but premium plans cost you depending on your needs. A league managing up to 50 teams and up to 1,000 players costs $249 per year.

TeamSnap was founded in 2009 and has customers in 177 countries.

Soccer action photo via Maxisport/Shutterstock

Galvanize is a coworking space in Denver dedicated to stimulating the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. Today, it is opening the doors to its gSchool, a full-time, six-month web development program.

The 30,000-square foot facility opened in October, with Galvanize touting the three pillars of “capital, community, and curriculum.” Since then, over 100 members have moved in to generate ideas, collaborate, and build companies. Galvanize designed the facility for the needs of early-stage companies, offering options for individuals with ideas to small founding teams to growing businesses with 30 employees. Galvanize’s emphasis is on community and supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem at every phase of development.

However, even with work space, mentorship, and capital, companies cannot grow if they don’t have the team to support it. gSchool seeks to expand the talent pool by providing skills and training to people interested in becoming programmers. The creators of the program guarantee their graduates a job with a minimum salary of $60,000 within three months — or their money back.

“One of the things we face in the microenvironment here at Galvanize is a developer shortage,” said Chris Onan, Galvanize’s managing director of venture capital. “We have 55 companies that call this home, and 40 are looking to hire a web developer. It is holding our companies back, both in the Denver/Boulder area, but more broadly all around the county and the world. Tech talent is an issue, and this is something we are doing to address that.”

gSchool is a partnership with Galvanize and web development firm Jumpstart Lab. The curriculum includes a number of popular coding languages and accommodates a range of skills levels. Students benefit from a rigorous curriculum as well as from proximity to the hotbed of startups and elite group of mentors that are involved with Galvanize. These interactions not only provide opportunities to gain practical experience but also to build relationships that can support their own careers.

Jeff Casimir is the cofounder of Jumpstart Labs and the program director of gSchool. He has an extensive background in education and said his goal is to turn “normal people” into professional web developers.

“I think the sheer practice of skills is more significant than the amount of materials,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “We could go over everything the students need to know in a few weeks, but that’s not good enough. They need to practice those skills so they become automatic. They need to be able to know the hard things are possible and have a toolkit. The startup community can’t wait for colleges to change their curriculum.”

While Galvanize and gSchool have the immediate goal of stimulating the Denver/Boulder startup scene, the vision is ultimately to be part of a larger, nationwide effort to address unemployment and tech labor shortages by offering an alternative form of education. Onan said there are far too many college graduates saddled with debt and working as bartenders or waitresses because they can’t find jobs, and as a result, attitudes about traditional career paths are changing.

“Millennials are moving to Denver and Boulder in droves to start companies,” Onan said. “The Corporate America game has been played. There is so much activity here, a lot that we owe to Brad Feld and David Cohen. A lot of the Galvanize companies have graduated from TechStars. Galvanize and gSchool are additive to that community. We want to see this become a tech epicenter attracting people from all over the world.”

By offering a place to work, an active support network, opportunities for capital, events, and education, Galvanize strives to leave no need untouched for entrepreneurs. All that’s left is ski lessons.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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MobiPlug lets homeowners manage their devices right from their smartphone with a single application that talks to various protocols and off-the-shelf devices. There’s no contract unlike Xfinity, ADT, and other competitors.

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean claims to be the world’s simplest cloud hosting service with unlimited bandwidth. Aimed at individuals and startup companies, it lets anyone deploy a virtual server in less than a minute. Digital Ocean already has 500 active customers and 10,000 virtual servers (5,000 were added in the past 30 days).

Birdbox

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Then we flew back to SF on Thursday, where we invited some exciting new companies to pitch at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and found several we expect to invite to launch at DEMO this spring in Silicon Valley. That evening, we held a meet-up for some of the companies to pitch to a big crowd at the Dutch Goose. Entrepreneurs had no microphone, so they had to scream to make themselves heard.

In Boulder, we met with companies at Foundry, one of the most respected venture firms in Colorado. Afterward, we invited them and some other promising entrepreneurs to pitch at a party at Jill’s at the St. Julien Hotel (photos below).

Our executive editor Dylan Tweney will be back in Boulder in a couple of weeks for the VC conference, speaking alongside many other great minds from around the world.

We’re off to Boston, where the Atlas Venture team and others will host the 10-company pitch event on Tuesday, and soon after that we’ll be hitting Los Angeles (more about that meeting here), Chicago, Detroit, Singapore and Austin.

Much thanks again to the teams at Foundry and Kleiner!

Here are some photos from Boulder by Christina Kiffney:

Eric Darst (@teamflowh) from flowh.com with Dave Angulo (@daveangulo)

Steve Norman from DoubleScoop

Patrick Carter (@DigitalFolio) from Digital Folio

Matt Marshall (@mmarshall) from VentureBeat

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group

Tim at the DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

DEMO Innovation Tour Boulder

Jason Mendelson (@jasonmendelson) from Foundry Group with Jeff Makowka (@jmakowka) from AARP

If so, you’ll want to apply to join a special meetup we are hosting with one of Boulder’s most respected venture capitalists, Foundry Group.

Basically, we’re offering awesome, free feedback about your idea.

Here are the details: We’re inviting 10 companies who plan to launch products soon to pitch their ideas to a few key members at Foundry as well as to me (as DEMO Executive Producer, I select the companies to present at DEMO) on Wednesday, February 8. Ideally, we’re looking for companies contemplating launching products at DEMO Spring (held April 17-19 in the Silicon Valley), or in Fall (date TBA).

Of course, as editor-in-chief of VentureBeat, I’m also on the prowl for great companies to write about too — so either way, I’m interested in meeting ambitious entrepreneurs.

We’ll also be co-hosting a party with AARP at the T-Zero Lounge from 6-8pm that evening, and the drinks will be on us. Register to attend here (AARP is also sponsoring full scholarships for three companies focused on the 50+ year-old market to launch DEMO Spring in April. If interested in that opportunity, apply here).

DEMO has become an incredible launch platform for startups, mid-level companies, and fully developed, publicly traded corporations to show off their new tech products to an audience of media, investors and other ecosystem players tracking innovation (many large Silicon Valley companies send their corporate or business development officers, for example). DEMO alumni recently hitting the news include Fusion-io, which went public this year, and SuccessFactors, which was just acquired by SAP for $3.4 billion. They add to the long list of successes that came out of DEMO, which include companies like Salesforce.com, VMWare, WebEx and Palm.

We’ve made a lot of changes to make DEMO even more compelling. A new scholarship program makes it free to attend for most early stage companies, and more affordable for later stage companies too (and we’re doing even more on that going forward). And we’re keeping the event in Silicon Valley, which we’ve found is helpful for most companies wanting to do deals and meetings while they’re here from out of town.

If you’re interested in presenting your ideas to the DEMO team and the members at Foundry, please fill out this form. If you’re selected, we will get in touch with you immediately to explain the details and provide further explanation.

We look forward to seeing you in Boulder!

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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The Foundry Group is the area’s leading venture firm, and its senior partners will be offering free feedback to entrepreneurs. It’s a great way to form early ties with a venture firm, without the pressure of a formal pitch for money.

We’re inviting up to 10 companies contemplating launching products at DEMO (either the next DEMO event in Silicon Valley, Sep. 12 – 14, or DEMO Spring 2012) to present at the Foundry Group offices at 1050 Walnut Street, Suite 210, Boulder.

DEMO is the top venue to launch your company or product because of the significant publicity you get there. The nation’s leading tech media attends, as do leading venture capitalists and business development executives. Everyone from Salesforce to VMWare has launched there over the years.

Aside from editing VentureBeat, I’m the Executive Producer of DEMO. I’ll be joining Foundry in offering feedback. We’ve done this before at other firms around the country, including Accel, Sequoia, and RRE, as part of our worldwide quest to find the best entrepreneurs. We also have an event on Tuesday at Austin Ventures.

As was the case with our other venture-firm meetups, there’s no exclusive deal with Foundry; like us, they just want to hear about new companies and ideas. If you’re interested in attending the Foundry event, please fill out this form.

If you’re selected as one of the 10 companies, we’ll follow up immediately with more information.

Look forward to seeing you!