“Boulder is good for engineers — if you’re into innovation in rock climbing technology,” a friend once quipped about the outdoor-loving Colorado college town. But today, 12 startups from TechStars, a Boulder-based incubator, demoed their products in Mountain View, Calif. and did a good job of building on the city’s reputation as a budding center for high-tech. Almost down to a team, each of companies that presented this morning felt strong.
The TechStars demo reviews:
Let’s start with Devver. The company’s mission is to radically improve developer productivity. Aside from wasting time on social networks and video games, software engineers who are testing their code spend an inordinate amount of time waiting as the test runs. The problem is that every test resides in single units on individual desktops. Devver, on the other hand operates in the cloud and spreads the job across multiple servers. As a result, the whole thing happens 75 percent faster, every time. The service, which currently only works to test applications that use Ruby on Rails, is $100 per month per user. The advantage of Devver’s model is that the user need not pay infrastructure and maintenance costs. The disadvantage is a company running its own hardware has sole access to its code — control that vanishes when it uploads its entire codebase to a third party. Also, Devver is built on Amazon’s S3 service, so the quality of the security of the code rests primarily on Amazon. You make the call.
In most cases, if a startup got on stage to present a new photo sharing and management application, I might start to nod off: The world already has Flickr and Picassa. After seeing Occipital, however, it’s clear to me that those other two products’ time has passed. Occipital uses machine vision to identify nearly any object in an image. Automatically identifying and labeling landmarks is one thing. Occiptial does it, but so does a 3D mapping company called Everyscape. What Everyscape can’t do is recognize everything else. Apparently, Occipital can. If you, say, travel with a favorite stuffed animal and photograph it everywhere you go, Occipital will recognize it, label it and let you find every picture that contains it later on. If multiple people upload multiple photographs from the same event around the same time, Occiptial will figure out that an event just happened and classify the photographs accordingly. Doing this right is really, really hard, yet with two people, Occipital seems to have done it. This team is scary good.
Gyminee combines in-depth excerise and nutrition guides with social networking and “biggest loser” competitions to try to help people achieve their weight-loss goals. Targeted at affluent male gym goers with big goals, Gyminee gives users tons of metrics, videotaped exercise demonstrations and the ability to record their progress on their iPhones and get encouraging feedback from friends and fellow users. It sits in a similar space as SparkPeople and DietTV. While the former seems to be riding high, the latter seems to have lost the majority of its users after four months. Much of Gyminee’s service is free, but users will have to pay $15 every three months to get features like meal planning and personal training guides. If the company is smart, it will use Facebook’s FriendConnect to help register users, instead of making users build yet another new profile.
BrightKite, which has been around for a while, is a location-based social network, and today the company demoed its forthcoming iPhone app. It’s a bit behind Loopt and Whrrl in getting itself onto the iPhone, but from the looks of it, it could displace them. BrightKite’s app seems to offer a wider range of features than its competitors, including location bookmarking, the ability to find and learn about fellow users in the same area, and “place snapping,” which uses your location history to make educated guesses about the places you’re standing. I’ll do a more in-depth review when I test the app out myself.
Application Experts, also known as App-X, sits on top of online business software offered by Salesforce.com. It helps fund managers keep track of the madness involved in fundraising, deal flow and portfolio management. The company has 14 private equity and venture capital firms as customers and is already profitable. At its current pricing, once it secures 100 customers, App-X will be pulling in over $1 million in recurring annual revenue. It is looking to raise a few hundred thousand dollars from angels who can help generate sales. Some of our readers — the ones among you holding the pursestrings to huge sums of cash — might actually find it quite useful. The rest may find it boring.
Apparently, there are 9.7 trillion unused frequent flier miles on the books, most of them go to waste and this must be stopped at all costs. While average joes won’t care, TravelFli wants to help the 17 million “elite” frenquent fliers who fly an average of nine trips in a year track and exploit the available rewards. From one web-based interface, these elites can manage their frequent flier miles, credit card points and rental car and hotel loyalty programs. Currently, they cannot use TravelFli to actually book anything, but the company says this functionality is coming. The most striking thing about these presenters — aside from the to-die-for pilot’s outfits they wore — was their claim that each TravelFli user is worth about $135 per year. TravelFli is not the kind of startup that gets excitable tech journalists to leap out of their seats, but at least it thinks it has a way to make cash. The company has raised $500K so far, but interest has been high enough to make it consider going after a bigger round.
IntenseDebate came onstage, talked for about three minutes and then announced it had just been bought. Automattic, makers of Wordpress, was the buyer. You can read more details about that in our earlier post.
Dating sites have been around for more than a decade, but they don’t appeal to everyone looking for a date. Ignighter’s take on that problem is to try to create a social network for groups, based around the idea of meeting people you’d want to date within a group that your group is friends with. You and your friends create a group on the site, add information about each of yourselves, and message people in other groups. The company also lets you share what your plans are, so you can actually go on real-life dates. It also offers an iPhone application. Rival startups include MIXTT, another group-themed dating site that launched at TechCrunch50. Ignighter, meanwhile, launched last month and it says it has more than 10,000 total users so far. It hopes to make money through a variety of revenue streams, including sponsored dates, virtual goods that you can buy for the hot ones, and ads.
For some highly particular eaters, Whole Foods supermarket simply won’t do. Sure, the place has gourmet organic chocolates, but were they made by hand by a lifelong chocolatier? We think not. Enter Foodzie.The company has taken the “buy hand-made” ethos of Etsy and applied it to food. Instead of warehousing the goods and putting an expensive layer between seller and buyer, like Amazon Grocery and iGourmet, Foodzie’s site connects buyers directly to producers. Read the rest of this entry »
FriendFeed quietly rolled out a pretty cool new feature tonight. Now, when you update a service that has location information included in it, such as Brightkite, a Google Map image of your location will be placed below the update.
Location-based services (LBS) are becoming a dime-a-dozen in Apple’s App Store. Some, such as UrbanSpoon, Yelp and AroundMe are quite useful and popular. But those simply focus on finding places and activities (and mainly food) nearby your current location. More complex LBS social networks, which focus on tracking you and your friends, haven’t yet caught fire. 
Google starting to catch on to this TV ad thing? –It’s been almost two years since the search advertising giant made its first foray into television advertising. In order to grow, it’s going to need more time slots (inventory) to sell. It took a step in that direction this week, striking a deal with Harris Corp., a company that will help add and manage new inventory. Google TV Ads also made a deal with COREMedia, which will help measure the performance of direct response television ads. 
Will Wright weighs in on Spore DRM — The Spore creator wishes he paid more attention to it, but he didn’t realize it’d be such an issue. He also thinks this is part of the growing pains inherent to the transition from brick and mortar game sales to online, downloadable ones. 
There’s smoke, there’s fire, and then there’s a volcano the size of 
Social networks built around location are a hot item, and getting hotter.
