This startup provides an online gathering place where users meet new people based around shared interests. Every day, it connects users to someone they haven’t met before based on location, history, interests, and intent — what the service calls “pools.”

Upon signing up, you join pools based around your background, passions, and the type of people you would like to meet. The technology then makes relevant matches and the rest is up to you.

“There are numerous reports showing how social networks are making the world less social,” said founder and CEO Alex Capecelatro in a statement. “As the Internet has evolved, we’ve seen more access to data, more access to curated content, and more access to the people we know, but very little in regard to connecting new social spheres. Frustrated with how difficult it is to meet new people, and how the Internet has been a barrier instead of a gateway, we set out to create a platform that gets us offline.”

The goal is to help people interact in the physical world. At The Pool makes introductions that can go beyond the first stage. The web is replete with dating sites that provide a similar service, but those are mostly patronized by people looking for a romantic connection. At The Pool is more focused on friendship and peers, so you no longer have to go alone to those obscure indie film screenings or have someone to play badminton with.

This invite-only “exclusive community of extraordinary people” launched in July and has expanded its presence into more than 50 countries. Today, At The Pool is announcing product updates and a $1 million round of funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and a syndicate of L.A. angel invetors. The homepage was redesigned to switch from a focus on daily matches to a news feed format where relevant content and updates are posted.

The team also enhanced the “activities” feature so users can post things they want to do nearby and notify people who may be interested. This was in response to a large number of requests from members that wanted to organize events on the fly.

Since launching, the levels of user engagement have been high. The company claims that members send an average of 15 messages in their first 60 days and 20 to 30 percent of members return almost daily. The gender division is split fairly evenly. As for age, it’s a young crowd with 85 percent of members are under the age of 35 and 55 percent are under the age of 25.

At The Pool is based in Los Angeles. It is the silver to Facebook’s gold.

Social events startup Lifecrowd has raised $5 million in its first round of funding, with a goal to expand its evolving marketplace that connects like-minded users connect at nearby events, the company announced Thursday.

The service has come a long way since it debuted at DEMO Fall 2011 conference. In its build up from beta to its first round, the company has clearly defined its purpose. Unlike Meetup, which lets anyone create groups centered around one focus, Lifecrowd offers all kinds of singular events. It’s also different in that users create the events, but Lifecrowd’s team curates the listings to ensure only the best show up.

Lifecrowd’s first round of funding was led by Chicago-based Lightbank, with participation from Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures, and Prism VentureWorks. And recently, the company became the first startup to emerge from the relatively new Los Angeles accelerator MuckerLab.

“This powerful group of experienced tech investors brings an incredible collective expertise in localized online commerce to the table, as well as deep experience in marketplace development, scaling up on a domestic and international level, and a thorough understanding of what today’s consumers want,” Lifecrowd CEO Bong Koh said, in a statement. “This combined knowledge and broad network reach will be a tremendous asset as we expand Lifecrowd into new markets and build new platforms and products that help our users enrich their lives and discover new, fun activities.”

Lightbank Partner Paul Lee seems especially enthusiastic about Lifecrowd’s potential growth due the hot social activities space enabled by social networking and the Web.

“We see a tremendous market opportunity for Lifecrowd’s approach to catapult it to the head of the pack,” Lee said, in a statement. “Bong and his team have created a service that resonates with people, that solves the problem of finding fun things to do in your area with an online marketplace of activities that perfectly blends the online and offline components of social networking.”

Lifecrowd is currently live in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Orange County, and San Diego. The site lists 10 cities where the service intends to launch next, including New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Austin.

Lifecrowd screenshot: Lifecrowd homepage

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

Social activities website Lifecrowd, which debuted its service today at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference, wants to be the go-to site when you’re looking online for a fun real-life event.

Lifecrowd wants to differentiate itself from sites like Meetup by partnering with reputable experts to create fun group activities rather than letting just anyone create events. A few sample activities include culinary sessions to create sushi rolls, poker gatherings to learn how to count cards, beachside yoga and photography excursions.

“Lifecrowd is what Meetup should be,” Lifecrowd co-founder and CEO Bong Koh told VentureBeat. “Our emphasis is on quality of experts and content above quantity. We want to give users a way to try something new guided by vetted experts.”

The startup plans to start small by debuting officially in the Los Angeles area today and then moving up and down the West Coast. “Next up, we’d like to be in Orange County, San Diego and the Bay Area,” Koh said. “By the end of the year, we hope to launch in New York as our first market outside of California.”

Thus far, Lifecrowd has signed up more than 100 hand-picked experts in the Los Angeles market to create events. The experts use the service as a chance to make money from the activities and Lifecrowd takes a cut of what the experts charge. Initially, Lifecrowd will take 18 percent of the transaction. Eventually, as it scales out and more people use it, the company intends to take a smaller cut.

Los Angeles-based Lifecrowd has nine full-time employees and has thus far raised $2 million in funding, with participation from Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures and Prism Ventureworks.

Lifecrowd is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The company announced a global competition Wednesday to boost the number of active college-related community sub-sites on Reddit (called Subreddits). Three subreddits with the highest level of growth between August 26 and September 30 will be awarded prizes, such as rebranding the main Reddit site with a school’s colors and mascot for a day, unique collegiate Reddit stickers and a possible meetup with Reddit staff members.

“Something we’ve seen in the past year is that local subreddits have done really well, and not just in terms of activity and growth. It’s actually very useful for people to find … others with similar interests, meetups and to stay informed,” said Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest). “Colleges were kind of the next natural step from that.”

In June, the company arranged a Global Reddit Meetup Day event to build on the trend of local community subreddits popping up on the site. Thousands of Reddit users participated in over 160 cities across the world.

Winning an official Reddit meetup on campus could be particularly appealing to students and alumni, especially since the company has a good track record on its previous meetups. For instance, its Washington D.C. rally/meetup in 2010, which gathered thousands of people and received boatloads of mainstream media attention, was heralded as an extremely enjoyable experience by those in attendance.

“Some schools have developed communities rallying behind their sports teams, others simply oriented around the student body,” writes competition organizer Josh Irwin on Reddit’s official blog. “While not every school has a top 20 athletic team, every school does have students, and all students have something to say.”

All schools are eligible to participate in the competition — provided that both the school’s name and a link to the specific subreddit appear on the site’s collegiate wiki page. The page has almost 200 colleges listed (as of today), and the majority of college subreddits have already shared the competition announcement blog post, according to Martin.

Having more college communities interacting on the site is definitely beneficial for Reddit. It will give the company new opportunities to sell unique advertising and promotion deals, which are generally accepted (and sometimes welcomed) by the Reddit community. The Reddit team has a history of trying to make its advertising efforts as valuable to users as the submitted content found on the site.

That strategy has hurt Reddit’s ability to generate revenue in the past. In turn, the low revenue made parent company Conde Nast hesitant to spend additional money maintaining the site. However, continued growth and promotional potential eventually led Conde Nast to provide the additional resources necessary for Reddit to pursue efforts like the college competition.

Martin said he hopes the competition will raise awareness about existing college subreddits and ultimately lead to higher participation in the future.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Stomp.io, an online service that brings together people looking to meet up at “kooky” events, announced that it is launching today at the Launch conference in San Francisco.

“It’s like Jackass, but for nerds,” said All Things D’s Kara Swisher, referring to MTV’s offbeat stunt show.

The service is like Meetup meets Groupon. Anyone can post a crazy event — like squirrel fishing, where a bunch of people will meet, attach nuts to strings and drive squirrels nuts. Users then sign up for the event and let the craziness commence.

Stomp.io will also offer deals for some of the more crazy events to attract more users. The more events a user goes to, the more points and badges they can earn.

Stomp.io also has an iPhone and an Android application that lets users upload photos and rate Stomp meetups. The application learns over time which meetups the person likes and begins to tailor the application to show those types of meetups. The iPhone application then creates a scrapbook of all the photos Stomp users have taken at meetups.

“Stomp isn’t about finding fun things to do — it’s about the people we do it with,” said Stomp.io co-founder Nick Tommarello. “It’s an adventure-oriented MeetUp.”

The sweet spot for the application is the bunch of crazy college graduates that have a lot of disposable income and time, but aren’t restricted by all the crazy responsibilities that parents have, Plante said. It’s a group that is looking to spend money on experiences rather than buying things — but  don’t quite have the excuse to the stupid things it did in college.