TechStars DEMO day, class of 2011, Boulder

I have had the pleasure of interacting with many of the TechStars companies this year, some before the even got into TechStars.  Every year, and in every TechStars session, I am amazed at how quickly these companies pivot and muture throughout the year.  As I have worked with TechStars companies over the last 4 years, I have also been impressed with how many of them launch on DEMO day with a core product and business and really stick with it for years to come.  There are always a few more pivots and refinements, but in general, the companies mature and grow pretty much as they are presented on DEMO day.

So, here are the 12 companies that launched at DEMO day, in the order that they presented, and my favorites:

·         SimpleEnergy:  What do you get when you mix Farmville with your thermostat?  You get SimpleEnergy.  I’ve seen a few of these before, but not done by utility company industry veterans.  Their target, the $11 B of funds which utility companies have to incent their customers to conserve energy.  Strong response from their audience after their pitch.

·         FlixMaster:  We are all used to hyperlinks on the web – I just made one to the left here so you can click through to the FlixMaster web site.  But what about hyperlinks for video?  FlixMaster delivers both the technical deployment platform for “Branching Video” and the web based toolset for anybody to publish them.  That’s what you get when you combine an emmy winning video producer with a game producer and some good tech support.

·         Creative Brain Studio: HTML5 blah, blah, everything is HTML5, it’s going to unify the web, blah, but how do I produce content for HTML 5?  Well if you are producing a casual or social game, you produce it with Creative Brain.  With a development platform for Windows and for OSX you can build your game and publish to multiple clients from one app, with simple a cloud back end ( Azure by the way).  Backed by decades and decades worth of game development experience.

·         Truant Today:  Hey Zack, what did you do for summer break?  Oh, I moved to Boulder and launched a startup at TechStars with my buddy Jonathan.  Yeah, that’s what this 16 year old did with his summer vacation, show that to your XBOX enthralled teenager in the basement.  Truant Today notifies parents and guardians when their student is not in school using simple SMS messages.  Simple, yes.  Effective, oh, yes.  Resulted in a 50% drop in absentees.  For a school district like the Las Angeles County school district, that means $12 M .    Yep, it’s a pain killer.

·         MealTicket: What do you get when you mix Groupon like offers with your suppliers and collaborate across your supply chain.  You get MealTicket.  MealTicket allows food suppliers and distributors to partner with their distribution restaurants, like BajaFresh, to provide offers for the food that they need to move.  Supply chain optimization headed towards your tummy.  And it’s targeted at the $200 B food distribution market.  Finally a deal scenario that makes sense.

·         Mocavo:  Search for dead people.  Yep.  Deep, deep verticle search for names that allows you to discover that long lost leaf of your genealogy tree.  4.1 B names have already been indexed and soon there will be over 9 B names indexed.  No other search engine and no other proprietary database are even close.  They even add social to dead people, well family trees anyway.

·         GoSpotCheck:  There is a company TaskRabbit that has been in the news a lot.  You can ask for a task to be done, and people bid on it, you accept and then pay for the task.  GoSpotCheck is like that but for businesses to use in marketing their products.  Tasks are provided for consumers, uh, like my wife, to go and check store presentations, inventory, etc.  It gets reported back, rolled up and presented to the customer as a report.  Look out Neilson, you are about to be crowd-sourced out of business.

·         ReportGrid:  Ah, making reporting easier.  Having bought and build a few companies in this arena, this one sounded interesting.  Well, when you mix some award winning mathematicians with some solid business acumen and a Web 2.0 API strategy, you get ReportGrid.  Every web based startup has to create analytics about user traffic, social interaction, page attention, etc.  And each rolls their own.  Not anymore.  ReportGrid is web app reporting as a service and it looks pretty darn slick.  I liked their competitor slide as it showed all the potential acquirers to me more than their competitors.

·         inboxfever:  Turn e-mail into apps.  Not the old fashioned Outlook forms kind of apps, but simple, clear text, type an ask in a subject line, send it to a specific e-mail address, get something useful back kind of app.  inboxfever makes it simple to get reports, doc conversions, send in information, etc.

·         SocialEngine:  There are many social monitoring apps out there, and some social reporting tools like Radion6, but what do you do with all of that data.  SocialEngine takes all that data, compares it to your goals and objectives, filters it down, and recommends a response strategy.  By seasoned veterans in the social analytics space, the big brands are already clamoring to work with them.  Estimates are that close to 20% of marketing budgets will be targeted at social and SocialEngine delivers a platform and tool to deliver.  Think automated help desk for social response.

·         flextrip:  The market for tours and activities is a $27 B market.  Really.  That’s big.  And flextrip helps you find the tours and activities that match your demographic, weather and intent.  Going to Vegas for a romantic getaway, how about some romantic activities?  And, they figure out how to get this product to market, by partnering with travel planners and splitting the cut.  With a catalogue of 21,000 activities and growing, they are already off to a good start.

·          FullContact:  Managing contacts is a big business, which is probably why FullContact is well on their way to completing their $1.5 M Series A round.  Their API taps into their database of 100 million contacts built from crawling and cleansing information from the web. 

So, my favorites?

I love FlixMaster.  I love how they evolved from a very narrow, single point, solution, essentially creating a game title with some specific video content to being a platform for hyperlinked video.  And they executed so effectively.

The Microsoftie + Gaming + Cloud in me likes the game dev and publishing platform delivered by Creative Brain and I love seeing guys who have been there and done it for decades delivering what many said was not feasible to deliver, in essentially a month.

And I love a 16 year old, giving up his summer vacation, to create an app to… what… keep kids in school.  Fortunately I feel good about my 16 year old’s activities too, hacking XBOX controllers and working with a friend manufacturing products in the garage and shipping them to China.  I think our next generation will be just fine thank you.

And this class of TechStars 2011 – most all with seed funding in hand and heading towards $ 500k in funding, looks like one of the strongest classes ever.  Congrats to Nicole Glaros for managing the program this year.  We will be seeing these companies around for some time to come.

Published: 8/4/2011 3:52 PM