Editor’s note: The following report comes from Don Dodge, who blogs at Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing and is a business development executive for Microsoft. TechStarsis a startup incubator that selects 10 teams and provides funding of $18,000 per team, as well as free office space, operational support, and mentoring from investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders.
TechStars has now been operating for three years. Three of the original ten companies from 2007 have already been acquired (SocialThing by AOL, Intense Debate by Automattic, and Brightkite by Limbo). Today, TechStars debuted ten new startups from their 2009 class in Boulder, Colorado. The teams presented today to about 150 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Here are Don’s notes on each of the ten startups to present at TechStars today. (He also did this for us last year).
Next Big Sound – Measures the growth and popularity of music groups across major web properties like MySpace,Twitter, Last.fm, and others. Next Big Sound measures things like number of fans, number of plays, and comments. It’s best understood as a sort of Compete.com for bands. The company hopes to be the de facto standard for understanding band related metrics on the web. They currently track about 500,000 bands. They use the “Freemium model” with free basic accounts, and charge for premium services like more advanced reports, social media impact analyses, and other services. Current customers include Jason Mraz and about 30 other bands.
Everlater – This company enters the crowded but very lucrative online travel space with a site that allows users to richly document their travel experiences. Users can upload stories, experiences, photos, and more directly to Everlater or the site can pull items in from external services such as Flickr. There is also an iPhone app that enables offline recording of travel experiences which can be synchronized and shared later. Each user and trip has a unique URL like this one that can easily be shared with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Everlater also allows users to share their travel experiences offline by generating and sending postcards, printing scrapbooks, and photo albums.
Vanilla Forums – Vanilla is a popular open-source application that already powers over 300,000 discussion forums on the web. It’s been around for many years. Today, the company announced that it has released a greatly enhanced Version 2.0 of Vanilla both as open source and for the first time as a hosted solution . Vanilla has a business model similar to Wordpress. They have vanillaforums.org for open source, free download/use, and vanillaforums.com as a hosted service, but with up-sells for things like domain name mapping, removal of ads, and single sign-on integrations. They should get a good bump in initial sales from the 300,000 installed base of free users, some of whom will be happy to pay for the additional services.
SendGrid - SendGrid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies sending transactional outbound email (emails delivered by software applications such as sign up confirmations, shipping alerts, friend requests, and notifications). By using SendGrid instead of their current outbound email servers, companies can improve the delivery rates and solve scalability problems. SendGrid also solves many of the common problems faced by companies sending transactional email, such as CAN-SPAM compliance, link tracking, open rate reporting, and more. The company already has nearly 100 paying customers and has delivered over 100 million emails on their behalf.
Take Comics - Provides online digital versions of comic books. The company has relationships with comic book publishers and has technology which converts the print format into pixel-perfect digital formats optimized for desktop and mobile experiences. The comics themselves are visually stunning both on the desktop and on devices such as the iPhone. Comics can be purchased directly through the iTunes style application which also includes a variety of social features and content discovery mechanisms.
Rezora – An email marketing service specifically designed for the real estate market. It’s similar to Constant Contact, Vertical Response and many other similar services but it adds many real estate specific capabilities such as MLS integration and local real estate news feeds. The software is sold to agencies for use by their realtors and can track clicks to help realtors understand what properties, areas, and price ranges their clients are interested in. The company has already signed a major client with 1,100 agents.
Retel Technologies – Provides video surveillance analysis for stores and restaurants. It uses security camera feeds to deliver interesting metrics and analyses such as table cleanliness, service times, and employee activities. Many companies have tried to use sophisticated techniques to process daily video streams from security cameras with varying success. What’s interesting here is that Retel has re-thought the process and delivers human tested results using paid micro-tasks on services like Mechanical Turk. This enables the company to deliver sophisticated reports that include data points such as male vs female ratios, instances of theft by employees, and other actions that only humans can get right. The company charges a flat monthly fee per camera for these services. Retel already has some national chains as early customers and is reporting that $550K of a planned $750K raise is already committed.
TimZon – Pronounced “Team Zone”, this service is billed as “the easiest way to share visual feedback” and is targeted at virtual teams and customer service organizations. The service allows you to record a visual message that can include screen images, audio, video, and white-boarding /annotation., then easily share it as a URL. Because it requires no software to be installed in advance, this is an easy way for organizations to exchange complex visual feedback. The basic service is free to use, but TimZon provides paid packages for companies that want to systematically collect and organize visual feedback.
Mailana – Helps you share what really matters with the people who really matter. It analyzes your communication patterns from email, Twitter, and social networks to determine your inner circle. It then allows you to share your inner circle with the inner circles of your close connections. The idea here is that existing social graphs are too inclusive to be used to efficiently discover connections and expertise. Mailana aims to simplify this by implicitly generating only your “inner circle” based on actual communication patterns, then exposing that only to your most frequent and trusted connections. In theory this dynamic, current, and accurate social graph will expose the most efficient path to needed, trusted connections. The business model is likely to be something like LinkedIn, meaning advertising, and up-sells for premium services.
Spry - Spry provides insight into software development projects by monitoring all the tools and services used by a project team. Spry analyzes the data in real-time, generates progress reports, and enables clear and consistent communication throughout the team. This helps managers and developers make better decisions throughout the process thereby reducing the likelihood of failure and delay. What Spry is doing is analogous to the activity stream on Facebook, but based on the activity of the development tools and services used on a project. Spry is similar to 6th Sense Analytics which was acquired by Rally Software earlier this year. Spry will use the classic 3 tier (free, pro, enterprise) revenue model, with more features as you move up the scale.
TechStars will also unveil nine additional new companies in Boston (this is the first year for the Boston version of TechStars) coming up on September 10th.
So, Timzon = screentoaster, with mspaint annotations?
….k
Dan, TimZon is far more than that. Why so snarky?
TimZon allows the user to record PC interaction, add annotation, add video and audio to communicate issues, ideas and requirements. A single packaged file delivers a replay of recorded PC screen shots, video and audio clips. Useable for problem reporting and analysis, requirements design and product training. Web based and super easy to deploy. API based architecture allows them to be integrated into other solutions such as help desk, customer feedback, etc.
I am not being snarky, just pointing out facts.
Screentoaster does everything you said above, minus the annotation tools.
Heres a demo of me doing a bunch of stuff (even annotations!)
Webcam, Mic and desktop- All web based.
http://www.scre...techcrunch_test
Not every company is three months old. Some have been around longer.
The presentations were really good today. Kudos to Techstars and all of the 2009 participants. They continue to graduate bright folks every year.
I love Retel’s model. Mechanical Turk for video surveillance. Take that GE.
Thanks for the compliment, Erick – we’re excited about what we’re about to do over the next year!
A lot of email startups lately. Just give it up and use Twitter instead
Yet we all keep running back to email
Social networking is only increasing the # of emails we get. I heard a statistic today from SendGrid today that Facebook sends 600 million pieces of transactional email every single day. Wow.
What I want is an email service that makes it easy to do user lifecycle management for web apps. REALLY hoping SendGrid is the solution.
Investigating now.
Also: I use/love nextbigsound to death.
Techstars — always funding great startups.
Hi Tyler, I would love to find out more about what you have in mind. Don’t hesitate to use the Contact page to get let us know.
*yawn*
actually, i do like retel’s solution, but it’s tough to get cash out of restaurant owners unless they have a large customer base or are corporate owned…
“actually, I do like money, but it does require finding customers who have jobs, in order that they have any…”
Dear Captain Obvious: thanks for the tip.
Me sleepy like I drank hot milk.
Its great to see another crop of interesting companies come out of Boulder. Each one has taken an idea and looked at it from a new perspective.
I am most impressed with TakeComics, Next Big Sound and Vanilla. Each will make some decent noise in the near future…
Anyone else feel that in general TechStars companies are a little stronger than YC’s?
Yep, I hadn’t noticed it until this crop, but the % of companies I actually care about is much higher with TS.
TechStars is very much about building solid businesses. Historically, the companies have been less about just creating cool apps, but rather, spending serious time on mentoring that typically results in strong business models.
I think Launchbox’s companies (written up here yesterday) looked more impressive. Boulder is a much better place to live and hang though
More difficult to compare YC as those write-ups are spread over numerous posts.
Trying to fix problems with email are boring as I think email itself needs to be fundamentally changed. Of course, POP, IMAP, and SMTP standardization, ‘battle-proven’ history, and familiarity by the mainstream allow it to remain entrenched.
Looking forward to seeing what the future holds for all of these guys. Especially Take Comics.
i got my moneyz on TakeComics.
I saw the presentations today – great stuff, very professional and passionate entrepreneurs. Next Big Sound, Everlater, and Take Comics are some true innovations. Congrats to everyone!
Did you (or anyone else) use Everlater? Seems like something the traveler/writer would be interested in, not his friends/readers. Kind of like the vacation slide show.
I’ve used it, and loved it.
Perfect solution for sharing your travel experiences. Also will be a great way to plan trips.
Curious how long that type of capital generally lasts. what’s the equity share?
Pictures can be found here: http://www.flic...57621965451728/
Thanks to everyone that came out!
Kudos to everyone, glad to see that Timzon and Spry are there, two of my favorites.
Each one of those companies look solid. I really like Vanilla Forums – excited to see what new features they will add next.
Very interested in SendGrid. Looking for a go-to email provider to cascade to after sending first 200 a day through Gmail, which is dead simple in Rails apps.
Confused about pricing though. I love the metered style, not as thrilled about automatic charge each month. Want to pay for usage. Pricing page not clear. Which is it?
Hi Dan,
We are a drop-in replacement if you are using Gmail. Just change your SMTP settings are you are up and running.
We have updated the site to reflect the emails included on each plan.
Isaac,
Ah, that clarifies things. I still think it could be simpler and more attractive for potential customers (like me). Why the set monthly rates?
Why not just $0.001 for the first 10,000 emails, $0.00075 for the next 100,000, and $0.0005 after that?
That would lower the barrier to entry for every web app looking for email delivery. During early development, on staging servers, etc., the service would feel “free”, with the added bonus of knowing nothing needs to change when moving to production deployments, and the service will scale with the site.
Low volume users can sign up for free and they can send up to 200 emails per day.
We setup monthly rates because we assign users their own IPs and setup rDNS for them. Think of it as each user having their own mail server with an expert system installed that knows how to deliver email to different ISPs to them happy and increase your email deliverability.
Good companies, yes. All of these have potential to succeed. But, looks like TS played very safe with this – for an incubator, these companies look lot more mature – all must have been working for months/years prior to coming to TS.
Would have liked to see some risky ventures out of TS as well, but, I guess economy is causing everyone to be extra careful these days with their money.
Hi Sam, only one or two of the TechStars companies this year were a little more mature. Most were super young. A couple changed their idea RADICALLY during the program.
It’s amazing what you can get done in 3 months.
I just have to say congratulations to all of the TechStars teams! It’s exciting to be an exec working in this community (Denver/Boulder) that has such an inherent start-up culture. I’ll be watching these companies closely and wish them loads of success.
great stuff! love to see good startups, esp from MSFT.
congrats to the team
i don’t know how any of them are going to get distribution so they don’t die on the vine by this time next year
Like the idea of Take Comic – but man, what country are they from? Did you read the first line from their Website?
“We couldn’t count the number of times we have had the first few using of a great book, only for our store to stop ordering the title – forcing us to travel hours to hunt the book down or wait for the trade.”
and at bottom of page there’s an option to edit the footer LOL…
Hey, thanks for pointing out the mistake, as you can imagine a product like Take Comics has taken a lot of work and I rushed the launch of this information site, so we had something in time for demo day.
Needless to say sleeping around 4 hours a night for the last couple of months has taken its toll, but it is really unprofessional of me to put out the first line like that or leave the default footer.
I am really proud of the product we have built and look forward to getting it out.
No worries Kevin – I figured as much and after posting it I felt a better approach would have been to just reach out to you directly and let you know, so glad you read the post. Good luck on the beta (I signed up for it). My son is fanatical about comics (creates art himself) so we both think your product has great promise. Best of luck.
For christ’s sake.
Another round of crapola online business models to fuel the wants and needs of the ego’s of their founders and the larger heads of their supreme idiot seed venture fund leaders.
WTF is Mailana going to do to actually make money?
And – how is TimToze or what ever its called going to survive?
I absolutely despise the people that think they can think up some poxy idea in their backyard and then, literally overnight, they are posted on Arrington’s blog for stardom and the ultimate utopia of fame and fortune.
Back to basics = business model 101. Find a service people are going to pay for, then build it.
Not the other “build it and they will come (then we will figure out how to make money off those that came)”!!!
Even good ol’ Twitter does have a business model yet, so hey – who cares! Keep pumping your VC money into them boys – I hope you loose the lot.
Ah shut up you BLOWBAG troll!
indeed.
Whew, yeah. So, Rupert, tell us about your awesome startup and billion dollar business plan . . .
(Also you meant “egos” not “ego’s”, right?)
How do things look from the cheap seats Rupert? I love guys like you- no risk, no vision, nothing to offer- just a blowbag.
Why are all these companies linked to their CrunchBase profiles instead of to the actual company????? 2 clicks are a better ux than 1? Wtf.
So lame, TC, so lame.
I had the same frustration. And as if the crunchbase links weren’t useless enough, the company logos are linked to… the same company logo?! I was all set to click down the list and check these guys out and instead I just got annoyed with TechCrunch and left.
Nice job techstars teams!
The 2009 TechStars grads seem much more mature than the last two graduating classes. I think it has much to do with the maturing of the TechStars program as a whole; as David, Brad and the rest of the founding gang clarify their vision and bring in talent like Nicole Glaros and Andrew Hyde, they are choosing to nurture entrepreneurs offering more serious, long-lasting types of products and services. Long after the social networking flash has left the pan, truly useful offerings like Next Big Sound, SendGrid, Spry and Rezora will continue to provide their customers measurable business value.
Good morning Caron,
Indeed the TechStars program is maturing. David, Brad, Nicole and Andrew are getting sharper each year. And don’t forget the previous founders. We all benefit from the experience of companies like EventVue, BrightKite, Devver, SocialThing… Every previous founder, every TechStars mentor and every volunteer who has walked in our shoes before help to make us a better company. And I hope we can help do the same for next years company. TechStars and Boulder are truly about community and mentorship.
The teams today all did outstanding work. I can tell you that after seeing Vanilla’s presentation, I converted our support forum over from GetSatisfaction (it took quite literally 5 min – impressive). As soon as they offer the branded/no-ad version, they’ll have my money.
TakeComics was also amazing – I think this one has a ton of potential. I’d be surprised if they don’t get snapped up by Apple and incorporated into iTunes somehow.
All in all – very impressive work by ALL of the companies and by the team that put on the Demo Day event.
Explain me how are you going to make money in one sentence. You can’t. Sorry, you are out.
explain to me in 1 sentence how u monetize your trollish commenting. I hear it’s big business.
… for assholes.
I explain you how am I going to make money in one sentence. I will teach you proper grammar.
hate to be the party spoiler here, but Band Metrics provides far better analytics than the Next Big Sound
Great stuff here. Were in final stages of a Social Net Dev and a send grid could be a huge assistance to us! Email management is a rollout and ongoing concern.
Hi Ric,
Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing more about Social Net Dev.
I wouldn’t consider any of them innovative considering what the web can do and what it’s going to do in the future, but no less fun to see new ideas.
I like everlater.com, but as soon as I use it it went down… will be back to try it later. I like this post a lot, thanks.
Rossi, sorry you had a problem. The site was definitely not down (as far as we know), so it could have been something more specific.
We’d love it if you could tell us more about what happened so we can fix the problem. Email feedback@everlater.com
Thanks for checking us out!
Thanks for your respond Ryan, it is working for me now so I take that back. It could be something on my end at home, it is working at work and giving it a try now.
I always wanted to share my vacation pictures, stories, where to eat and more… and you are offering everything.
Great customer support too, can’t believe I got a reply here.
Getvanilla is falling over each time I click on something – plugins are exposed for the hosted service, but they then want me to “download” them. Themes got me a radical system error msg, etc.
If you are now pushing the hosted version business model, you should have had a way higher quality bar.
This is your moment in the sun – get on the case asap.
The hosted forums are in public beta right now. We know there are issues, but we had a lot of people begging for us to put them up, so we obliged.
We’re working through our issues and we have a big community of devs helping us get everything ironed out. Will be moving out of beta ASAP
NBS claims “to be the de facto standard for understanding band related metrics on the web. ”
good luck with that, they’re about a dozen companies way ahead of you
The SendGrid website says 135mio emails by 128 companies.
That’s over 1mio emails per company.
1 mio sounds like SPAM.
Hi I went along to the demo day last week. Despite all the trollish comments, there are some strong potential businesses here, and the writeup while good and concise I don’t think really did all the companies presenting justice.
I’ve just posted some thoughts on how the TechStars companies approach pitching too, which I think there is a clear pattern to, and the “TechStars method” and why its effective, but also why it doesn’t necessarily look like these companies are going to change the world.
http://bit.ly/1k4gj