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). In February, we covered the news that TechStars had expanded to Boston. Today, TechStars debuted nine new startups from the inaugural Boston class. The teams presented on Thursday to about 200 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are about three months old and have two or three founder employees. Don was in attendance today and these are his notes on the startups that presented at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (MS-NERD)

TempMine is looking to change the temporary staffing market. The company believes that they’ve found a way to make the temps, employers, and agencies happier with a single solution. Temp workers create a profile on TempMine that is automatically updated as placements occur, providing more transparency and traceability to the process.  Employers can search directly for temps across the inventory of multiple agencies, finding the right fit. Agencies retain control over placements of their best temps. The temp agency only gets involved after the employer finds the exact temp they want. There is no cost to employers or temps to use TempMine, but they do take a 1% commission from the agencies. It is an $86B industry, so 1% can add up.

LangoLab is the most entertaining way to learn a new language—by watching popular TV shows and videos with subtitles. LangoLab leverages the American media machine that is constantly churning out entertaining content and then provides an engaging “watch and learn” experience complete with translations, definitions, user generated language notes, and self testing.  Many people have learned English just by watching TV with subtitles, and this is the online equivalent. English as a second language is the largest market. As an example, Rosetta Stone had $250M in revenue last year, and the total market is around $30B.

Localytics provides mobile usage data and analytics for the mobile market, similar to companies such as Flurry and Medialets. Localytics says that it has both real time and “deeper” analytics than the competitors, allowing you to slice and dice the data in a variety of ways to gain better and more immediate insight into the usage of mobile applications. They also explained that they’ve open sourced critical components so that developers can know exactly what they’re putting into their applications, and that their mobile components are highly optimized for performance. Localytics is cross platform and already supports Blackberry, Android, and iPhone applications, with Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm planned for the near future. Localytics uses the Freemium model: free basic service, with paid premium services. They already have 60 customers, adding 10 new customers each week, and they just launched.

AmpIdea is working on web-enabled baby monitoring as a platform for delivery of various services such as video monitoring, sleep tracking and analysis, statistical comparison, music streaming, and even an integrated baby encyclopedia (Baby 411) which suggests techniques to soothe sleeping babies based on age. While they’re at it, they’re using wifi as the delivery mechanism for audio and video monitoring, which eliminates the static and range issues that plagues traditional baby monitors. For new parents money is no issue when it comes to safety and a good night’s sleep. The sleep scheduling monitor keeps a record of when the baby is sleeping and waking up over time. This helps the parents schedule when to put the baby down for naps and night time sleep. AmpIdea sells the monitor hardware and charges for additional services.

HaveMyShift has built a tool that allows hourly shift workers to trade shifts online. The company is using a grassroots approach and encourages employees to sign up and trade shifts with or without the blessing of the company itself.  They’re seeing strong viral adoption in the Chicago area market where, for example, 80% of Starbucks stores there already use the application. Many of the listings offer “bonus money” to tempt others who work for the same employer to pick up a shift, and last-minute shift changes can be filled with paid emergency promotional placement. HaveMyShift makes money by taking a percentage of the bonuses offered to other workers to cover a shift. Absenteeism costs US employers more than $200M every day. There are 74M hourly workers in the USA, working 888M shifts. HaveMyShift says that it’s simply facilitating a process that goes on anyway, and making it easier on everyone involved.

oneforty is creating an app store for Twitter applications, open to any developer who wants to build and sell a Twitter app. The company organizes the apps by category, allows for ratings, media coverage, profiles (showing what applications are used by various users), and the necessary e-commerce infrastructure. Oneforty takes a percentage of every sale. Funded by angel investors just 15 days after the start of TechStars, the company is also advised by Guy Kawasaki who says that oneforty founder Laura Fitton (@pistachio) was a major influence on his initial use of Twitter. Laura also taught Twitter for Business at Harvard Business School.

AccelGolf.  30,000 golfers are already using AccelGolf, after just 3 months in beta, for stroke tracking, range-finding, and personalized improvement of their golf games. The company showed off their BlackBerry and iPhone applications and explained that the heart of their system is really the community of avid golfers who are now connecting and building their own social network. AccelGolf offers personalized improvement tips by analyzing strokes of golfers who are just slightly better than you, and presenting areas for improvement based on your past performance.  AccelGolf suggests which club to use, and where to place the shot, based on your past performance on a specific course. In one example the company showed the iPhone application calculating odds based on past performance for landing a risky shot over a sand trap on a dog leg left. AccelGolf already has 70% of all golf courses loaded in their system. They use the GPS on your phone to determine your position and calculate distance to the pin.

Baydin uses email, and the words in the email, to create keywords to search for other relevant information. It is similar to Xobni, but goes beyond email data and searches all the files on your hard drive, and document repositories across your corporate network. It automatically launches the search in the background while you are reading the email, and presents the relevant results in a side panel in Outlook. The founder used an example from his first job where he designed a USB circuit board. He didn’t know that five other divisions had already designed similar boards. Baydin would have found references to this and saved him the effort of reinventing the same board. Baydin is an Outlook plug-in so it is easy to draw comparisons to Xobni here, but Baydin seems to be more focused on unlocking hidden corporate knowledge vs.. analyzing email that you’ve already received.

Sensobi bills itself as a personal relationship manager (PRM) and also reminds me a lot of Xobni , but it goes beyond email and looks at phone calls and other activity on your phone contact list. In practice, it’s a BlackBerry address book replacement that shows you the last time you communicated with your contacts, who’s falling off your radar, and who you need to get back to quickly. You can set a reminder for each contact to remind you to connect with them within a specific time interval. It does this by analyzing the email, contacts, text messages, and phone calls on your Blackberry and then presenting your contacts in a relationship-focused view. For any contact you can see the last several communications of any kind with them. The team edition takes this one step further and allows co-workers to share and leverage a unified view of communications with each contact. Sensobi uses the Freemium model, with paid premium services for $50 or $100 per year. Over 6,000 downloads in just 6 weeks, while still in beta.

TechStars plans to bring about a dozen of the 19 companies from Boulder and Boston to San Francisco on September 30th for a “best of” repeat performance. Here is coverage of the San Francisco TechStars event from last year.

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And while I think that’s inherently a good idea, there are a couple of flaws in the system that put a downer on the experience. I’ll explain.

What Next Big Sounds aims to be is a place where you can go to see how fans interact with music online, virtually in real time. Look up a music artist, say Manu Chao, and you’ll get a nice overview of how many ‘plays’ his music is getting on his MySpace, Last.fm and iLike profile, measured by week, month or all time. Wanna see how many fans your favorite artist has on any of those sites or other services such as Facebook and Twitter, how many times one of his accounts was viewed and how many comments it gets? No problem, click the corresponding tab and you’ll see a nice graph representing the evolution of all these elements.

Also a neat feature is that you can subscribe to any given artist in the NBS database and get fed RSS items or e-mailed alerts with updates on all that is measured. Furthermore, much like Alexa and Compete for website traffic, you can do comparisons between artists and bands, enabling you to track their online evolution in comparison with others.

A couple of gripes. When you sign up for the service, you can opt to register as a fan, an ‘industry professional’ or an artist but nowhere does NBS specify what the difference is. I signed up as a fan and set out to get some basic statistics on bands that I like, and quickly noticed that Next Big Sound’s database is currently too far from complete to be truly useful.

I did a search for a band I like called “Blackbox Revelation”, which yielded zero results, and trying my luck with electro dance sensation “Justice” there were multiple options yet the service failed to tell me which would be the right one to pick. YouTube isn’t tracked at all, and neither are services like Rhapsody and Pandora. Finally, it would be cool if Next Big Sounds let you check the online activity centered around individual tracks or albums instead of merely the artist’s name.

Overall, I think it’s a great idea and I’m looking forward to seeing it evolve in the future, but for now it’s clear that the service requires some extra work and polish.

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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.

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In the nascent world of mobile social networking, there are the big dogs (Facebook and MySpace) and everyone who wants to be a big dog. Two of the puppies just got bigger. Limbo is buying Brightkite, which all the tech kids are raving about, in a nearly all-stock transaction. It will change its name to Brightkite in a re-branding move, and gain Brightkite’s engineering team and product smarts. Limbo CEO Jonathon Linner will remain as CEO, while Brightkite founders Martin May and Brady Becker will take over product management and design.

Meanwhile, Limbo brings a lot of cash to the table, having just raised a previously undisclosed $9 million round of financing in January, 2009. Nexit Ventrures was the lead, and existing investors Azure Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and New Enterprise Associates also participated. Brightkite, meanwhile, started out as a TechStars startup and was funded with just $1 million in angel money. This marks the third exit from TechStars’s Class of 2007—the other two being SocialThing to AOL and IntenseDebate to Automattic.

The combined company will employ 35 people and boast two million active users. That should keep it in the running with other growing mobile social networks such as Loopt, which has more than one million active users, Mig33, which may have 10 million or more and MocoSpace, which has 3.5 million active users. The enlarged engineering team should help Limbo/Brightkite push out new features at a faster pace and keep up with the front pack.

Both Limbo and Brightkite have iPhone apps, and both use Facebook Connect to plug into people’s existing social network. Here is how we described the Brightkite app when it first came out:

The app allows users to syndicate their current location to their friends, meet nearby Brightkite users, and lifestream with the equivalent of geo-encoded Tweets. The application is tied to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which allows users to manage their location from a number of other services. The site also uses databases to automatically associate POI’s and cross streets with GPS locations, so user positions aren’t simply displayed as coordinates.

Meanwhile, Limbo is more centered around the activities of the people around you and connecting with them that way. We included Limbo in this roundup, where we concluded it could do a better job with locating the exact position of friends on a map. Brightkite’s Fire Eagle implementation should help with that.

Something tells me this is just the beginning of the consolidation in mobile social networking.

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Silicon Valley has Y Combinator. Boulder, Colorado (and now Boston) has TechStars. Boston also as of today has Start@Spark. Washington, D.C. has LaunchBox Digital. Philadelphia has DreamIT Ventures. And now Atlanta is joining the seed incubator movement with Shotput Ventures.

Started by a group of Atlanta tech entrepreneurs who want to attract and keep startup talent in the Southeast, Shotput Ventures is accepting applications from young, first-time founders for its summer program. The deadline is April 10.

Mitch Free, the founder of industrial marketplace MFG.com, is one of the backers. He explains in an email:

We are looking for “capital light” web startups. We think there is so much open source software, web services and cheap cloud computing capacity (like Amazon S3) that web business can be prototyped and launched very inexpensively.

There has been nothing like this in the Southeast. We have lots of great breeding grounds such as Georgia Tech but the people with the next big idea have had to reach out to the Northeast or West Coast to find seed capital and support. Our goal is to create an eco-system in the Southeast to encourage and support web startups. And once they are up and running we don’t want them having to relocate to Boston or San Jose

The first summer round is funded with $300,000. Who needs a summer job, when you can create a startup instead?

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The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital, a prolific investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark, and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas.

Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted to information technology companies but also periodically be granted to startups offering financial or educational services. Entrepreneurs who get into the program will have access to Spark’s partner network and legal counsel, and will also be prepared for a second, more formal round of funding at a later stage if progress is deemed satisfactory by the firm. You can apply here.

This is not the first program of this type we’ve seen. In fact, it seems like they’re popping up all over the place, conceivably thanks to independent initatives like Y Combinator and TechStars who’ve paved the way. Charles River Ventures debuted its “QuickStart” program back in November 2006, Sequoia simply invested $2 million of its own fund into Y Combinator to give them more runway, and other firms have set up platform-specific seeding funds in the past (e.g. Kleiner Perkins’ iFund and Bay Partners’ Facebook-apps only fund).

We should probably note Spark Capital in fact a partner to TechStars, and General Partner Bijan Sabet is listed as a mentor for the seed program, but undoubtedly they’ll be competing for the same investment sooner rather than later.

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Companies use exploding for a variety of reasons. But the goal is to put additional pressure on the company to accept the terms and quickly, without much further negotiation. In particular, they don’t want to see a deal “shopped,” which is when you take their term sheet and go to other buyers/investors looking for a better deal (which is exactly what you should be doing as soon as you get a term sheet from anyone).

But they are bad news for startups, who can’t take their time to find the best deal possible when presented with one. I’ve received a couple of these in the past and have always ignored the clauses. Generally speaking, the day after the explosion they’re still very happy to do business with you. If they’re not, they weren’t good partners anyway. (there are exceptions, such as when certain financial milestones or other important dates are coming up, but those situations are fairly obvious).

The Y Combinator letter is fairly straightforward in its advice. In particular, competitors (which are mainly TechStars and DreamIT, although they aren’t mentioned) are giving exploding term sheets that expire prior to Y Combinator getting a look at the companies. Lawsuits have also been threatened:

Advice to Summer Applicants
March 2009

If you’re also applying to one of the other YC-like organizations, you may find yourself in an awkward situation. Last summer several of them gave startups offers timed to expire before YC interviews.

At least one made groups who got offers sign something promising not to tell anyone. Another actually threatened to sue a startup if they didn’t show up for their program.

Using so-called “exploding termsheets” to pre-empt other offers is not uncommon in the VC world, though even there it’s considered a slightly dubious tactic. But VC funding happens asynchronously. Using this tactic in a stage where funding happens synchronously is not very ethical. It would be like colleges doing it.

(YC asks people to decide that day whether or not to accept an offer from us, but we do this because at that point they already know all they need to, not to pre-empt other offers. There is no other seed firm that decides after us.)

What can you do if you find yourself being pressured to decide before you’re ready? We advise approaching the situation with confidence. If your startup is going to succeed, you’re going to have to learn how to push back against people who try to take advantage of you. So try negotiating. The better you are, the more willing they’ll be to wait for your decision, no matter what they say about their deadlines or the number of “spots” they have.

If you really get into a pinch, let us know and maybe we’ll be able to figure out some way to interview you early.

Sorry about this. We started YC to make it less stressful to start a startup, not more. We never anticipated this sort of situation would arise.

There’s just one problem with the advisory, though. Y Combinator themselves ask companies to make a decision on the day they get their offer. So it’s somewhat hypocritical to complain about the same actions by their competitors. As they say, though, they are the last to interview new startups in each summer and winter class. So startups know who has accepted them by then, and the Y Combinator deal terms and even the contracts they’ll sign are on the website for review.

I’ve emailed both TechStars and DreamIT for a comment. TechStars Executive Director David Cohen writes:

No, TechStars does not ask the founders that it makes offers to not to disclose the offer. We do ask them to accept it quickly (usually in 24-48 hours) or we move on.

TechStars issues a letter of intent when it makes an offer. Once our offer is accepted and signed by both parties, it includes non-disclosure (but not before).

The reason for this is two-fold. First, we are by definition still making offers and we may have to move down the list if some are not accepted. We don’t make all offers at once – it happens over a period of about a week, usually in personal meetings. So we don’t want other applicants that we’re planning to make offers to thinking they won’t get one, etc. Second, we generally advise our startups not to make a bunch of noise on the way in to the program as this is typically too much publicity too early. So, if they enter into the letter of intent, we ask them for confidentiality until such time that we can coach them on working with the media. Then they decide what they want to do. Again, this only happens upon acceptance, and not before.

TechStars has never once threatened to sue a startup or applicant for any reason. I have heard this rumor about another program (not ours), but I have no idea if it’s true or not.

will also tell you that regardless of lots of random innuendo, we have never once set our application or offer deadlines based upon those of any other program. Our program historically sits in the exact dates of the University of Colorado summer break, in order to maximize the likelihood of available temporary housing. We set our dates completely around this, and not based on anything else. In Boston this year, we simply added a two week offset for logistical reasons.

We’ve also heard back from Michael Levinson, Managing Partner at DreamIt Ventures:

At DreamIt our focus is to help the entrepreneur. This is summed up in our mission statement which is “To help great people with great ideas build great companies.” We not only offer money and speakers, but we offer as part of our program (and at no charge) a dedicated “been there done that” mentor, accounting services and legal services from top notch firms, and a great community of shared office space.

Like Y Combinator and TechStars, DreamIt asks companies to accept our offer quickly or we move on. We ask our companies to let us know within 48 hours.

Our process is fully-described on our website, and is very similar to the process TechStars described in its comment. We make rolling offers. As we interview companies and find ones we think are a great fit with DreamIt, we make an offer. We have hundreds of applicants and scores of highly qualified candidates for a very few number of places. We need to know quickly whether a company is in or out so that other entrepreneurs are not denied an opportunity to participate in DreamIt (or for that matter any of the other programs, since an acceptance into one program might open up a spot for another entrepreneur in another program).

Each of these programs (YCombinator, TechStars, DreamIt) have different schedules based on a variety of factors. In our case, DreamIt officially starts with a Kick-Off weekend April 17-18 where we bring in all of the DreamIt `09 companies, introduce them to each other and to many of the resources at their disposal (e.g., each company’s dedicated law firm, accounting firm, mentor, and other support services), and start them on the process of accomplishing the milestones that they set to achieve by August. Not only does this enable companies to hit the ground running when they return for the immersion part of DreamIt from May through August, but with the DreamIt resources available to the companies starting in April, companies can make extraordinary progress from April to May.

Our acceptance cutoff is set without regard to other programs but instead so that the companies participating in DreamIt can participate in Kick-Off Weekend.

We have high regard for Y Combinator, TechStars and other accelerator programs. All are providing opportunities for entrepreneurs to launch new companies in exciting ways.

What would be best is if founders didn’t have to make decisions on any of these small incubators/investors until they’d pitched all of them. That’s unlikely to happen, since Y Combinator carries most of the brand weight and would likely get most of the best startups (like Stanford gets all the best students). My guess is we’ll be seeing more of this, not less, over time.

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Boulder, Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars has decided to open a second office in Boston where it will run a concurrent mentorship program starting this summer.

The Boston program – which will probably be located in Cambridge – will accept the same number of companies (10) as the Boulder program, effectively doubling the number of TechStars companies admitted each year. Assuming application rates don’t rise dramatically, this will make it easier for companies to get into the program – especially if they’re willing to relocate to either city.

Co-founder David Cohen says that admission rates are about on par with last year, despite the recession. With the deadline of March 21st still over a month away, TechStars has already received 100 applications for its Boulder program. Last year, 400 applications were collected in total. Those who apply after today will get the chance to state a preference for either location, and those who have already applied to the Boulder program can contact TechStars to switch their preference to Boston.

It would seem TechStars is intentionally trying to fill the mentorship void left by Y Combinator when that incubator announced its departure from Boston in January. However, Cohen says that TechStar’s expansion into Boston has been in the works for about six months now, so Y Combinator’s decision didn’t play a role.

TechStars plans to run its Boston and Boulder programs mostly separately, even though they are going to be held at roughly the same times. About 5-6 investors have contributed to each program, and Boston has its own set of east coast mentors that includes Colin Angle, Don Dodge, Eran Egozy, and Chris Heidelberger. Boston entrepreneur Shawn Broderick will be in charge of managing the new branch.

The programs will mix, however, at the end of both sessions when the best from each are combined and given the opportunity to present to investors in Silicon Valley.

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TechStars, a startup incubator that offers mentorship along with a relatively modest amount of seed funding, has begun accepting applications for the third year of its program. Interested companies can apply here between January 19 and March 21, 2009, with winners selected by March 28. The TechStars team will select around ten companies to participate in the program, which takes place in Boulder, Colorado and culminates in a pair of Demo Days in Boulder and Mountain View, California during which each company will present their pitches to a room full of potential investors.

TechStars had a very successful 2008, during which a number of its companies were acquired: in August, lifestreaming startup SocialThing was acquired by AOL, followed a month later by Automattic’s acquisition of enhanced commenting system Intense Debate. A few of its companies have also been successful at raising money since the economic downturn, including artisan-food market Foodzie, which closed a round in December, and group dating site Ignighter, which raised $1.2 million in October.

Other startup incubators include DreamIt Ventures and the well-known Y Combinator program, which was founded in 2005 and now has funded well over 100 companies.

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More acquisition news from the TechStars Demo Day: madKast will soon be acquired by ShareThis, a widget company that allows users to share a blog post or news article across multiple services like Digg and MySpace. madKast, which we covered last October, is also a widgetmaker, allowing users to share posts through web services as well as through other routes like SMS messages and email.

Details of the upcoming acquisition are scant at this point, as madKast is currently unable to disclose any further information (the deal will not be complete for a few days). ShareThis, which closed a $15 million round last March, is likely looking to acquire madKast both for its complementary technology and its team.

Earlier today IntenseDebate, another TechStars company, announced that it had been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

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This is the second year for TechStars, and they have already had an acquisition. SocialThing was recently acquired by AOL. The teams presented today to about 100 VCs and Angel investors for the first time. These companies are three to six 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.

Gyminee

Gyminee -A fitness social network for detailed tracking, online accountability, and motivation. With Gyminee, you can find workout programs and track your progress, track your food and nutrition, and set goals for whatever is important to you. On the social side of things, you can find GymBuddies to keep you accountable towards your goals and participate in fitness challenges. They already have over 35,000 users and over 1.2M page views. On the nutrition side they have a database of 50,000 food items complete with nutritional information that you would find on the label. You can track your diet, calories, and nutritional value. Freemium business model. Free service where you can upgrade to premium services for $5 per month. Looking to raise $300K in seed funding.

Ignighter

Ignighter – Wish dating could be as fun and easy as going out with your friends? Ignighter is group to group dating. Meet people the way you do in real life…like you did in college. Ignighter is about hooking you and your friends up with someone else and their friends. They believe group socializing is safer and less intimidating than one to one blind dating, and leads to personal dates. Ignighter has elements of Facebook for groups and Match.com for dates. They have an iPhone app that uses GPS to find other groups close to your current location. They have over 10,000 registered users. Business model; premium services like better search placement, and of course advertising. Looking to raise $300K.

Peoples Software

Peoples Software – WhozAround? from People’s Software takes the pain out of making plans with your friends with planning and scheduling tools that plug right into your Facebook account, your contact list, or your mobile phone directory. Lightweight and location-aware, WhozAround sorts your friends, makes plans with one click, and outputs your events into a clean feed that can go right to your calendar, email, or your phone.

Peoples Software founders are Susan Mernit formerly a VP at Yahoo and AOL, and Lisa Williams, a founder of several companies, and formerly at Boston.com. It is great to see two women founding a cool new startup. Business model; locally targeted advertising. They believe they can get $7 to$10 CPM rates because of the local targeting, and by partnering with regional media companies. They are seeking $225K in seed funding.

Devver

Devver – Takes the tools that developers already use on their desktops and turns them into cloud-based services. Currently focused on Ruby tools and testing suites. Strong emphasis on test suites. They will add PHP, Python, and Java later. They will also have an open API so that developers can add other languages.

By putting developer tools in the cloud, they can execute them more quickly, reduce setup and configuration time, enable easy scheduling, display rich reports, and make it simple to share data between team members. The dev tools and environment is set up once on a cloud based server, then team members can be added quickly and have all the same tools, projects, and code.

Business model; subscription fee of $100 per developer per month. Sales channel – seems to be word of mouth through the Ruby development community. Seeking $200K in seed funding.

The Highway Girl

The Highway Girl – is a traveling music show for the digital age. Hosted by singer songwriter Samantha Murphy, the show educates artists on how to manage their careers in the digital age while also giving fans a true behind the scenes look inside the life of a singer / songwriter on tour. It is initially based on Samantha Murphy, but soon will include other artists. TheHighwayGirl.com will sell exclusive content from the artists they feature, as well as act as a liaison between artist and fan on non-traditional transactions that connect them.

Samantha delivered one of the most unusual startup pitches I have seen. She sang a song about raising money and building a business. Wow! Samantha is an incredibly talented singer /songwriter. Business model; Exclusive content, tours, merchandise, and a traveling music tour called The Highway Girls. Also partnering with TopSpin. Seeking $500K in seed funding.

Application Experts

Application Experts provides Software as a Service (SaaS) to venture capital and private equity fund managers and to the pensions, endowments and other parties that invest in venture capital and private equity. Based in Denver, Boston, and Chicago. The founders were in private equity firms prior to founding the company.

The idea is to build a social network of private equity and venture capital investors to share best practices and information. They also provide a deal-tracking dashboard to help manage the pipeline of investment deals in progress.

Their target audience has plenty of money and is willing to pay. They charge $3k per person with a minimum of $15K.

Occipital

Occipital – Photography has evolved over the years, but the ways we interact with digital photos are still decidedly primitive. Occipital is using artificial intelligence to organize your photo stream, enabling vivid recollection with groundbreaking visualizations.

They can stitch photos together into a panorama, automatically label and tag photos, and construct 3D scenes from your photos. They can zoom in, fly over, step inside buildings…all based on simple photos stitched together into a 3D presentation. They find objects in your photos and link them to the same or similar objects in other photos and stitch them together. This is hard to explain with words, but the visual demo was amazing.

BuyPlayWin

BuyPlayWin.com – Combines online shopping with tournament games. Buy products, play games, win a refund for the product. Every shopper gets a chance to win full refunds for everything they purchase by playing fun games against other shoppers. For example, buy a $120 college text book. Compete with six other people who are also buying the book. Win the game and you get the book for free. They use the profit margin in the product to pay for the winners purchase. If a product has a 33% profit margin they need three players to break even. With 10 purchasers they make a very nice profit. They are seeking $400K in seed funding.

Foodzie

Foodzie – An online marketplace where consumers can discover and buy food directly from small artisan producers. The Foodzie technology makes it simple for small producers to sell their products online and aggregate all these products within a marketplace that makes it easy for “foodies” to discover the very best food. They focus on gourmet foods and organic health foods. These are high-end and high-margin products. Foodzie takes a 20% commission on every sale. Traditional retailers take 50% margin, while a distributor takes another 10%. The food supplier only ends up with 40%. So, with Foodzie the producers get to keep 80% of each sale. They are seeking $350K in seed funding.

Travelfli

Travelfli -Helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their loyalty programs and discover the value in this hidden currency. They help users manage their award programs in one centralized and secure place, find ways to get free travel using their miles, and book award travel online. TravelFli allows you to aggregate frequent flyer miles and hotel points from family members and keep track of all the various rewards programs. They help you keep track of when miles expire, or when there are special promotional programs for your miles.

There are over 120M people in frequent flyer programs, and trillions of frequent flyer miles that never get used. There are 17M elite flyers that account for 43% of all flights. These elite flyers are a very lucrative market for airlines, hotels, rental car agencies, etc.

Business model; commissions on all sales. Advertising – CPMs for travel are very high. They will also sell aggregate data on flights, hotels, and car rentals. They are seeking $500K in seed funding.

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LaunchBoxDigital says they’ll invest $15,000 – $30,000 in six to ten startups, in exchange for 4% to 8% of the equity. Founding teams must spend the summer in Washington D.C. to participate in a twelve week incubation program. Applications must be received by March 14, 2008.

The model is based on the much emulated Y Combinator, which has now funded dozens of startups. London based SeedCamp and Colorado based TechStars have nearly identical business models.

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TechStars offers up to $15,000 in seed funding ($5,000 per founder, max $15,000) to broke entrepreneurs with a good startup idea. Ten winners will be selected, and winners will need to spend most of their time in Boulder over the Northern summer building out their ideas. In return, TechStars takes 5% of the equity in each startup. Winners have full use of TechStar’s offices, access to legal advice, and are able to tap into a strong list of startup mentors to help them build their idea (list here). Non-US companies can apply, although must be able to legally spend most of summer in Colorado.

Of last year’s winners 8 of the 10 companies are now angel or venture backed, are profitable, and/or have had acquisition offers, and 6 of the 10 winners heard about the opportunity on TechCrunch (according to TechStats).

The Techstar’s program is similar to YCombinator, and both are solid ideas, giving wannabe startups a helping hand in turning their dreams into reality. The associated support is first rate and particularly for those not well connected in the Valley would be difficult to replicate; ultimately the $15,000 may be the headline figure but the related support makes it much more valuable.

Applications close 31 March 2008.

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MadKast is an embeddable widget that lets you easily share links with your friends on any of 15 link sharing sites (Digg, Delicious, Reddit, …). But unlike other link-sharing widgets such as AddThis, MadKast also lets you send links via email, SMS, or IM. It’s a rather simple, yet useful, tool for letting your readers spread your posts.

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Most of these companies are unlaunched and seeking additional angel funding (exceptions are noted). Here are our notes on each – and see Don Dodge for his take:

EventVue builds social networks around conferences (see confabb, an existing competitor). The idea is to let people connect before, during and after conferences in an online space, to add to the physical interaction at the conference itself. The company plans on generating revenue by charging an affiliate fee for each new registration. They are currently looking for $150k in funding.

Intense Debate – see our previous coverage. Intense Debate is a souped-up blog commenting widget that adds a lot of features for publishers and commenters alike. Currently installed on 30 blogs. Installing the plug-in on your blog (WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad) adds threading, comment analytics, bulk comment moderation across all your blogs, user reputation, and comment aggregation. They are looking for $500k in funding.

socialthing! is an ambitious project that simplifies the management of digital content (blogs, photos, music, friends, social networks and links). Users can also synchronize information from and to various social networks from their profile page. Strong viral component. Revenue from advertising. Raising $500k.

J-Squared Media has launched their “Sticky Notes” Facebook application. It has 1.7 million users after six weeks, who have sent over 4 million sticky notes. They are working on several other related Facebook applications and are cash flow positive with $30,000/month in revenue from cost per action advertising. Not seeking funding. More here.

Search-To-Phone is a mobile search service via voice. Call and leave a voicemail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to the appropriate business to call you back with information and/or a special offer. Built on TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They’ve signed a business development deal with Excell Services to provess 10 million calls. They are looking for a small capital investment and more partners before launching.

Villij is a recommendation engine that analyzes your online life (social networks, blogs, bookmarks, etc.) to find people who may have similar interests as you. Raising $500k.

MadKast has the honor of being the first TechStars startup to launch. Our previous coverage is here. They’ve made a dead simple way to increase distribution for your blog with one line of javascript or one click for Blogger and TypePad. Once the widget is installed, readers can send a blog post via email, mobile MMS, or social bookmarking networks to friends. They are raising $300k in capital.

FiltrBox is a content monitoring and filtering service for blogs, news sites and other websites. Content is filtered by topics, keywords and context and then delivered to the user via RSS, email and/or text messages. Filters can be adjusted via sliders and will learn what you like over time. Raising $500k in capital.

KBLabs is developing Facebook applications and widgets. Wah! Cool was their first application, which launched four weeks ago. It now has 100k subscribers and is generating 1.5 million page views per week. Other applications include Post Secrets, Motivate Me and Track Bot. The founders are going back to college this Fall but will continue to consult and build Facebook applications. They are not looking for funding.

BrightKite serves location based notifications (”place streaming”) over email, instant messaging of text messages. The idea is to stream content about a place, from a place. Friends are alerted when you are nearby. You receive offers from local businesses. Etc. Targeted towards conferences, bars, parties and public places. It is also a platform for third party applications. Raising $500k in capital.

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Ten startups ideas have now been selected out of 300 applicants.

All start-ups move to Boulder on May 15 and the program starts May 21 for 3 months. There will be 3 evening sessions each week that’ll give the teams access to 40 mentors for personal meetings and panel discussions. They’ll also have extensive meetings and access to the four founders of TechStars – notable VC Brad Feld, David Cohen, Jared Polis (founder of BlueMountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown.

Information is vague at this point on the selected start-ups, but two of them are Socialthing! and Intense Debate. Socialthing! is going to be doing something in the social networking space and Intense Debate has something to do with real-time debating online.

YCombinator’s model is similar – they give $5,000 plus another $5,000 per founder and take 2-10% of the start-ups’ equity. The model has worked – one of their investments, Reddit, went on to be acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.

Of the selected teams, founder ages range from 20-36 with median age at 25. Seven of the teams are B2C (social learning, social networking, social media, mobile, social media sharing, alerting/messaging, local/community) and the other three are B2B (SMB/new media, infrastructure / VOIP response, enterprise social networking). One team has a partner coming from Sweden, while the other teams are all from USA (NYC, Philadelphia, St. Louis, South Carolina, Denver, Seattle, Jacksonville, LA).

Of the applicants, 80% were between 20-30 years old – youngest was 14 and oldest was 62. Of the ideas, 75% were B2C, 20% B2B, and 5% “public good”.

Editor’s Note: This post by Steve Poland, co-founder of WeBothLike.

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For those of you unfamiliar with Y Combinator, it’s the seed financing fund guided by Paul Graham’s philosophies that helps young startups launch through mentoring and investing a base $5,000 plus $5,000 per founder. In exchange they take a 1-10% stake in the company. The teams are usually composed of young college grads with some programming skill. It’s not not a program meant for industry veterans. Some have criticized the program for taking too much ownership for such a small investment. Some readers have also called shenanigans on the operation. Here are some of the companies we’ve covered before. Kiko, Reddit, and Loopt are some notable Y Combinator companies. Exits, so far, have been through acquisition. Kiko died, and was then acquired by Elliot Noss. Conde Nast bought Reddit.

Some other programs such as TechStars have adopted the model. TechStars is another well backed program based in Boulder, Colorado also offering experienced mentors and cash to aspiring startups. While not the same ground floor financing as Y Combinator or TechStars, the venerable VC firm Charles River Ventures also adopted a smaller financing program (up to $250K debt) called Quick Start.

Here are the details for applying. Aspiring web entrepreneurs should also check out the Startup School coming to Palo Alto in March. With some work your company may be ready in time to present at TechCrunch 20.

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They are taking applications now, out of which ten winners will be selected. The thirty of so winning entrepreneurs (TechStars anticipates an average of three founders per idea) will travel to Colorado on May 21, 2007, and spend the summer in Boulder building out their ideas. TechStars will also give each founding group $15,000 in seed funding, and help them locating housing at the nearly University of Colorado, Boulder. TechStars will take 5% of the equity in each startup.

This is comparable to YCombinator’s model, where they give $6,000 per founder and take 6-8% of the startups equity. And the model has worked so far, with a number of promising startups launching, and YCombinator-funded Reddit being acquired by Condé Nast last Halloween.

TechStars is solidly backed, with investments from David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis (founder of Blue Mountain and ProFlowers) and David Brown. There’s a long list of mentors as well who’ve promised to help guide startups over the summer.

We are seeing a dramatic shift as (some) investors are lurching away from providing big capital to over funded web startups to these structured, mentor-driven angel investments. YCombinator and TechStars fill a definite niche, as does Charles River Ventures recent foray into small (and quick) investments as well.

I’m definitely going to take at least one trip to TechStars this summer and do some interviews and meet this new crop of startups. TechStars will repeat the program each summer.

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