There are several companies at Techstars that are nearing an early launch. One of them is MadKast, which you might have noticed on my blog for the last week or so. It’s the little green icon next to the end of the title of each post. MadKast makes it easy for people who are reading a blog post to quickly share it with their friends. It supports both email and MMS sharing, as well as all the popular social bookmarking sites. They also plan to support sharing via instant messengers soon. MMS is neat because the recipient actually gets the full blog post on their mobile phone. MadKast also plans to deliver a suite of analytics that help publishers understand reader engagement, sharing statistics, and more.
I like that MadKast saves every contact that I share content with, so that next time I want to share something, I don’t have to re-enter the recipients information. I can just tag an existing contact or two, and click share. It’s even nicer that this works across any MadKast enabled blog, not just the one where I initially created the contact.
Johann, Josh, Doug, and Tony are all from the Los Angeles area and are the founders behind MadKast. They’ve spent the last eight weeks or so here in Boulder building MadKast and falling in love with the place. Now MadKast has decided to stay here in Boulder after the summer, officially making MadKast a Colorado startup. Woot!
Try out MadKast for your blog, and let the guys know what you think. They’re on about 35 blogs so far and it’s still in beta, but they’ve made this really easy to do – it’s a single snippet of javascript that goes right before your </HEAD> tag. If you use Blogger or TypePad, they’ve made it even easier with auto-installers. Either way, it should take you about 30 seconds.
Let the MadKast guys know what you think. There’s a feedback button right inside the widget itself and contact information on their web site. They’ve been great at taking feedback all summer and iterating quickly.
