Dave Taylor pinged me today to tell me about a fun event he’s organizing called BrainJam. Here’s the info he sent over:
Connect with the brightest folk in Colorado @ BrainJam!
Early in 2007 I hosted an event that we informally called BrainJam and was really delighted at how it worked out. We had about 30 people attend this informal “unconference” and while I admit that we kinda made it up as we went along, it worked out really well: everyone who attended got five minutes in front of the room.
Some people talked about their new startups or their idea for a cool startup, some people tried to hire developers or other people to staff up their companies, some just talked about relatively random stuff that was of interest to them and one or two talked about their skillset and asked to be hired.
Most importantly, it was egalitarian. Everyone got five minutes and everyone listened, so we all had a good time and there was a LOT of networking going on, especially over the pizza boxes.
Last year we had the event at Mobius (thanks Brad!) but this year we’ve booked a larger, more posh venue at Rally Software Development in Boulder. It’s going to be awesome!
Socialthing is a TechStars company which has not launched publicly yet. The company plans to extend their current private beta to a wider audience next week at SXSW. They showed off their integrated lifestream which aggregates the social activity of all your friends into a single spot and also lets you push out content to those social sites. This plays in the same space as Plaxo Pulse and the recently launched FriendFeed service.
We’ll cover SocialThing in more detail once they launch. For now, you can read about them some elsewhere, like here and here.
Mercifully this wraps up my coverage of VCIR today - I may do a recap post soon. There are a couple of companies at the end that I didn’t get a chance to see (networking, you know how it is), but at least I’m not the only one who petered out.
The Format Dynamics presentation was interesting. As Brad Feld once put it - They solve the “prints like shit” problem. The Denver-based company enables nice-looking printing of online content. If you’ve ever tried printing a document from Firefox or Explorer, you’ve seen super duper ugly crap at its very best. By partnering with large publishers, Format Dynamics should be able to create a premium print ad network. They’ve already been working on this and have coined the term “printerstitial” (cute) for this sort of ad. They also allow for quick printing of brochure related to an ad that you are viewing on the net. The company has raised 4.4M in angel investment and is currently seeking a larger institutional round. For large publishers, this is an easy way to get some incremental revenue and provide an enhanced service to their customers. Something about it gnaws at me though - do people really still print anyway? And how do you know how much they do print? And if they do print, do they just get paper-based ad impressions that we’ve all been trained to ignore?
I missed the Yieldex presentation (but heard lots of clapping next door), so I’ll just let you check out their (sparse) web site. Yieldex is listed as a San Mateo, California based company with offices in Boulder. They help optimize the allocation of online ad inventory. According to their web site, “Every ad supported site, large or small, leaves money on the table, month after month after month. Yieldex provides technology that helps you identify it, quantify it, and recover it.” I wanted to include their logo here, but I couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.
If you don’t give a crap about VCIR, at least you only have to deal with these posts all in one day. At least you’re not me, currently sitting through a pitch on semi-conductors in a language that I don’t recognize at all.
I just noticed that Todd Vernon is also live-blogging VCIR, and making fun of me at the same time.
Here are Todd’s thoughts on some presenting companies from this morning: HiveLive, Control4*, Filtrbox, WBS Connect*, and Zayo Group*. The companies with asterisks are ones that I did not cover - there are two tracks here so I’m glad Todd is getting to see and cover some different stuff.
I’ll be sure to post an embarrassing photo of Todd here later in the day.
HiveLive (covered previously, but significantly evolved since then) announced 5.6M in new funding from GroTech Capital and existing investors today. It was fun to watch John Kembel start off his pitch today with “Well, some stuff has changed since two months ago when we started preparing for VCIR, and now we’re done (fund raising)!” Previously, the company had raised 2.2M from angel investors.
HiveLive has evolved significantly into an enterprise social networking platform. Using HiveLive, enterprise customers can engage their customers using social tools more directly than with traditional point solutions such as Wikis, blogs, or forums. Hivelive says that the key differentiator in this emerging but already crowded market is their flexibility. John eloquently explained that bolting a wiki onto a social network and then onto a forum is not a scalable solution that larger brands will find success using. With HiveLive, customers can build highly customized systems with configurability, not code. I think it’s neat that end users can even add their own components (given appropriate permissions), thereby literally allowing the customers to build the community components themselves. That’s ultimate power to your natural community.
Hivelive has gotten into some interesting distribution opportunities. For example, Rally Software has implemented HiveLive in their new Rally Community Manager, which the company distributes through a SalesForce integration with its products.
Congrats to HiveLive for all the great progress and the funding.
It’s nice to see some great Utah companies presenting this year at VCIR. I just watched Daz Productions show off Daz3d, which “strives to bring 3D art directly to the masses by delivering the highest quality digital 3D content and software at the most affordable prices.” It does so with some pretty bad-ass 3d modeling software and combining it with a powerful and active community. In the growing virtual worlds market, stuff like this has some great opportunity.
Utah-based Control4 also just presented their solution for “home automation for real people.” I didn’t see the presentation myself, but I know that this is one of the hot companies out of Utah right now. This (long) Wired video featuring Control4 might give you a good idea of what this is all about.
Boulder-based Filtrbox, a TechStars company which just had a coming out party of sorts here today at VCIR, is nearing launch of their content monitoring service. I’ve been using the early product since early on at TechStars and getting critical content updates each morning in my inbox. I’ve sort of come to depend on it, and it saves me a bleary-eyed morning trip to my RSS reader to check my most critical sources. Instead of looking at it source by source, Filtrbox allows me to simply get my most important daily dose of information with no effort. Think of it as sophisticated persistent search, paired down, and delivering only the most relevant content. It’s one level up in sophistication from a simple keyword monitoring tool like Google alerts.
Filtrbox scours both mainstream and new media sites. It’s just as capable of finding an article in the Wall Street Journal or on the smallest of blogs. Because of some neat quick-start technology, users can easily configure filters which define the topics of interest, and Filtrbox uses a proprietary ranking system known as FiltrRank to try to find only the most relevant content. You help influence the FiltRank by providing feedback (both implicit and explicit) on the articles that the system finds. Additionally, filter definitions can then be easily shared with your co-workers or other interested partners.
According to the Filtrbox web site, “The company’s mission is to significantly ease the pain and reduce the complexity of tracking mainstream news, blogs and other online content sources for new mentions of your company, your competitors, your industry or even your friends by providing an easy-to-use, yet sophisticated productivity tool.”
Filtrbox has many delivery options beyond simple email and RSS. It also includes a “dashboard” (seen below) that helps you spot trends, manage, and drill down into the articles that the system presents.
Today, Filtrbox announced the completion of seed funding from several investors including FlyWheel Ventures and True Ventures, as well as some angel investors. Disclosure: I am also an investor in Filtrbox, both via TechStars and Colorado Startups, LLC.
While Filtrbox is a subscription based service, the VCIR panel asked about the future product roadmap relating to the metadata which Filtrbox collects. Certainly a long term business model for Filtrbox could be around mining and monetizing the metadata, but while Ari acknowledged this potential path he responded by saying that today they’re simply focused on delivering a great tool to their users.
Filtrbox is still in private beta, but plans to widen their beta in the coming weeks. The CEO and founder, Ari Newman, has extended an invitation to 25 Colorado Startups readers to try the service very soon. If you’d like an invitation to the upcoming open beta in a few weeks, just drop me a note and I’ll pass it along to Ari.
Superior based Newmerix has raised over $21M thus far for their automated lifecycle management solutions for Oracle, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Newmerix covers the complete lifecycle of change to these mission-critical applications, including planning, impact analysis, automated software quality, change release and management, workflow, versioning, and auditing. If a company has chosen a large-scale ERP app then they’ve likely invested millions in that solution. Newmerix offers Automate!Change™, Automate!Test™, and Automate!Control™ for each platform, which exist to make these platforms more manageable and effective overall.
Boulder-based ProStor Systems is a “tape replacement” removable storage provider which has raised over $20M to date. ProStor preserves the best characteristics of tape systems while adding the best characteristics of disk based systems. The company is able to offer large capacity removable media systems in an IT-friendly and familiar removable media model. The RDX technology which is the core of the ProStor IP is licensed to third party OEM customers (such as Dell) who build and market the devices. I don’t know crap about storage solutions, but in the low margin hardware business this certainly seems to be the sensible business model. Luckily, I was sitting next to storage veteran John Ives, who explained to me that the company seems to have made strong progress on their OEM relationships for RFX. Thanks John for making it clear that I have the tiniest of clue here.
I won’t quite be live-blogging it but I hope to put out 3 or 4 posts from here today. So far, the wifi at the new venue (Park Hyatt, Beaver Creek) is working well, unlike last year. So this should give me a chance to cover some of VCIR.
VCIR is a great annual event that draws venture capitalists from not just the Rocky Mountain Region, but from all over the country. It’s the largest and oldest capital conference in the Rocky Mountain region, and showcases the region’s most promising emerging growth companies for an audience of over 200 venture investors, CEOs, entrepreneurs and service professionals.
Brad Feld of Foundry Group kicked us off this morning. Appearing in his usual jeans-based attire, Brad welcomed everyone and led an interesting discussion with investors from outside the Rocky Mountain region. They talked at length about what sorts of opportunities they’re considering, how they look at and play in regional deals, and the sorts of initiatives and technologies that are emerging in our region and beyond.
I recently received the list of presenting companies at the Dealmaker Media Under the Radar conference being held at Microsoft’s Mountain View campus on March 20th. Colorado companies presenting there include:
David Cohen
