Today TechStars held its third Demo Day, offering a dozen of its startups the chance to display their wares in front of a throng of investors and the media. TechStars is a seed stage investment fund similar to Y Combinator and DreamIt Ventures that gives startups a modest amount of cash (around $5,000 for each founder) and a three month mentorship in exchange for a 5% equity stake in the company. Every year TechStars chooses ten companies from hundreds of applicants to take part in the program. Some of these companies have presented before at last month’s Demo Day in Colorado or in last year’s presentation.
Included in the days festivities were announcements that two TechStars companies have been acquired: madKast (by ShareThis) and IntenseDebate (by Automattic, the maker of WordPress). After AOL’s purchase of SocialThing! in August, that brings the acquisition total from TechStars’ first class to three (of ten graduates). Not too shabby.
See below for profiles on all the presenting companies. → Read More
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. → Read More
The first TechStars company to launch, MadKast has raised a $300,000 series A round of financing from EONBusiness Venture Capital and several Angel investors in California and Colorado. Another TechStars company, EventVue, closed their own round of funding last week. 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. → Read More
Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage – ten of them – to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring. 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 → Read More
The first batch of Techstars (a Y Combinator like incubator) startups are launching. MadKast is the first out the door. 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. With the widget, you can easily let visitors share your entire blog posts via email, mobile MMS, or through any of the social bookmarking services. The widget also maintains a list of emails and phone numbers you’ve contacted in the past to make sending new links to friends really easy. AddThis (which we use) has a similar widget, but focuses on an exhaustive list of social bookmarking services. MadKast’s widget also offers an analytics package that tracks which posts are shared most often and what other blogs your readers are visit. They plan on monetizing through splitting revenue with bloggers from contextual advertising sent along with the shared post or links. Charging for more complex analytics tools is another option. MadKast was started by Doug Ludlow, Johann Moonsinghe, Tony Restuccia, and Josh Larson, the team originally behind Zemble.com, a mass text messaging service. They brainstormed the idea for MadKast while in Colorado applying for TechStars. TechStars is an early stage startup program that provides seed financing and mentorship in exchange for 5% in equity. → Read More
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