A Day at TechStars

On Friday I spent the day in Boulder, Colorado on my first day as a TechStars Mentor. I had the chance to meet with some great Boulder-based startups to talk shop, brainstorm product strategy, and help them think big about their businesses.

In the evening, we hosted a Facebook Developer Garage Boulder, and had a chance to hear about some great Facebook Platform and Connect applications being built in and around the Boulder/Denver community.

The most interesting thing I took from this first session in Boulder is that the startup energy there is electric. The entreprenuers are passionate, and the community is overwhelmingly collaborative and supportive of each other.

Here’s a look at a few of the startups I had a chance to meet with on Friday. For the most part, when mentoring startups, you talk about the future. Here you will find a quick overview of the present. I’ll leave the future to be seen in each of their products.

Suffice to say, there are some really cool things going on in Boulder:

Lussumo is a free, open source, platform for doing cool things. Right now, they’re shipping an awesome discussion forum application called Vanilla, which over a million users love. Expect big things in the forum space from Lussumo in the future.

http://lussumo.com

The Next Big Sound is pushing the music envelope on the internet. Today they’re a platform for discovery of unsigned bands. Tomorrow they’re looking to change the way music business is done. With all of the innovation needed in how artists and management interact with the internet, these guys are thinking about things in exactly the right ways.

http://thenextbigsound.com

Everlater seeks to make telling travel stories fun and easy. In traveling around the world, and looking around the web, they realized that putting together a simple travel story is actually quite hard. If you are a traveler who also loves to share and create, keep an eye on Everlater.

http://everlater.com

Mailana is frustrated with how hard it is to make meaning out of the increasingly massive amount of user generated content inside the email stream. They’ve been expermimenting with new ways to visualize email inside the firewall, and have released some of these tools for consumers on top of Twitter. With all of us fighting our inboxes every day, lets hope Pete and the team at Mailana bring some innovation to the craziness of email.

http://mailana.com

EventVue seeks to connect you to the people who matter most every time you attend your favorite conferences. With recent Facebook Connect integration and a slew of upcoming features, attending conferences will never be the same. If you run a conference series, or are looking to get one off the ground, I highly recommend you take a look at the work this team is doing. They’re making connecting, in person, easier for all of us.

http://eventvue.com

TimZon makes communicating concepts and ideas to remote teams easy with video, white boarding, and a slough of asynchronous private video communications tools. What they are doing is really cool, and has a shot at helping people communicate an be productive with video in a way that no one else has tried.

http://timzon.com

Lijit gives blog publishers powerful tools for search by extending the idea of search to include the social network surrounding the publisher. The social graph is a powerful thing, when combined with search and put into the hands of publishers.

http://lijit.com

Ignighter takes a more social approach to dating. Rather than signing up for the site by yourself, you invite your friends to become a “dating group.” Then, you can find other dating groups to go out with on a group date, increasing your odds for finding a compatible mate in the social graph. These guys are adding more features soon which will help get more people involved and hope to create a movement around group dating. I think they’ve got a shot. If you’re single, stay tuned, this could be really cool.

http://ignighter.com