On the crowdsourcing bandwagon?  We are, and want to share some news with you: Boulder based Crowdsortium, a crowdsourcing industry trade group, is running a contest to give away a booth at CrowdConf 2011, the first and leading conference on crowdsourcing.

Crowdsortium includes a growing list of companies and organizations, many with Boulder ties (Trada, Kapost, Napkin Labs, boulder.me, and Victors & Spoils, to name a few).  In true crowdsourcing spirit, members are sharing ideas, best practices, and more, just as their own crowdsourcing communities do.  IP protection, incentive systems, and the logistics of distributed work forces are among the topics discussed.

The list of speakers for CrowdConf 2011 was sourced from an impressive list of companies, including Amazon Mechanical Turk, Kickstarter, Quora, and Threadless.  The event will be taking place November 1-2, 2011 in San Francisco.  You can purchase tickets here, but I’d recommend reading on before you spend your investors’ hard earned money.

If you meet these qualifications, you’re eligible to enter the Crowdsortium booth giveaway:

• You’re a Crowdsortium member.  Apply to be a member if you’re not already one – it’s free, but may not be forever.
• Your company/organization is three years old or younger.
• You’ve received at least one round of funding.

To enter, write a short blog post (200-400 words) describing your company and why you should be considered the most up-and-coming crowdsourcing company in the universe.  Rev up your social media machine, because the entries with the most tweets and retweets (important: tweets must include @crowdsortium) by 11am MST on September 23 will be the entries judged by Crowdsortium and CrowdFlower.  The winner will receive a free Crowdsortium Sponsored Exhibitor Booth at CrowdConf 2011; the runner-up will receive two free tickets to the event.  Peep the CrowdConf 2011 Booth Contest press release for all the details and get your social media on.

Photos: Andrew Hyde

Another TechStars Boulder Demo Day, another home run.  I had high expectations following last year’s event, but 2011′s class did not disappoint yesterday.

The Boulder Theater had plenty of Demo Day energy from the start, with TechStars alumni manning a variety of posts, investors making their rounds on the first floor, and other Boulder community members heading to their seats on the balcony.

After the event kicked off with an NBA playoff-like introduction of the 12 teams,  it was straight to the action, listed here in super-condensed form:

SimpleEnergy lets utility companies engage their customers with information and game mechanics to help them save energy.  Think Mint for energy consumption.

FlixMaster lets people create videos that allow viewers to choose what happens next and interact in other ways.  Branching-path video: Choose Your Own Adventure in multi-media form.

Creative Brain Studios gives developers the ability to create a game published across a myriad of phone, tablet, and computer platforms at once, letting them focus on creativity instead of headaches.

TruantToday immediately notifies parents by text and e-mail when a student skips class, helping the schools that use it to recover thousands in otherwise lost funding.

Meal Ticket lets food service distributors partner with restaurants to create coupons and other promotions, creating more demand from their customers’ customers.

Mocavo is a free search engine specific to genealogy, allowing users to research their family tree and receive automated updates as new information is discovered.

After the 15 minute break, TechStars Co-founder/Congressman Jared Polis shared a few words, followed by Co-founder David Cohen’s introduction to a trailer for the upcoming Bloomberg Television documentary series about TechStars NYC 2011, premiering September 13th. Then it was back to the presentations:

GoSpotCheck connects brands with a crowdsourced workforce to check on their products’ in-store merchandising.  Mechanical Turk meets the secret shopper.

ReportGrid gives developers an API to add analytics and reporting features into their web applications without having to code them from scratch.

InboxFever turns e-mail accounts into mini-applications of their own, returning stock quotes, driving directions, and other information based on e-mail subject lines and content.

SocialEngine offers message-by-message advice to help businesses manage their social media communications by highlighting negative comments, influential people, and more.

Flextrip lets online travel companies market tours and activities in a vertical marketplace.  It’s Kayak extended beyond travel and accomodations into “what to do when you get there”.

FullContact‘s API takes a chunk of partial contact information, pieces it together with other data, and returns complete, updated contact records.

The rounds being raised ranged from $500k up to $1.5M, many of which had significant commitments coming into the event.  This marks an increase compared to the fund raising efforts of the previous class, which ranged from $250k up to $1M this time last year (The sign of a stronger class or an entrepreneur-friendly fund raising bubble?  Take a peek at the TechStars Results Page, then come back and discuss).

Congratulations to TechStars and this summer’s graduating class – well done.  Thank you for involving the community as you always have, and we’ll see you at Demo Day 2012!

Community members: if you’ve got ideas on how TechStars can do it even better next year, get the conversation started in the comments y’all.

Sitting around recently with Rob Johnson of Gnip, Tim Falls of SendGrid and Vikas Reddy for Occipital, we were talking about startup culture.

My first job out of college (unless you count my temp job removing staples all day for several months) was at Denver’s then largest public relations firm. I knew I wanted to work there the day I interviewed for my internship because it was massage day. A masseuse came in once a month and gave free massages to every staff member. What I didn’t know is that so often people were so under the gun that they didn’t have time to actually get the massage.

Perks are what companies hold out when they describe their culture be it free massages or half-day Fridays (we had those too). But perks do not make a culture. Culture isn’t that Trada pays for my gym membership to One Boulder. Culture is that no one at Trada cares if I leave for more than an hour to take a gym class because they know I’m a grown up and trust me to get my job done.

As my boss Bill Quinn said, “All I’ll have to do is treat you like a grown up to win your respect.” A former agency man himself he understand that agencies are full of micromanagers and people who tended to sweat every single small thing. That was the culture.

One of the trademarks of my first company was that they had a program where you could pay money to wear jeans on Monday to Thursday in our business casual environment for $5 a day. Each quarter the company would donate the proceeds to a charity that we would choose as a staff. Which sounds heartwarming until you think about it.

As Rob said, “So wait…they made a policy they felt mattered but told employees they could pay to break it and then financially benefited by getting tax credit for donating to charity by charging you a ‘jean tax’?”

Well, when you put it like that, yes.

Culture is letting employees wear what makes them feel comfortable and trusting them to know what’s appropriate depending on what they’re doing and who they’re meeting with.

I’m grateful for the years I worked at the agency. My co-workers were incredibly sharp, the clients were fun and my boss Brandy Radey was (and is) an incredible mentor. But I’m glad that I work at a Boulder startup that doesn’t charge me a “jean tax.” Because that’s what constitutes a culture.

If you’re interesting in working at a place with a “No Jeans Tax”, Trada, SendGrid, Gnip and Occipital and pretty much every startup in Boulder is hiring like crazy. Apply at Trada for a dev/engineer position, and free coffee is on us at Atlas Purveyors.

Turning a hobby into a business is hard work. Just ask Rachel Ryle, co-founder of Tweety Got Back. I did exactly that a couple of weeks ago and learned that she and co-founder Heather Capri aren’t afraid of hard work, as long as they can make some time for fun (and plenty of puns) along the way.

Calling Tweety Got Back a hobby may be a bit of sandbagging on Rachel’s part. After all, she and Heather had some success creating its predecessor My Space or Yours to offer free layouts and themes for MySpace users a few years ago.  They rode a whirlwind of referral marketing and started generating real ad revenue before MySpace faded away.

With the idea of what could have been fresh in their minds and Sir Mix-a-Lot on the brain, they launched Tweety Got Back to offer a similar product for Twitter users.  It’s dead simple to use: 1) sign in with your Twitter credentials, 2) choose a theme, and 3) click “apply”.

I fly the Red Sox colors with a Tweety Got Back theme.

In some ways, trying to turn Tweety Got Back into a full time business for Rachel and Heather is like trying to get lightning to strike twice, but they’re okay with that.  Rather than stand around with their fingers crossed, the two are using what they’ve learned from My Space or Yours to get to high ground, prop up their lightning rods, and get their rain dance on.  It seems to be working.

Tweety Got Back has gotten love from TechCrunch, PCWorld, Sir Mix-a-Lot himself (@therealmix), and a recent blog post from the Twitter mothership.  Not too shabby, but there’s still work to be done to get to the level they had with My Space or Yours.

Sitting with Rachel in Atlas Purveyors, I asked what replicating their past success would look like in the context of Tweety Got Back.  I got a tongue-in-cheek but telling answer: “I’d be buying Atlas and turning it into a dance club.”  A promising future awaits if they can build up their user base a bit.

Other examples of Tweety Got Back’s tongue-in-cheek awesomeness:

• Tweety Gives Back: every now and again Rachel and Heather will bake a few snacks and drop them off at other local startups.
• Tweety Got Backup Dancers: Rachel and Heather helped raise a bunch of money for local charities during Cause To Rock by joining the bands as backup dancers for extra donations.  Rachel: “I dance for money.”

Yes, they love a pun (Rachel has no shortage of these things), but are serious about giving back to the Boulder community, where they both grew up in the same neighborhood.  ”So many people in the community influence what we do and why we do it,” Rachel says.

It only seems fair that we give back too, so lets help Rachel and Heather build up their user base.  If you’re not a Tweety Got Back user already, go find a theme you like and apply it now: rep your favorite sports team, check out backgrounds from their 12 Featured Artists (6 of whom are Boulder’s own), or pick from 900+ other themes.  You might even have some fun while you’re doing it.

As far as hobbies go, Tweety Got Back is a pretty good one.  I, for one, would like to see it grow blossom into a full time business.  Maybe someday I’ll even hear “I like big butts and I cannot lie…” echoing late at night on Pearl after Rachel’s had a chance to open her dance club.

What happens to TechStars companies when Demo Day is over, the investors have left town, and the program has gone into hibernation for the winter?  A few weeks ago I got together with Michael Joseph, founder of Vacation Rental Partner, a TechStars Boulder ’10 company to find out what they’ve been up to.

Michael established Vacation Rental Partner as a “scratch your own itch” company to help make vacation rental management easier.  He was already managing several Lake Tahoe rentals, including his own, through a property management company he had started.  Some time later, he moved to San Francisco, expanded the team to three, and built out 95% of a web application, which was impressive enough to get Vacation Rental Partner into TechStars.

Soon after the team had relocated to Boulder and the program got underway, Michael knew that the 95% the team had already built was off the mark.  ”For a first time tech entrepreneur,” he notes, “TechStars helped me think about getting something out there and getting feedback.”  Michael credits TechStars for instilling a truly entrepreneurial mindset in him.

While the original app was focused on managing logistics, users let the team know that increasing bookings should be the top priority.  The team moved quickly and ended up starting over twice to be sure that the product would be simpler and more effective in marketing users’ properties, including two key features:

• Rental property listings get pushed to 20 partner organizations
• Online bookings which allow renters to book properties just as they would a hotel room

How rental property owners have been living without an online booking system is beyond me.  Couple that with the fact that listing properties is free and you can see why Vacation Rental Partner provides tremendous value to property owners.

Michael strikes me as a soft spoken, matter-of-fact type of person.  When we started talking about what keeps him up at night now that TechStars is over, I got a very straightforward response: Vacation Rental Partner is at a point when it’s time to find out whether this early stage product can mature into a scalable business.  No spin, no bullshit, just recognition that there is still plenty of hard work to do.  I love that in a founder.

What can you do to help Vacation Rental Partners out?  If you or anybody you know could use more bookings, get the vacation rental property listed right away.  If you’re a traveller looking for a vacation rental, sign up for great deals on last minute rentals.

Life is a lot less glamourous for Michael now that the TechStars buzz is behind him, but somehow I think that it suits him just fine.  I checked in with him a couple of days ago, and he’s focused on building the inventory of vacation rental listings.  With that said, it’s time for me to go; I’ll be helping my friend list her Boulder vacation rental into the Vacation Rental Partner system.

Not too long ago I had a chance to sit down with Chad McGimpsey and Joel Wishkovsky to talk about their move to Boulder, co-founding Card Gnome, and what’s keeping them up at night these days.

We kicked back on their apartment patio, just off  CU’s campus, to enjoy a bit of sunshine and to talk startups.  Not a bad way for us all to take an afternoon work break.

I first connected with Joel a little over a year ago when he and Chad had just moved to the area. Chad summed up the thought process with “Every time I got on a flight, I’d think ‘If this plane goes down, would I be happy with my life?’”  They had both left GE and the corporate world behind them, and Boulder had won out over Silicon Valley, Austin, New York, and Boston.

At the time, they were working on a marketplace to let consumers commission talent to create unique gifts – if you wanted a song written to impress a girl, for instance, Nudgems would have been the place.  In the time since, they’ve shifted focus to personalized greeting cards, changed the name to Card Gnome, expanded the team, and started generating revenue.  The Gnome has been busy.

Card Gnome is a great example of a startup taking a new approach to an old standard.  Like their established competitors in the $11 billion industry, Card Gnome prints cards.  You know, on paper.  The difference is, they make the hardest parts of sending and creating a card a lot easier for everybody involved.

As a customer, there’s the usual convenience of being able to shop online in your underwear or at work (in my home office, it’s occasionally “and”, not “or”) plus the added bonus of writing your own message inside.  Never again will you need to suffer through scanning the front of hundreds of cards in the supermarket to find the one or two that might work for you, only to reveal the cheesiest of poems lying in ambush.  With Card Gnome, you can add a note to the original message or start with a clean slate.  Here are a couple of other cool features:

• You won’t have to root around in your junk drawer looking for a stamp, since they’ll mail it for you at no extra charge.
• My favorite: the ability to schedule your cards in advance.

Card Gnome is so easy that even a forgetful guy like me can manage to look thoughtful.

Maybe more importantly, though, is that Card Gnome makes life better for artists.  In an industry with two companies that dominate 85% of the market, artists have almost no control over the use of their work.  Joel and Chad are artist friendly, and cite the artists as the happiest stakeholders in the bunch.  Artist Shops showcase their work, and royalties that are considerably higher than industry standards don’t hurt either.  The fact that Card Gnome’s selection has been doubling in size every month since November is a reflection of the company’s strong relationship with artists, with 2,000 cards to choose from.

Distribution is their next major challenge.  We didn’t get into details, but Joel told me that they know the site converts traffic into customers at a predictable rate.  They’re looking for volume, and are working on creating partnerships to help get it done.  ”We came from the GE world, were you push it out and automatically have a million users.” Joel said.  These days the team is hustling to get users in the Card Gnome world.

Chad and Joel have applied for TechStars Boulder, and should know whether they’ve gotten in soon.  When I mentioned that I thought there’s a void in resources for promising companies that don’t make the TechStars cut, Joel called bullshit.  They were denied last year, but they didn’t miss a beat.  They took a look at the list of mentors and started sending e-mails.  ”We got access to 9 out of 10 of them,” Joel recalls.  An example of why I love this team.

So what can you do to help these guys out?  Buy some cards, of course.  If you need an excuse, Card Gnome has cards for Passover, Easter, and Mother’s Day, which are all on the horizon.  If you’re still not convinced, use the coupon code “WeLoveBoulderMe” to save 20% on any order before December 31st.  On the flip side, artists interested in earning a royalty on every card sold without giving up their copyright should apply for a shop.

Go on, start shopping.  What are you waiting for?