This Wednesday, August 25th from 6pm to 9pm, Quickleft will be hosting a ruby-centric hack fest at their offices with a few other of Boulder’s dev shops. Helping out are…

• Pivotal Labs
• Viget
• Slice of Lime
• Imulus
• GB Studios

The general theme is test driven development (TDD). For a full list of potential topics and all other details, see the announcement. Come hungry!

The address:
1919 14th Street
Suite 714
Boulder, CO 80302

[Disclosure: I work at Quickleft.]

Photo by Andrew Hyde

It turns out that my Cheap Seat for yesterday’s TechStars Demo Day was more expensive than the investors’ seats (free), but I’d happily make another donation to the Entrepreneurs’ Foundation of Colorado for a spot next year.

Just about every seat reserved in the balcony of the Boulder Theater for the community at large was filled – more people were there yesterday than last year, if memory serves.   It looks like the word is getting out that this is a great event to attend.  Deservedly so.

The entire first floor was reserved for investors, with many from out of town already in attendance at Boulder’s second Open Angel Forum the previous night.  Laptops and smartphones were everywhere to be seen.  A busy couple of days in Boulder for the investor community.

TechStars co-founders David Cohen, Congressman Jared Polis, and Brad Feld kicked things off with a few updates on TechStars’ alumni, the TechStars Global Affiliate program (expect 5-10 more Global Affiliates to pop up in the next year or so) and the Startup Visa Movement, among other things.  The co-founders continue to have their hands full with developing the startup ecosystem here and abroad.

Once the presentations got going, it was slide deck after slide deck of polished pitches (in this order):

ScriptPad lets doctors write prescriptions safer and easier than traditional handwritten notes, saving lives and saving money.  ScriptPad offers a freemium app to doctors and receives a per prescription fee from pharmacies.

Omniar wants to make the real world clickable, Terminator style.  Find information attached to an object by taking a picture of it with a smartphone, allowing Omniar’s mobile app or apps developed on Omniar’s API to visually recognize it and retrieve any data attached.

StatsMix creates custom dashboards to help businesses aggregate, visualize, and draw insights from a variety of metrics.  Drag-and-drop what you want from Google Analytics, WordPress, MailChimp, and more into a single place.  StatsMix even helps analyze your data for you.

RoundPegg helps companies hire for cultural fit, evaluating job candidates on a variety of traits, comparing them to current employees, and measuring for an overall match.  RoundPegg is built on a process developed by Chief Psychologist Dr. Natalie Baumgartner, putting “The Doc in a box”.

RentMonitor aims to make being a landlord easy by streamlining their Circle of Pain – marketing, tenant screening, rent collection, and property maintenance – into a Circle of Profit, especially for owners of multiple rentals.  RentMonitor also helps come tax time.

GearBox has developed a robotic ball controlled by a smartphone as it rolls across the floor, entering the new “smart toy” market.  GearBox plans to sell the ball and allow developers to create a myriad of games and other apps on its API.

Vacation Rental Partner takes the work out of renting out a second home.  Vacation Rental Partner goes beyond marketing, allowing renters to book your property as easily as they would a hotel room, with online payment processing, booking management, and more.

BlipSnips lets you share a moment of time.  Rather than sending a link to a video with a note “the clip I want you to see starts at 10:24″, BlipSnips lets you tag a particular clip from a longer video and share it with others.

Spot Influence find key influencers across the web based on your keyword search.  Spot Influence grabs data from a variety of sources to calculate the Reach, Relevance, and Impact of individuals, resulting in their overall Influence score for a particular keyword.

ADstruc has created a marketplace for outdoor advertising to make selecting and bidding on billboards as easy as PPC.  ADstruc allows advertisers to view available locations on Google Maps, retrieve valuable data, see their own ads superimposed on a street view of the billboard, and to bid accordingly.

Kapost is a content marketplace connecting writers with publishers.  Kapost lets publishers find strong writing, facilitate payments, manage rights, and plug that content into a variety of popular content management systems.

One of the first things that jumped out at me was that many of the “asks” were for more money this year than last (again, if memory serves).  Four of this year’s 11 teams were raising $500k or more, while none were in 2009.  What didn’t change from last year, however, was the quality of the pitches.

The presentations were strong across the board, with each team refining and rehearsing throughout the TechStars program this summer – an entire summer’s worth of blood, sweat, and tears, distilled into 5 minutes on stage (if you haven’t seen their level of commitment in The Founders yet, you should).  For anybody wanting to learn how a pitch is done, TechStars Demo Day is a great classroom.  I’ll be there again in 2011.

Congratulations to all the TechStars Boulder 2010 teams for surviving the summer – I can’t wait to see what you all do next.  Which of you will be the first to earn a gold shirt for being acquired?

I’ve been having a lot of fun learning about and switching over to Ruby over the last month from PHP. As a part of this process, I’ve started to get a sense for the lay of the land of the Ruby community in Boulder.

Meetups

• Ruby Code & Coffee: A weekly meetup on Wednesdays at 8:30am. According to the Boulder Tech Calendar … “Get together with some other rubyists in the area to write some code, share stories, and swap ideas.”
• Boulder Ruby: Educational talks on Ruby, Rails, or other general programming topics at the Collective Intellect offices. Click the link for more info.

Dev Shops

• dojo4 is a Boulder based dev and design collective. They say it best themselves – “We will send ninjas.”
• Foraker: I haven’t had a chance to meet anyone from the Foraker team yet, but it seems they focus on Ruby/Rails development as one aspect of their full service offering.
• Quick Left is a web engineering firm helping young and established companies alike build and improve their products. (Disclosure: I am employed by Quick Left.)

Conferences

• Mountain.rb Conference is a new single-track event being held this fall around the same time as boco and Startup Week. This should be awesome!

I’m excited to start checking out some of these events and meetups, and will hopefully meet some new Boulder people along the way. Let me know if you have anything to add to the list!

UPDATE: If you’re interested in learning Ruby, make sure to check out the hilarious _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby

Having just gotten home from Ignite Boulder 11, I feel compelled to borrow a line from one of my daughter’s favorite books: “Wow!  That is all I can say.  Wow!’” (Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, if you must know).  Shortly after IB 10, Andrew Hyde, the driving force behind the event’s huge growth, felt that Ignite Boulder had plateaued, despite the fact that it had become the largest Ignite in the world.  After tonight, I feel confident that he has changed his mind.  I sure have.

When Andrew wrote that post, I agreed – it felt like Ignite Boulder was leveling off.  I wrote a lengthly comment, carefully outlining all of the things from prior Ignites that were now missing from the last two and suggesting ways to recreate them.  I never did publish it.  At the end of the day, I just couldn’t write anything that didn’t sound like a “I knew the band before they became popular” kind of a thing.

Tonight’s event wasn’t awesome because it was like the early Ignites (nor was it awesome because the presenters use the word “awesome” so many times), it had an awesomeness (it’s contagious) all its own.

First of all, there’s the change in venue.  Chautauqua and what it offered was amazing.  There was the pre-show barbecue next to the auditorium and the families picnicking out on the grass.  My wife and I chose to sit on the porch of the Dining Hall, which is always a treat.  Throw in a little sunshine, free beer, and the Flatirons as a backdrop, and you’ve already got yourself a winner.  The auditorium itself was beautiful, an all-wood building with giant doors opened to a nice breeze.  When it got darker, a bit of light peaked through the slats in the walls.  I really look forward to TEDxBoulder, if for no other reason than to be in that building again.

The speakers…yes, the speakers – the best bunch from top to bottom that I’ve seen.  Ef Rodriguez warmed things up with his usual charm, and Anna Sawyer immediately followed with the crowd pleasing How to Marry the Rich, a practical guide to marrying up.  My personal favorite Spark of the night was Josh Fraser’s Snakes and Staircases, which taught me that vending machine deaths are a very real risk and that Scottish accents are very persuasive.  The 14th and final slide deck of the evening, Justin Crowe‘s Modulate Your Life: High Fives & Livin’ On A Prayer, had 1,300+ of us high fiving and belting out the Bon Jovi chorus together to end things just so.

Andrew and I were wrong.  Ignite Boulder just keeps getting better, and there’s plenty of room to grow from here.

I had the pleasure of meeting with John and Josh from ADstruc last week. Their company is a Boulder Summer 2010 TechStars team hailing from New York City. We talked about their experience so far in Boulder this summer, what’s been happening at TechStars, and some other general tidbits.

The Team

Both John and Josh are Midwesterners born and raised. John grew up in Michigan and attended college in Maryland. A prolific amateur ping-pong player, he recently won a tournament while back in NYC and will be playing in France sometime this summer. Josh is an Ohioan turned big city guy. He went to undergrad in Ohio and law school in Florida after a stint as a professional drummer. What little free time he has these days is spent prepping for his wedding later this summer.

The Business

ADstruc is an online buying platform in the form of an auction and listing based marketplace with the goal of improving the profitability of buying and selling outdoor advertising. John and Josh recently worked together at a large brand licensing agency and John got involved in outdoor advertising while running his own consulting gig on the side. Outdoor advertising, also known as OOH (out of home) advertising to industry professionals, is a massive market at around $6B annually. In terms of competition, both John and Josh acknowledged that it exists but view it in a very healthy way – as validation of their market and a benchmark to improve upon.

The Moves

We touched on two specific topics during the discussion that relate to their potential for success. They were timing and customer development. After developing ADstruc and speaking with customers for a few months, coupled with the TechStars opportunity, John and Josh realized it was time to quit their jobs and pursue ADstruc full time. By working with customers from the beginning, they were assured that they were building a product that the outdoor advertising industry wanted and would pay for.

On Techstars and Mentors

So far, they have both been blown away by their whirlwind experience at TechStars, especially in terms of the “invaluable mentor feedback” and interaction between teams. During the mentor dating period, ADstruc was working along with the other teams to find people who have useful input and connections to help their companies grow. One of the best mentor presentations for them was by Eric Ries on customer development as it related so much to what they were already doing.

As far as the environment in the Bunker goes, John and Josh both attribute a lot of their progress so far this summer to the wealth of knowledge being shared between teams. They’re helping people out with their sales experience and getting tons of knowledge drops from others on solving technical and user interface problems and questions.

On Boulder

According to them, being in Boulder this summer has helped them immeasurably. Getting away from the go-go-go atmosphere of the Big Apple has allowed them time to focus as well as “… given us the opportunity to relax, take a break from our usual responsibilities, and think about the answer to questions twice. Not to mention the relatively cheap rent, comfortable lifestyle, and clean air.”

Some Other Quotes And Tidbits

• “Without a program such as TechStars, starting a company as a first time entrepreneur, even in New York City, is like starting a company in Alaska” – John
• “We’d be crazy to not try to bring some of the community aspect of TechStars and Boulder back to NYC” – Josh
• Everlater has been really inspirational to them as they go through TechStars and learn what they should be capitalizing on while in the program
• “Josh and I are the only two people in TechStars this summer with Blackberries” – John
• Blue is both John and Josh’s favorite color

If you get a chance to meet these guys this summer in Boulder or later in New York, take it. They’re funny, skilled, and out there making waves.