I don’t quite remember the exact wording, or even who said it, but the idea that Boulder is the most inclusive tight-knit community on Earth is something that has resonated with me since I first heard it.

This is the only community I’ve come to know in which inclusive and tight-knit aren’t characteristics that are at odds with each other. There is something inherent in the Boulder culture that says “join us in the fun”. There is also a conscious effort by a handful of people to ensure that Boulder’s most valuable resources are available to the rest of us, by the way.

Though I’ve lived here since moving from the Boston area in 2001, I’ve just begun to discover what the Boulder tech community has to offer in the past few months. In that short time, I’ve gone from a quiet wallflower to an active (though still quiet) participant:

• Boulder Lean Startup Circle: Just a week after asking to join this group, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Ries, one of the leading thinkers in this field, present and lead a discussion on the methodology while he was in town.
• Snap Impact: I was welcomed by the group, volunteers with the motto “Making doing good easy”, for a weekend event to help lay groundwork for the development of the backend for Serve.gov, despite having little more to offer than a willingness to contribute.
• Blogging for boulder.me: After expressing interest in writing for this blog, I was offered a spot in the weekly rotation after a brief e-mail exchange to work out a few details.
• Presenting at Ignite Boulder: I received an enthusiastic “hell yeah” after e-mailing one of the event organizers with a short pitch for a presentation I had in mind and was added to the next event.
• TechStars’ Investor Day: Sitting in free seats set aside for the public, I had an invaluable chance to watch and learn as the TechStars 2009 companies pitched to a theater full of potential investors.

The upshot to all this is that there are plenty of opportunities to get involved in the Boulder tech community above and beyond just showing up, even for a guy like me who cringes at the thought of traditional networking (I have an allergic reaction to making small talk with strangers in the hope of exchanging business cards).  In every instance I’ve been both welcomed in and encouraged to participate, a nice change from what I’m used to in the Northeast.

I’ve been given the opportunity to dive in, stretch my comfort zone a bit, and figure out where I fit in, and for that I am very thankful. Go ahead, give it a try yourself. You might just like it.

An annual tradition on Memorial Day in Boulder is the BolderBoulder 10k. Although I didn’t run it this year, it was one of the first things I did after moving to Boulder in 2008.

Here’s what some people think about the event…

Clare Tischer – “I’ve lived in Boulder since 2007 and have had the joy of running the Bolder Boulder for two of the three years I’ve been here. As of 2010, the average runner’s age is 44. If that isn’t motivation to strap on your sneakers, I don’t know what is. Besides the fact that it’s incredibly well-organized and attended, it consists of a little of everything I love about this town: fitness, dramatic age gaps, the amazingly cold (although domestic) beer at the finish line. Most importantly, it’s about each individual’s personal best. Want to run a sub-40? Do it. Walking the entire course? No big deal. From Mile 1 to 6.2, every participant is being cheered on by all walks of life– retired locals in their lawn chairs, babies in rompers, CU students slamming beers and heckling runners to try their muddy slip ‘n slides, regardless of your pace. In a community that is consistently rated as fittest and with so many fiercely competitive tri-athletes calling this place home, that’s a really beautiful thing. After my run this year, I joined friends for a lawn party and watched the last few waves finish. At the very end, two women were helping a much older woman (perhaps their grandmother?) walk the course by holding her tightly on both sides. Shortly thereafter, the pros dashed through at lightning speed. You’ve got to love an event that means showing up and being your version of bolder. ”

Andrew Hyde – “Love the energy, community and human performance. Boulder comes out in force and I love being a part of it. Well run, super fun.”

Tara Anderson – “The Bolder Boulder represents everything I love about Boulder: community, people living a healthy lifestyle, artists, performers and gorgeous weather. It’s my own annual tradition and this year was the seventh consecutive race I’ve run.”

I recently had three friends fly into town from Chicago, Boston, and Delray Beach, and had a chance to show off what I think makes the Boulder community special for a few days.  I had a real sense of pride sharing it with them, and it reminded me why I feel so lucky to be living here.

A tradition 18 years strong, the four of us take turns hosting what we now refer to as The Mannual.  As this year’s host, I was responsible for choosing a theme, planning the long weekend, and sending a packet of information to the rest of the group.  Though it was my third time hosting in Colorado, it was the first feeling like this is home.  And it felt good.

I settled on: “Eat.  Drink.  Play.  Boulder.”  I arranged to borrow a friend’s vacation rental to make downtown accessible by foot, narrowed my wish list of spots to visit, and decided to use technology as an underlying theme (a facet of Boulder that I appreciate more and more).  A week before their arrival they had access to our trip loaded into Gowalla, a Flickr account, and our newly minted website.

Eat:  We did plenty of that, as we usually do.  The highlights included my favorite lunch spot SALT (especially because they feature a few local ingredients and I love the wood fired oven and stove), Sisters’ Pantry dumplings at the Boulder Farmers’ Market, and an old fashioned barbeque, with plenty of sunshine on the patio and socializing with the neighbors.

Drink: Yes, plenty of that too.  We never did make it any of the breweries on my list (Oskar Blues, Boulder Beer, and Upslope), but we did hit Liquor Mart to stock the fridge with their great selection of local stuff.  Some of the favorites were Upslope Pale Ale (Friend: “Is this the one I read about in Maxim?”  Me: “You read Maxim?”), Left Hand Milk Stout, and Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale.

Play: Some of that, but less than in our younger years.  Disc golf was cancelled due to high winds and laziness, but we did manage to squeeze in Whiffle Ball at Chautauqua Park, where my friends were my groomsmen a couple of years ago.  We also soaked up plenty of sun playing Cornhole on the patio (insert joke here), and learned a thing or two from neighbors who went to college in the Midwest where the game was born.

Many of the things that I wanted to do and places I wanted to visit never did make the cut, but in the end, it may have been better that way.  We had a chance to enjoy the sunshine, have some great food and drink, and really relax – the things that I love to do, here in my home.

The next time your friends fly into town, what will you show them?

Callisto.fm is a Boulder-based startup with the goal of helping people listen to and discover podcasts more easily. Here’s the scoop…

The Story

Michael Sitarzewski had been bouncing the idea for a site called YourTuner around in his head for a couple of years. As an avid podcast listener and producer, he wanted a better tool for the podcasting market. So, in January ’09, Jeremy Tanner helped organize a PodCamp in Boulder at the newly setup Threadless offices, and Michael decided to present his idea there to see if it had any traction. At that Podcamp presentation, Richard Jones volunteered to help Michael build the product, and Callisto.fm was born. Over the next few months, Michael and Richard roped in Travis Silverman to help them work on the design and user interface and quickly had a prototype up and running. This is a classic scratch-your-own-itch type story, and one that’s sure to have good things ahead.

The Team

• Michael Sitarzewski – A long time web-enthusiast, Michael has been creating web applications since the early 90′s. He’s working on business development, strategy, and so much more. His favorite color is blue.
• Richard Jones – Boulder resident and ZendFramework extraordinaire, Richard focuses on making things work. His favorite color is green.
• Travis Silverman – An RIT graduate and current designer at Slice of Lime, Travis ensures that things are looking good and feeling right. His favorite color is black.

The Boulder Bump

According to the Callisto.fm team, it’s meant everything that they’ve chosen to start their new business here. They pitched their idea and formed their team at Podcamp and Boulder Open Coffee. They trust the feedback they’ve gotten and trust even more that nobody’s here to steal their idea. A direct quote – “Without Boulder, there would be no Callisto.”

Why They’re Different

One word: Integrity. A majority of other similar podcasting services out there have a simple revenue model – we’ll scrape the web and index as many podcasts as we can while displaying and injecting advertisements while paying podcast producers little to no money. Callisto.fm flipped this on it’s head and built a platform that they hope podcasters will want to use, for their and their users’ sake. As such, no podcasts are added without the permission of the owner. This effort has paid off as it is one of the main reasons that Leo Laporte and his This Week in Tech podcast are listed on the site.

Features to Watch

There are two features I thought were pretty rockin’…

1. Every Search Is A Playlist – Whenever you perform a search on the site, you can instantly start using the results as a podcast playlist. See Here. Just click that “Play this Channel” button.
2. Suggest a Podcast – Have a podcast you want added to the listing? Head over here to suggest it. Just under 100% of podcast owners that visit the site when their podcasts are suggested by real users, sign up to get their podcasts in the listing.

In conclusion, if you’ve never listened to a podcast, Callisto.fm is perfect for you. If you have, even better. Head over, check it out, and let them know what you think.

A quick look at the profile of Boulder startups has lead me to an initial conclusion that must be obvious to area veterans: The tech scene in Boulder, CO is hardly full of cut-and-paste geeks.

The thematic titling from The Foundry Group’s “Glue” companies might mislead otherwise, however a closer look at the technologies being created by companies such as Gnip and Simple Geo beg a closer, look. Honestly, those not fluent in the speak of cloud computing and data infrastructure have to sprint just to keep up on the company blogs.

What we’re seeing here is not a new kind of VC model – investment companies have been prone to specialize before – rather we’re just seeing it applied to the tech community (a good portion of it in Boulder) in a way that allows said VC firm the ability to make sense of what comes next. With a finger on the pulse of infrastructure companies such as Simple Geo, making educated guesses as to the next big social phenomenon on the Internets might just be within closer reach.

Foundry’s position on web technologies is pretty straight – forward…

We believe that enabling web technologies are going through a similar development cycle as enterprise application integration technology did 10+ years ago. Companies are creating tools, applications and platforms to enable more productive and automated uses of resources that have become ubiquitous parts of the online ecosystem.

For example, geo-tagging (Simple Geo) and powerful filtering technologies and analytics (Next Big Sound) applied to social network data provide some distinct possibilities to make what has otherwise been a flood of usage data into a monetized transaction, where the rest of corporate culture will pay top dollar for the ability to finger its way through data sifted by and funded through the Boulder tech scene.