Last week TechStars co-founder David Cohen made an appearance on This Week in Venture Capital.  In doing so, he showed tons of love for the Boulder entrepreneurial community by talking about TechStars generally and slipping a slew of Boulder startups into the conversation.

Here’s my BlipSnips breakdown of the episode for your viewing pleasure:

I love Boulder.  Now I love I Love Boulder too.  What better way to embody the spirit of the Boulder community than to have local organizations and businesses create a structure for individuals to tweet, blog, video, and photograph their love of Boulder together?

Boulder is regularly recognized as a great place to live, work, and eat by its inclusion in a variety of Top 10 lists each year.  It’s great PR for the city, due in no small part to the fine folks at the Boulder Convention and Visitors Bureau and other organizations with the budget and structure to elevate Boulder’s profile for our collective benefit.

Adding my photo to Flickr was a piece of cake.

With the recent launch of I Love Boulder, individuals like you and me now have a variety of tools to add our personal perspective.  Tweeting about something inspirational you heard at Startup Women?  Add the hashtag #iloveboulder.  Snap a cool photo of kids frolicking in the jet fountains on Pearl Street?  Add it to the Flickr pool.  Many of you already pimp the Boulder brand; making it part of the I Love Boulder effort is a natural extension.

Hats off to my friends at Quick Left and Cypher13 for building out the website and creating the branding.  The fact that they’ve donated their services is a reflection of what makes the Boulder community so great.

Quick Left’s role in this project is no surprise if you’ve read Jennifer Roberts’ post about them.  Steve Hubert had this to say on behalf of the Quick Left team:

Giving money wasn’t an option for our small startup but we could give something we had plenty of, engineering talent.  Being in Boulder has been amazing for Quick Left on both a professional level and on a lifestyle level.  So, when the opportunity came to support this community, we were excited to jump in.

When I got in touch with Todd Berger and Lucian Föhr about getting Cypher13 involved:

Cypher13 Design studio considers itself part of the fabric of Boulder and…has been provided with exceptional opportunities from within the Boulder community… When Cypher13 sees an opportunity to give back to Boulder and make a difference, it’s very happy to do so.

I can tell you from first hand experience that both Quick Left and Cypher13 are companies that have loads of talent and take a huge amount of pride in what they do.  The fact that they are willing to share their talents with the Boulder community as a whole is a wonderful thing.

As a beneficiary of what the Boulder community offers, I feel it is my giri, my duty, to do my part in spreading the Boulder love.  I’ve uploaded a few photos to Flickr and written this post to get started.  I can hardly wait to see what our collective creativity will come up with.  What do you have in mind to help out?

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?

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.

Fiona Schlachter had the excellent idea of coming up with a map of Boulder’s entrepreneurial community to show relations and give some context to events, foundations, groups, etc. that we may have heard about but not known what they were.

Check it out and comment if you have any updates/changes or additions. Also, if you feel compelled to style this to look a little bit better, let us know that as well!