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This Week in TechStars: David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jeff Clavier, and Ari Newman

This Week in TechStars: David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jeff Clavier, and Ari Newman

TechStars has been busy. Very busy. Last Friday the incubator launched This Week in TechStars, a weekly webcast under the This Week In umbrella, on the heels of the Do More Faster book tour, the filming of the Bloomberg Television series TechStars (premiering 9/13), and TechStars Boulder Demo Day.  With all of this exposure, count on TechStars to get even busier.

Host David Cohen, TechStars Co-founder, welcomes Brad Feld, TechStars Co-founder and Foundry Group Managing Director, Jeff Clavier, SoftTechVC Founder, and Ari Newman, Filtrbox Founder and TechStars alumnus, to the first episode of the show.

TechStars intends to bring TechStars entrepreneurs and mentors onto the show to talk about real problems facing entrepreneurs.  The premiere did not disappoint.  If your company is struggling with its pricing model, the last conversation with Ari Newman will be invaluable.

The BlipSnips (TechStars Boulder ’10) summary of the show is below.  Please leave a comment if you think having a weekly summary of This Week in TechStars will be valuable to you.

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High tech glue brings horizontal money to Boulder

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.

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