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.

Boulder has friends in high places these days.  Yesterday “Boulder Is for Startups” was posted on WhiteHouse.gov, shining yet another light on the entrepreneurial ecosystem here.  Boulder Startup Week, TechStars, and Silicon Flatirons all got some love.

Here are a few of the highlights:

• Boulder was one of eight cities on the Startup American Roadshow.
• “Today, Boulder is home to one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the country, with close to 200 fledgling tech companies and a city campaign that proclaims ‘Boulder is for startups.’”  Note: boulder.me is not a city campaign – it’s a volunteer campaign.
• “The rabbi of the Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem…is my good friend Brad Feld.”
• “From May 18-22, the city’s startups will be rolling out the red carpet for talented developers, designers, marketers, and general startup enthusiasts.”  If you haven’t registered for Boulder Startup Week events yet, register now.
• “Many entrepreneurial communities ask how they can be the next Silicon Valley?  As Brad has often explained, that’s the wrong question.”

If you’re interested in reading the post in its entirety, check out “Boulder Is for Startups” on WhiteHouse.gov.

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:

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.

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 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.

Last week I had the chance to sit down with Alex White, CEO of Next Big Sound. We spent a few minutes talking about the bootstrap stage of Next Big Sound, its trek through Tech Stars and the year following.

Next Big Sound started during some rough economic times which almost forced the close of the company just before it was accepted into Tech Stars.

“I quit my job the same week as a major market crash,” said White.

The first year of Next Big Sound consisted of its three founders working out of a house in Chicago, where White slept on a couch for several months during the first major iteration of NBS. Prior to its current model, White described Next Big Sound as a “fantasy sports league for the music industry.”

“Each of us were continually fascinated with the question of ‘How does a band become famous?’”

The way by which NBS tried to answer that question changed dramatically during the company’s time at Tech Stars. Shortly before closing the company, acceptance into Tech Stars gave White and his team “a second chance at life” to reinvent how Next Big Sound would approach the music industry.

Shortly after acceptance into the tech startup accelerator, Next Big Sound dumped its old model and spent several weeks contemplating and ideating a new business model, this time focused on providing data and analytics to music industry professionals.

The free version of the new software started collecting data just 5 weeks into the 13 week Tech Stars program last year. Since then, NBS has grown to track  more than 700,000 online artist profiles which have generated more than a billion unique data points. Subscribers can get weekly notifications reporting on the online activity surrounding specific band profiles.

“When we started, we wanted to reverse engineer the billboard charts, but you just can’t go back in time.”

Now with a full year’s worth of data under its belt and a growing list of online platforms, NBS might get its wish.

“We’ve seen bands go from 50 plays a day to over 500,000 in that time.”

Band managers, producers and other industry professionals interested in “the why” of such quick growth can subscribe to Next Big Sound Premiere, a music analytics software service which gives context to the data.

Going forward, White looks to more data and continually increasing user involvement to drive success.

“We want to solidify our place as the standard of music industry data.”

As quickly as they’ve gathered data sources and a backlog of online social media activity, they might do just that.

If you haven’t watched them, The Founders video series is a collection of webisodes about the TechStars teams and their experiences. A healthy combination of funny, inspiring, and straight-up knowledge, I’d recommend you keep an eye on them.

“The Innovation Lab” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 2 from TechStars on Vimeo.

“The Question is Why” The Founders | TechStars Boulder | Episode 1 from TechStars on Vimeo.

The videos are produced by Megan Leigh Sweeney. This summer’s videos are here (check out the teasers!) and you can find last summer’s videos over here.