TechStars Top Ten: Search to Phone Leads Startup Pack
“Putting your money where your mouth is” is NOT always a good thing, when venture capital money is at stake.
“Get funded, get educated, get going,” is the TechStars turnkey call to startup arms; Not a lot of funding is promised, but not a lot is expected either.
What is TechStars? The elevator pitch, in TechStar’s own succinct words: “We help startups start.”
TechStars helped ten startups start yesterday, as Don Dodge reports.
In July, members of the TechStars team, notably David Cohen, executive director, helped spur a “Startup Weekend” to launch a collaborative startup in one weekend direct from the heart of Boulder, Colorado.
Cohen spoke to the Boulder County Business Report on the eve of the “event,” expressing his confidence that “if we got enough talent in one room, why couldn’t we do it.” Cohen got 70 people “in one room.’ Everyone who works will receive a portion of whatever the new company makes, was the pitch.
No one has apparently recieved anything though because six weeks later, startup weekend remains unfulfilled, no new company is open for business as envisaged.
Cohen hoped that bloggers would follow “the story” all weekend; I did. Here are my stories:
Startup Weekend Fever: Creative Destruction NOT On Agenda and Web 2.0 ‘Buzz Crap’: How Startup Weekend Failed to Deliver
From the get go, I underscored a key flaw in the Startup Weekend modus operandi: Self-focus, rather than neutral business focus. I wrote:
Truth be told, Startup Weekend actually required more than a weekend; Brainstorming for startup ideas took place online prior to the on-site intensive. Did Startup Weekend participants take advantage of pre-planning time to do in-depth plans for the “next big thing”? Market research perhaps? Census data review? Focus groups? NO indication of any such solid business planning development tools deployed.
From where did participants draw their startup inspirations then? From themselves, and their four year olds.
The first startup idea posted prior to the weekend was by David Duey, who hoped to help his infant browse better. Nick Woodward hated “having to pay the service charge to Ticketmaster” and wanted to be able to ”bypass the promotions company and/or the ticketing company.” Tyler “just graduated college” and testified to the “the pain of purchasing textbooks.”
The wining startup formula? A SERVICE TARGETING STARTUP WEEKEND ITSELF!
Joe Scharf on “The Idea: Vevo.com as in Vote Early, Vote Often”:
The idea came from thinking about the Startup Weekend model. To eliminate the need for countless number of rules and to keep the Startup Weekend model self-organizing, we will need to rely on a democratic voting process to guide the course of the group’s action. I imagine we’ll be making a lot of decisions during the weekend through group votes. We will want a method to make these decisions quickly so we can focus more on developing and less on decision “overhead”
Fast forward. TechStars itself held a demo day yesterday to showcase ten (2-3 three person) startup teams they funded to the tune of $15,000 each.
The TechStars pool of startups seems to follow in the startup weekend tradition of focusing on what appeals to the TechStar cool Web 2.0 app tech community itself.
The ten $15,000 dollar startup TechStar online wagers are generally representative of a typical day of headlines at Techmeme: blogs, Facebook, social networking…
EventVue: Events community
IntenseDebate: Blog widget
SocialThing: Personal profile
StickyNotes: Facebook app
Villij: People recommender
MadKast: Blog widget
FlitrBox: Content filtering
KBLabs: Facebook developers
BrightKite: Place streaming
One TechStar wager appears to break the inner geek mold, though: Search-To-Phone, billed as “your personal search assistant.” The Dodge snapshot:
Find local products and services by calling Search To Phone. Leave a voice mail asking about a product or service. The request is then routed to relevant local businesses, who respond back to you with information or an offer. SearchToPhone uses Microsoft’s TellMe and Gold Systems technologies for voice recognition. They have just signed a deal with Excell Services to process 10 million calls.
In other words, a real honest to goodness, stand alone, general consumer facing business model using cutting edge technology and gaining real market traction.
The other prospective TechStars? In good Web 2.0 tradtion, they are, for the most part, in very private betas! KBLabs is on hiatus, however, returning to college after a memorable summer break.
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