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Nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and fueled by leaders and social hubs such as Micah Baldwin , Tech Stars mentor, #followfriday creator and now chief community caretaker at Graphic.ly of Digital X, and Robert Reich, the founder of Boulder/Denver Tech Meet-up, Boulder's startup community is pumping, even in the midst of recession. Boulder is the home of Blue Mountain cards , one of the first successful online greeting cards websites. In the 1990s, Fortune 1,000 tech companies popped up all over the Western prairie between Boulder and Denver. Since then, Boulder's creative, crunchy, beautiful mountain environment has nurtured a self-supporting startup tech ecosystem. Sponsor We already wrote about Boulder in our Never Mind the Valley series , and recently had the chance to visit the city and lunch with four of the region's startups. Here is what we found. Community Support RWW's Never Mind the Valley series: The Boulder startup community, continues to be a supportive, passionate community with talented individuals, inspired ideas that is affecting change politically and economically in the United States. Lunching with four startups that Micah Baldwin organized was like lunching with a family. The group we talked with share office space, mentor each other and talk proudly of each others ideas and accomplishments. The Underground Rail Road Attracting talent is foundational to any startup environment. Eric Marcoullier, co-founder of Gnip described the "underground railroad" of transients that have made their way from Silicon Valley to Boulder. "Weekly I would get emails asking about what Boulder was like. Eventually I just started telling people to come here, visit and ask the locals themselves," he said. Venture capitalists have also made their way from busy Silicon Valley to the Boulder Valley. Affecting Change - The Startup Visa Act Once you have the foundation of talented motivated individuals, ideas flow. Brad Feld of TechStars took the idea for a national startup visa bill and made it a reality. TechStars receives proposals from all over the world. Startups based in foreign countries come on tourist visas with great ideas - and potential jobs are being sent home with them. The startup bill seeks to change this. The bill will enable companies that do not have U.S. citizen or resident status, but who have blessed by at least $100,000 in VC investment, to start their companies in the United States. Measuring Outcomes The four thought-provoking, pioneering startups we met with had had nothing but positive things to say about TechStars and starting a business in Boulder. Each had a unique story; two of them were locals and all of them men. Gnip Eric Marcoullier , co-founder of Gnip , launched two years ago with the unique idea of providing data collection and analysis of social signals across multiple social websites to help companies improve their product and service experience. The Gnip platform and service bridges the gap between the data APIs between large companies and multiple social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Post Rank. ReadWriteWeb has covered Gnip extensively . Since its launch, Gnip has changed its technology strategy and will be re-launching soon. Everlater Natty Zola and Nate Abbott spent one year sleeping on couches as they traveled across five continents before they came up with the concept for Everlater . Everlater allows travelers to easily record and share their travel experiences through Twitter and Facebook. The platform allows users to use data from across multiple photo sharing sites. People can also publish their travel "scrapbooks". An algorithm lays out the book automatically so you don't have to. For hopeless photo organizers like me, this is a godsend! Next Big Sound Alex White , co-founder Next Big Sound , provides cultural analytics specifically to music companies. Music professionals can track how fans interact with their music, or music from many musicians across sites such as MySpace and LastFM. It is currently developing a premium service. Graphic.ly Micah Baldwin is not only social hub-connector extraordinaire, but also works for the uniquely cool comic book community Graphic.ly . Graphic.ly, which is currently in private beta, hopes to open opportunities for comic book creators, publishers and enthusiasts that are currently suffering under a one distributor model - as well as reawaken America's and the world's love for online comics. Members can both purchase and discuss comic books on Graphic.ly. Ties to the Universities Startup's ties with Colorado universities are immature, but starting to materialize. The morning of our lunch someone from the Colorado startup community (who we promised not to name) had met with the University of Colorado. As the individual put it, "Universities are turning out graduates prepped for a traditional computer science career at the likes of Lockheed Martin. We don't need MBAs - we need coders." The local Universities are overlooking careers in startups that are based - literally - around the corner or down from "The Hill" as a viable career option. An exception, University of Colorado Law School is has been offering startups free legal advice in exchange for student experience. Judging from the close-knit group of entrepreneurs we saw, Boulder has matured significantly since the dot-com boom and bust. The only thing lacking at lunch was more estrogen. Discuss
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Never Mind the Valley: Here's Boulder, Part 2
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If there was a real-time tag cloud for the RSA conference this year, three words would be in big bold letters: Security (of course), Cloud, and Virtualization. Paul Congdon, from HP's ProCurve Networking group gave us a view into the not-so-distant future where servers, like good house guests, knock before entering. In this case, it's the link they request, and to get it they will properly announce themselves and their intentions to allow the host to prepare to accommodate them. This capability is a linchpin in removing the process bottleneck in provisioning new services in the data center. For most organizations, the network is manually configured. To keep up with the movement of the provisioning of virtual machines, the network needs to enable "plug and play". Sponsor Complexity Means Controls The network is in a unique postion as a "pipe" as well as a "control" where it needs to know what communications go where and plays the role of traffic cop. This means opening ports between servers, controlling traffic and setting monitors to make sure traffic is optimized. When things change, configuration does as well, especially when a new service is requested. Today, this is controlled by human processes and controls to keep the network up to date with the applications and servers that host them. In the future, there is the opportunity to move forward in auto-configuration or even smarter handshakes. In essence, to oversee this process a directory or resources or inventory would exist that allows the network to "know" what is in place within it. This is a new control point for the data center, and is a resource to the network. Solutions in Protocols 802.1.x is technology that has been used in WiFi connections. One reason it was useful in that context is that it's expected that the link drops and reconnects frequently and so is seen as an opportunity for the physical link as well. The potential upgrades to 802.1 would enable a richer dialog between the server as it starts up its networking process. This would allow the server to announce itself and its requirements (e.g. encryption) and allow the network to respond to these appropriately (e.g. set encryption key). This process can become a big win for configuration management where now, the server can come up in the network and be provisioned according to the policy. All of this reminds us of the benefits of a company like Apple. Having the unique opportunity to control the model from end to end means have the ability to make better tools. We wonder if natural evolution will get multi-vendor shops a solution for all of their IT assets. What will it take to get to a model-driven data center? Photo credit: orinrobertjohn Discuss
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Reinventing the Handshake: Polite Servers and Smart Networks Lead to Active Security
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What do you get when a Christian pastor, an atheist, a grad student and a lawyer set up a website to criticize churches? I swear, this isn't a bad joke. It's a very real site, ChurchRater , and it allows anyone with an Internet connection to identify and review church services around the world. Is the site inspiring frank conversations about worship and religion, as its creators intended? Is it allowing sometimes closed or cliqueish communities to see how they appear to outsiders? Or does it, as some users wrote, "trivialize the deep dimensions of spiritual experiences" and "bolster the notion that church is a consumer-oriented proposition"? One thing's for sure: It's definitely a controversial idea for many who've stumbled upon the site. What do you think: Should religion be up for public review? Sponsor The site began as a rather natural extension of two of the co-founders' book, Jim and Casper Go to Church . The premise for the book "could be the pilot script for a sitcom: a pastor hires an atheist to help him critique several Christian churches throughout the United States." Jim Henderson, the pastor, and Matt Casper, the atheist, traveled to several churches around the U.S. to get a fresh perspective on how people worship. The website now allows any user to essentially replicate that feedback process. Here's how it works: Users create a profile (what, no Facebook Connect option?) and then have the options of searching for churches, reading reviews and posting reviews and ratings of their own. Churches can also request to be rated, in which case a reviewer is hired and sent to review that church. Right now, only Christian denominations are included on the site (Catholic and Protestant); the co-founders have stated they do not intend to add mosques, synagogues or other places of worship to their system. And most of the reviews are for churches inside the U.S. Still, if you've ever had the unique experience of living in or around any of the American Protestant subcultures, you know there's some darn good fodder for reviews there. Many of the churches in the site's database remain unreviewed. The review threads that exist, however, range from informative to entertaining. One well-known megachurch was criticized for its emphasis on showmanship. Another large church was given a terrible review for its unwelcoming congregation and self-important preacher. One pastor got smacked down for giving his own church a five-star rating. As interesting and even useful as such reviews can be, however, some of the site's users take umbrage at its purpose and execution. "We live in a world where 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, over three billion people live in poverty, and children of God are sold into slavery; we have no time to waste rating 'Sunday shows,'" one wrote. "By providing such an open forum," wrote another, "dirty laundry can be aired (in fact, IS aired) with no means of proving its truthfulness; as such, you become accessories, in all likelihood, to the bearing of false witness, even slander." Still, as a young person who was subjected to an unrelenting Baptist upbringing as well as constant coast-to-coast travel, I can see the value in having such a site. For discriminating church-goers who are looking for a new church home, it's good to have firsthand and honest feedback on exactly what a given worship service will entail. Besides, churchgoers are already "reviewing" churches informally and offline, anyhow. Why not bring these conversations into the light? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss
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Yelp for Religion: ChurchRater Lets Users Review Worship
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Remember POGS ? Don't feel bad if you don't - you've just dated yourself, that's all. These round collectible discs were used to play a children's game (also called POGS) back in the 1990's. Thanks to the incredible popularity of these little tokens, collecting POGS became a generation-defining fad for the demographic group known as the millenials. Where baby boomers had baseball cards and Generation X had Garbage Pail Kids, the young members of Gen Y had their POGS. Now prepare yourself for POGS' return - POGS 2.0, if you will. Except this time around, the chips have been wired for the digital age. And today, the "game" is a social network called FaceChipz instead of a old-fashioned variation on marbles. Sponsor FaceChipz: If POGS Was a Social Network FaceChipz is a new social networking site designed just for kids. Intended primarily for the "tween" set who's outgrown children's websites but hasn't quite aged into Facebook yet, FaceChipz merges real-world networking with an online component. After purchasing a starter set of five chips, the child has their parent register an account for them on the FaceChipz website. Then the game begins. The child registers all their chips online using the unique identification code found on the back of each token. When all the chips have been registered, they can be distributed to friends. In return, the child's friends will hand them their FaceChipz. When the exchange is complete, the child returns to the computer to register the new codes from the chips they've collected. The end result is a social network of friends with a physical counterpart in the real world - a brightly colored collection of FaceChipz that can be toted around just like POGS were decades ago. Social Networking Training Wheels Parents will appreciate the fact that the FaceChipz network offers a more secure and private environment for their kids than traditional social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. No strangers can solicit friendship requests here - the child's only online friends are those they've connected with in real life. There isn't even a search mechanism for friends to find each other without first trading chips. While that design decision is obviously meant to keep FaceChipz sales steady, the company claims it has another goal as well: to prepare children for the online world of social networking. Reads the company website , "FaceChipz wants to help kids stay safe, but also enable them to communicate using today's technology platforms...If your kids are savvy enough to make appropriate real world friendships, we believe that those relationships will be suitable and appropriate for the digital network they create." Other privacy protections are offered too. For example, the code on the back is only valid upon first entry. Afterwards, if a lost chip ended up in a stranger's possession, they couldn't use the code to connect to the child. Also, FaceChipz profiles are designed so kids are only permitted to post a limited amount of information and their email address is not stored. FaceChipz makes sure that none of their site's pages are indexed by search engines. Finally, when the child is ready to graduate to a more adult network, their account can be permanently deleted. Will FaceChipz Become the New POGS? All the elements are there that could make FaceChipz a success: collectible tokens, an online element and parent-friendly company ethics. There's another bonus, too: the chips are cheap. A five-pack is just $4.99 at ToysRUs and the one-time site registration fee is only $1.00. If anything, the fee is only there so mom or dad get involved and are made aware of the child's online activities. However, in this day and age, FaceChipz may be too innocent a portal to attract tweens. On a web filled with insane YouTube videos and the (often disturbing and occasionally pornographic) webcam-hopping service, Chatroulette , will a "your first social network" site even have a chance? Will today's youngest generation take to a modern equivalent of POGS or have they seen too much already? Only time (and sales figures) will tell. Thanks to Springwise for spotting this. Discuss
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FaceChipz: Internet of Things Meets Social Networking
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