Two Techstars companies, EventVue and MadKast have recently closed seed investment rounds. The founders of EventVue are from South Carolina, and MadKast is originally from Los Angeles. Both companies are now based in Boulder permanently.
EventVue makes tools to drive more attendees to conferences. Their funding was covered by TechCrunch, and I provided more details on the Techstars blog. Their model works on a success fee basis, so conference organizers pay when EventVue drives new attendees to the conference. As part of the package, conferences get a low-maintenance social network that integrates with popular event registration systems, providing further value to their attendees. EventVue is still in private beta, but has seen strong results with the first five conferences they’ve worked with.
MadKast makes a blog sharing widget that you can see here on ColoradoStartups.com (click if you’re in a feed reader). It’s the small green share button next to each post title. Brad Feld has a great writeup of how MadKast works on his blog. MadKast plans to add some more really interesting additional capabilities for publishers over time. The MadKast funding was also covered by TechCrunch, and followed up with a post on the Techstars blog.
Finally, J-Squared Media (who makes Sticky Notes and GlitterBox which are both top 60 apps on Facebook) is currently featured in the BusinessWeek article “Who wants to be a Facebook millionaire?” While J-Squared was in Boulder for Techstars this summer, they’ve now moved back to Philadelphia.
Several more Techstars teams from this summer should be announcing interesting news soon. If you’re interested in all the details, the Techstars blog is calling your name. I’ll just continue to do occasional roll-up summaries here on Colorado Startups.
Applications for Techstars will open in January for the program which will run again in summer of 2008.
