Our Perspective

VCIR Winter 2010 - part 1

From the desk of Ben Johnson & Elaine Schoch…

Last week, we attended the Venture Capital in the Rockies Winter 2010 conference in Beaver Creek. With more than 20 early-growth companies presenting, the Park Hyatt in Beaver Creek was full of innovation along many industries including standouts in clean technology and companies introducing technologies to improve our social and online experiences, something we all can appreciate.

We’ll be posting a few conversations we had with companies in the clean tech space this week but wanted to first share some interesting trends coming from the social space.

According to a study done by the University of California, San Diego, the average American consumes 34 GB of data daily. That is over 100,000 words of information daily. New platforms connect us with friends, family, new business opportunities, customers, journalists, and the list goes on. With the most prominent social connectors being Facebook and Twitter, the list of ways to connect with people is becoming as long as the list of people to connect with. We’re now finding ourselves less worried about how to receive information and instead how to make the most of the information that is being pushed at us. Companies like Grooger and BlipSnips are working to make that 34 GB of data a little more manageable.

Grogger

Grogger provides a Grog “group blog” publishing platform that grants publishers tools to better engage with their audience and crowdsource their content. Content published to the blog can be selected to appear at the top and bloggers are rewarded with recognition. Crowdsource + curation = best content, most content, and better audience interaction. Founder and CEO NAME sat down with and us and explained the technology and how it came about. You can also check out the post TechCrunch wrote about them, which hit during VCIR.

 

 

BlipSnips

Video is the next big thing, sometimes too big, which makes it hard to share specific moments. BlipSnips solves that problem by enabling users to tag, syndicate and inspire conversations about specific moments of videos. It is currently in beta but there are possibilities to use its measurable data-driven statistics as ways for brands to target customers. Founder and CEO John Bliss sat down with us and explained the technology and how it came about.

 

We have several additional clips we’ll be posting this week from other conversations we had with entrepreneurs at VCIR Winter 2010. Stay tuned.

The Huffington Post comes to Colorado

From the desk of Elaine Schoch...

As I’m sure you’re aware by now, The Huffington Post introduced a Denver channel earlier this week. I find it very interesting they chose to come to the Denver/Boulder community but at the same time extremely refreshing to have a new voice.

Traditionally, Colorado has been a Red state until this last election when we went Blue. Having The Huffington Post here will be interesting to watch since it’s a rather “liberal” outlet. If you’re Red or a shade of Purple, don’t worry – they cover a lot more than politics. You’ll find tons of local information from Denver’s Best Bars to entrepreneurial articles highlighting local leaders and their initiatives. This to me, is one of the more exciting pieces of information they’re going to be including.

The Denver/Boulder areas are mecas for innovative ideas/companies, yet we’re still competing with the Silicon Valley stereotype. This has been changing – slowly – but we’re on our way and having The Huffington Post join our community is testament to that.

I personally want to thank Arianna Huffington and her team for coming to the Rockies and helping to spread the word about all the cool technologies and businesses we have in our community. We won’t let you down…