The quality of the companies, the quality of the attendees, the quality of the execution, it just keeps getting better. I just got back from the 2008 Venture Capital in the Rockies Conference which was held at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek. This was the 25th anniversary of the conference and I am sure there will be a few more. Kudo's to Chris Onan for orchestrating the event.
The event spans 3 days, with check-in and a cocktail party on the first evening, a packed day of keynotes and company presentations on the second day and time for follow-up meetings, and 'um, skiing on the third day. Since I am sitting here typing this, I am not on the slopes.
I was impressed with the breadth and scope of investors in attendance. From Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Santa Fe, North Virginia and Palo Alto, there was a great selection. Some of the firms that attending included Fidelity Ventures, Battery Ventures, 3i, NEA, Austin Ventures, Altos Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Well, there is something to be said of the recruiting power of 12 inches of fresh powder in Beaver Creek.
The Colorado contingent was there in force as well: Brad Feld and his relatively new Foundry Group; Mark Soane, Don Parsons and Chris Onan from Appian Ventures; Ryan Pollack and Tracey Kerr from Meritage and folks from Sequel, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures and Centennial Ventures.
One of my Accelerator companies, Newmerix, did a fine job presenting and is making good progress in their current funding round. Newmerix provides full lifecycle systems management for ERP solutions, like SAP and PeopleSoft, built on top of the Sharepoint platform. Unfortunately I was not able to see the Newmerix presentation because I was on a conference call with the Microsoft ISV Coordination Council clearing the way to get many of our Accelerator companies integrated into the mainline Microsoft partner programs. But I was able to catch-up with Dan Gannon, Newmerix's CEO later at one of the many events. You can learn more about Newmerix at http://www.newmerix.com .
Another interesting presentation was by DAZ 3D. DAZ 3D, based in Draper, Utah, has been making 3D animation tools for some time. What they announced here was their social/marketing solution which provides a marketplace for artists leveraging DAZ. This new site, called http://Artzone.com , allows artists to post works, many which can be used in online role playing games. The images were stunning, but what is exciting is that you did not need $20 M and a game studio to create them; they were created by folks working part time in the evening, just messing around. I talked to Dan Farr, their CEO, about combining what DAZ 3D is doing with Microsoft's newly created XNA Creators Club, http://creator.xna.com . It would make it much easier for anybody to create or enhance XBOX games. Perhaps you would be able to create your own vehicles, weapons and characters for HALO… that would be a hoot.
It was great to see two TechStars companies presenting. TechStars is the summer incubation program run in Boulder by some of the regional Colorado entrepreneurs. First up was filtrbox, which lets you track a keyword or a search phrase, evaluate the volume of hits, and get notifications via e-mail or RSS. filtrbox has a unique query refinement UI with a tag cloud and add/remove boxes. I used it to build queries for all of my Accelerator companies. Here is an example of what you get, and Congrats to filtrbox for landing their first round.
Then, there was SocialThing, which allows you to aggregate your social networking sites into one user interface. I am not a huge social networking consumer, but I have teenagers, so I get it. SocialThing aggregates all of your social networking content AND posting (that is what I thought was quite cool), into one application. So if you use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, as my son does, then you have one central hub for your content. Great too for promotion purposes – he has a band and people can keep up with what they are doing with their social tool of choice. SocialThing is still working on the product but you can read about their progress on their blog at http://blog.socialthing.com .
I am looking forward to next year's Venture Capital in the Rockies 2009 and I can only imagine the view getting better from here.
