It’s pretty impressive what a few startup teams can accomplish in 90 days with a lot of hard work, mentorship, and late-night Maker’s Mark bourbon-fueled sessions. But their real journey is just beginning—and it will be a long one.

That’s my main takeaway from TechStars Seattle’s first “demo day” on Thursday. The seed-stage mentorship program—which started in Boulder, CO, and has since expanded to Boston, Seattle, and New York—accepted 10 startup teams (out of hundreds of applicants) for its inaugural Seattle program this fall. It’s part of a growing effort by local entrepreneurs and investors to foster more support for technology startups in the Northwest.

Andy Sack, head of TechStars Seattle, said the business plans being presented exceeded his expectations in terms of quality. He implored the investors in the audience (nearly 200 strong) to “get to know the teams—and write checks.” After all, demo day is all about hooking up the program’s startups with active angel investors and venture capitalists, who are all chasing the next big thing.

But the bigger goal, Sack told the crowd, is to build larger and more successful local businesses—and ultimately provide some big exits for investors, which should in turn expand the startup ecosystem. “You’re playing for the future,” he said. “Live the dream of what Seattle looks like in five years.”

My first impressions: Very polished pitches. High-energy crowd and presenters. Beautiful venue (The Triple Door). Bigger ideas than you might expect, but also a clear focus on how to make money. Lots of work still to be done.

Reactions from others in the audience: High-quality presentations, ahead of the other inaugural TechStars classes. The companies came a long way in the past few weeks. Mostly “execution plays” and not new ideas. I used to hear these ideas every day as a VC. Some pitches were for tools, not companies. Consumer Web is very noisy, and it’s hard to extract a signal. Founding teams are solid (many from Microsoft, Google). It’s very early for these businesses.

Here are a few thoughts on each company (you can also read TechStars founder David Cohen’s synopsis here). The bullet points are based on my personal impressions and, in some cases, comments from outside sources:

Highlighter
Founders: Josh Mullineaux, Matt Blancarte, Nate Whitehill
Idea: Help bloggers and publishers engage with readers by enabling the latter to highlight text, post comments, and share content online.
Tagline: Highlight, comment, and share on any device.
Analysis: Needs to continue building an elegant service that publishers really value, and that enough readers want to use. Distribution will be key if you’re charging publishers for analytics, and using contextual advertising.

Cabin Fever Toys
Founder: Adam Tratt
Idea: Motion-sensing stuffed animals (Zoomigos) and rewards to get kids to play outdoors, away from screens.
Tagline: Technology should make it more fun to go outside and play.
Analysis: I don’t think technology will solve our child obesity problem, but Zoomigos might be really fun. If so, it could be a hit. But that’s what it has to be to succeed—a hit. I don’t see health clubs, clinics, or insurance companies helping them sell this.

GoMiles.com
Founders: Michael Komanitsky, Marc Kamaka
Idea: Help travelers manage their disparate mileage reward programs and book award travel.
Tagline: Take control of your frequent flyer miles.
Analysis: Lots of competitors, but a pretty interesting Web interface that helps business and family travelers earn points faster. If it catches on, it could be big. But quite a few sites have … Next Page »

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You shape the view that others hold of your company via either one-to-one interactions or one-to-many interactions. Of course, the one-to-one interactions in business meetings and social settings are the most potent, because you have both quantity and quality of attention. But this doesn’t scale well. Another reason that personal one-to-one contact is so effective is that you can adjust your message based on real-time feedback from your ‘audience.’ If only that were the case for one-to-many communication! But maybe it can be. Hold that thought.

Network Theory

So, it’s obvious that newspaper, magazine and electronic media stories have the one-to-many benefit of touching lots of people, but the message and impact are highly attenuated because the contact is brief and attention is extremely fragmented by the clutter of competing stories and ads. There is nothing as exciting as scoring a great story in a prestigious outlet with wide circulation, but the real impact of a media program is the network effect that comes from multiple positive impressions bumping and rattling around in the environment. These collectively create a picture of your company in the minds of the key audience.

The second, third, and even higher-order effects are where the impact really lies. Imagine a VC reading a long positive story in her daily Dow Jones VentureWire e-mail newsletter ($6,000/year) nine months after your public launch. While the reporter’s story is initially triggered by your press release about a partnering deal, the length of the story and his extra effort to write it were driven by dozens of impressions that have already reached him. These include one article about you that he has seen and filed away from the New York Times, and two from local business press that he follows. Several round-up stories about your industry mention your company as a player. As he is preparing his story from your press release, his Google search turns up ten links to three industry-specific conferences where you’ve presented; one even includes a flattering photo of you at the podium. Search also turns up news stories he has missed, mostly snippets about your company in the trade magazines, a nice mention in Xconomy, but importantly, some of the company’s scientific publications in quality journals. A dozen bloggers have mentioned your company, mostly in a favorable light. His story is better, and the repetition he has experienced helps him get the kernel of your message right. He calls a couple of industry analysts about your thesis, and they, too, have been touched by your message frequently enough to offer neutral to positive comments. The VC reader is also consuming this story in light of a half dozen touches you have accomplished without ever having met her. These range from the first three minutes of your first conference presentation (before she left to take a phone call) to the NYT story she quickly scanned. Or imagine how helpful it is to your internal champion at a large corporate partner when he hears a story about your company in front of his boss at a cocktail party and someone else chimes in with another bit of news about your company.

The positive network effect grows out of repetition, consistency, and trust. Getting attention requires something else: news. More on that in a moment.

Audience

So let’s consider who is participating in this network you want to shape, starting with your key audiences. Most leaders would quickly identify prospective investors, customers and employees as the targets of interest.

It’s tempting to think of players such as your PR firm, reporters, editors, and other gatekeepers as simply a means to the end of reaching key audiences. But it’s appropriate to think more broadly about influence. You have to win over the gatekeepers as well. Also, don’t simply think of your current employees, vendors, and customers as a means to an end; they are also a key audience. In other words, … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Tippr.com, the group-buying site led by entrepreneur and investor Martin Tobias, said today it has acquired Austin, TX-based deals site FanForce for an undisclosed amount. As part of the deal, the founders of FanForce—Samy Aboel-Nil, Dane Knecht, and John Whitmarsh—are joining Tippr’s management team. The move gives Tippr the ability to help Web publishers and bloggers quickly set up daily deals and offers on their own sites, using Tippr’s software platform. Last week, Tippr acquired Chitown Deals in Chicago, continuing its nationwide expansion and competition with bigger players like Groupon and LivingSocial.

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Despite official data showing that the U.S. economy is out of recession, leading economics bloggers remain cautious about the nation’s economic prospects, with almost half saying that conditions are worse than the official numbers indicate. But government policies boosting entrepreneurship and allowing more high-skilled immigrants into the country could bolster recovery, bloggers say. That’s all according to a survey of online observers of the U.S. economy (including this reporter), released this morning by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO.

The overall condition of the economy is “mixed,” according to 59 percent of the bloggers surveyed, while 23 percent see the possibility of a double-dip recession and 10 percent believe a second recession is already underway. About half of the survey respondents said conditions for lending to individuals and small and large businesses are bad or very bad, and the group’s overall feeling is that government budget deficits, interest rates, inflation, and poverty rates will all rise substantially over the next three years. But all of that may actually mean more opportunities for innovators: nearly 60 percent of bloggers said conditions for entrepreneurship are either good or fair right now. (You can download the full survey report here.)

Surveys of leading economists are plentiful, but this may be the first time anyone has tried to quantify the views of economics bloggers, whose work appears in dozens of online publications (or on their own personal blogs) and ranges across the ideological spectrum. Tim Kane, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and the author of the survey report, says the foundation plans to repeat the survey each quarter.

“A survey of economic bloggers might seem like an exercise in herding cats, but it honestly struck us as a puzzle why nobody else was conducting one already,” Kane told me. “Here we have a crowd of the most knowledgeable and outspoken analysts of the economic scene, and nobody had bothered to take their pulse.”

Kane developed the survey questions with help from Donald Marron, former acting director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He sent survey invitations to the top 200 economics bloggers as ranked by the Palgrave Econolog, a directory maintained by New York, NY-based academic publisher Palgrave Macmillan. In the end 83 bloggers participated in the survey. I was one of the bloggers surveyed, and I was also on the board of advisors that helped Kane to design the questions. (For full disclosure: The Kauffman Foundation is one of the underwriters of Xconomy’s Startups Channel.)

To me, one of the most striking findings was that most respondents—71 percent, in fact—felt that the federal government is too involved in the U.S. economy. That seems unexpected, given that economists on the left and the right seem to agree that the bank bailouts and aggressive federal stimulus spending, while perhaps unpalatable, saved the economy from disaster. More than half of respondents gave the U.S. Congress a failing grade when it comes to their performance steering the economy; Wall Street firms also got dismal grades. The Congressional Budget Office and other watchdog groups fared much better.

Asked to name the federal policies that would best stimulate economic growth, the bloggers named increasing high-skill immigration (63 percent), increasing legal immigration at all skill levels (57 percent), promoting new firm formation (48 percent), increasing financial regulation (41 percent), and increasing education spending (33 percent).

Kane says the finding that surprised him most was that bloggers have such bleak views about the economy’s near-term future. “Despite the individualistic nature of bloggers, I was shocked to see how pessimistic the group was in general about the 3-year outlook for the U.S. economy, but I attribute that to their ability to see beyond both the headlines and the official statistics,” he says. “I was also heartened by the consensus for cutting payroll taxes and shifting the tax burden to consumption generally and gasoline specifically.”

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Raveable is a year-old Seattle-area startup that launched its hotel review summarization website in May. If there were a Raveable entry for Raveable itself, here’s what it might say:

Ranked 116 out of 340 tech startup websites in Seattle.

The good: Team is ambitious and knowledgeable; large market; useful technology; fun interface; customer focused; strong word of mouth.

The bad: Relatively new; pre-revenue company.

Best kept secret: Gaining attention from angel investors and VCs.

The idea of Raveable is to help leisure travelers quickly make sense of all the user reviews out there on the Web, and choose a hotel that’s right for them. So the company aggregates reviews from sites like TravelPost (Kayak), MyTravelGuide (Priceline), CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, and VirtualTourist, and provides a bullet-point analysis of the pros and cons of each hotel—for 55,000 establishments and counting in the U.S.

The company was founded by Philip Vaughn and Rafik Robeal, former Microsoft veterans with expertise in database applications, data synchronization, and mobile social networking. Raveable grew out of difficulties they’d each had in booking hotels quickly; they found they were sorting through dozens of reviews on multiple sites, without having a top-down view of how various hotels stack up against each other.

“We want to make it really easy to make a decision,” Vaughn says. “We were really frustrated by ‘Everything is 3.5 stars, everything is above average, everything is good.’”

The technology behind their approach is semantic analysis of text—an area that’s been in research for decades, but is increasingly being applied to Web search and corporate software. The goal is for the software to understand the meaning of sentences in user reviews—including the topic, the context, and the sentiment. So if reviews say the rooms are great, beds are comfortable, or parking is expensive, that’s pretty straightforward. But if they say the service could be faster, rooms get cold, the view is sick, or the place is in good need of repairs, say, the software relies on statistical models (trained and updated by the founders) to ascertain whether the sentiment is positive or negative.

Vaughn gives a sense of historical perspective, pointing out that Raveable fits into the trend … Next Page »

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Website Seeks Credibility From Readers

A new website is using a twist on popularity rankings by asking readers to score it on credibility. NewsCred, which just launched its beta version, lets users score its news stories by how credible they are, an attempt to add a new level of involvement to news sites, Reuters reports. The site is mostly in English, but plans to expand its Spanish and French content.

Google to Host Bloggers at Political Conventions

When hordes of bloggers join the swarms of delegates descending on Denver next week for the Democratic National Convention, and on Minneapolis for the Republican version the week after that, Google will be there with open arms, Internet access, and snacks. Google, which wasn’t a significant presence at the conventions four years ago, will set up a two-story, 8,000 square foot headquarters for bloggers in Denver, with something similar planned for the Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reports. Along with Internet-equipped workspaces, couches for napping, and free smoothies, the company will offer a closing-night party.

Democratic Platform Addresses Internet

The Democratic party platform, to be discussed and voted on at next week’s convention, takes special notice of the role of the Internet in modern life. The platform calls for a national broadband strategy. Wired says this is very different from the Bush administration’s stance, which has left issues of broadband access in the hands of the private sector.

Stem Cells Produce Blood in Lab

Blood drives may one day be a thing of the past, thanks to work at Advanced Cell Technology of Santa Monica, CA, the University of Illinois, and the Mayo Clinic. As the Los Angeles Times reports, researchers there say they’ve used embryonic stem cells to make blood. The team says they’re still several steps away from making blood suitable for transfusions.

Is Data Fusion a Boon or a Bust?

Data fusion, the process of linking several databases together to create a single, wide-ranging profile of a person for such purposes as preventing credit card theft or chasing down deadbeat dads, promises efficient use of personal data but seems like a nightmare to privacy advocates. But as it turns out, Scientific American reports, these databases may contain too many errors and meaningless coincidences to actually be useful.

Stolen Data For Sale Online

The Security Fix blog at the Washington Post continues its look at the tools of the trade for cyber criminals. Today, it talks about websites where thieves can purchase stolen credit-card data. The average price for such information is $1.20 per card number, along with names, addresses, and phone numbers.

LEDs May Light Up New York Streets

Long-lasting, energy-efficient LEDs have already become ubiquitous in traffic lights around the country. Now they may be poised to take over streetlights as well. According to the New York Times, New York City will conduct tests of new streets lights, complete with new pole designs, based on LEDs. If the tests are successful, the city could eventually replace all 300,000 of its streetlights with LED versions.

Bloomberg Proposes Wind Plan for New York

Windmills could top New York City skyscrapers and bridges, or supply power from the waters off Manhattan, if Mayor Michael Bloomberg has his way. Speaking at the National Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Bloomberg cited studies predicting that wind energy could provide 10 percent of the city’s electricity needs within 10 years, says CNET News. Most of the installations would likely be small turbines on tops of buildings. Well, after all, old New York was once New Amsterdam.

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The Cluetrain Manifesto, the classic book on how the Internet has changed the way consumers relate to corporations, was published in 1999. The word “blog” appears nowhere in it. (While the term “weblog” had been coined a couple of years earlier, it wasn’t until late 1999 that the short form “blog” caught on as a noun and a verb.) But if you had to boil down the “95 Theses” offered to corporate marketers by Cluetrain authors Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searles, and David Weinberger, the summary might be: “Get a blog, and keep it real.”

Consider some of these gems from the manifesto:

• “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they blow it, it could be their last chance.”
• “Companies need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. They need to get a sense of humor.”
• “Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.”
• “Markets do not want to talk to flacks and hucksters. They want to participate in the conversations going on behind the corporate firewall.”
• “If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.”
• “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”

The idea that companies need to communicate with their existing customers and potential customers in authentic, human voices—crystallized so clearly in Cluetrain—has now had plenty of time to sink in. At many firms, the natural response has been to launch a CEO blog, and/or to allow lower-level employees with the blogging bug to publish their own views. And here in Boston, quite a few corporate execs have come out to play.

A few of these writers still don’t get it—they want to hawk all that’s good about their company or its products. They don’t communicate when they screw up, and they sound too much like their own PR firms. But there are also some who seem to take to the medium naturally—who understand that a blog is more like a conversation than a lecture.

Some of the best business bloggers find ways to focus consistently but not nauseatingly on their own companies, using their blogs largely to give readers a look under the hood. In this category, one of the most worthwhile local weblogs is Chuck’s Blog, written by EMC vice president of technology alliances Chuck Hollis. In his frequent, very conversational posts, Hollis shares revealing insights into EMC’s short- and long-term corporate strategies—blogging recently, for example, about the company’s intentions in the cloud computing space.

Other local executive bloggers write more about their industries than about their own organizations—Paul Levy and John Halamka, the CEO and CIO of Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, respectively, are prime examples, frequently writing about the big issues that affect healthcare. And still others write about whatever new product or service happens to catch their fancy, even if it’s from a competing company. Here, The Next Big Thing from Don Dodge of Microsoft’s Cambridge outpost is one of the grooviest local examples.

Though the Boston Business Journal declared in a March article that “The Corporate Blog’s Dying Off,” there’s little real evidence of a dropoff in executive blogging. It’s true, as the article pointed out, that blogging takes more time and commitment than many executives have to give. But if anything, with mainstream media readership and viewership continuing to drop, it’s clear that companies have to engage with their markets through other channels, including the blogosphere. That’s especially true in the high-tech world, whose customers dwell largely online and have learned from high-profile corporate bloggers like Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble to look for human faces inside the companies shaping the computer and Internet industries.

“Blogs allow corporate bloggers to converse with their audience directly,” writes Arlington, MA-based marketer John Cass in his 2007 book Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging. “Such online conversation can demonstrate a company’s ideas, abilities, and, in the final analysis, brand to customers and the world.”

[Click to the next page for our list of Boston-area executive bloggers.] … Next Page »

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