If you want a glimpse at the leading edge of tech startups, TechStars Demo Day is a fine place to go prospecting. In just 60 minutes of total pitch time, you’ve got a damn good idea of the industries, customers, ideas, and technologies that top entrepreneurs and investors think are ripe for innovation.

And the accelerator phenomenon itself is certainly part of that picture. Organizers say attendance at pitch day was up significantly this year, as was the number of applicants—700 startups vying for just 10 spots, compared with 400 in 2010′s inaugural Seattle class. That growth comes as we’ve seen a big spike in the overall incubator/accelerator scene nationally, with increasing competition for getting into the top programs.

I’ve already posted the most complete rundown anywhere of Seattle Demo Day 2011, and you can also find quick snapshots, links, and founder contacts at this handy page put together by the group.

Today, we’re throwing in some extra insight from the head honchos themselves: TechStars CEO and founder David Cohen and TechStars Seattle director Andy Sack, who we interviewed right after the pitches wrapped up Thursday night.

One clear trend in the companies presenting in this year’s class, Cohen said, is the use of social media as platforms to build businesses that could have some substance, coming up with “new and interesting ways to actually monetize” all that sharing.

“So companies like Bluebox or Vizify are taking advantage of this proliferation of consumer data and the sharing that’s going on to drive that value back to businesses,” Cohen said. “That’s certainly a trend that continues to be the case. I think four years ago, it was all the social stuff coming out. This is the actual application of it for business.

David Cohen

Another reflection of the mood of investors is the presence of “very real businesses that have very clear revenue models—things like EveryMove. There’s a lot of money being spent in health care. Those guys are tapping into that,” Cohen said. “I think what investors want today are businesses that have a revenue model that they can understand, but that take advantage of the cool, hot, new, and social to really leverage it.”

“The other trend that you’re going to see more and more of—I know TechStars is looking at it—is the area I would call human-computer interaction. Broadly, I would throw robots into that, which you saw with Romotive,” Cohen said.

“You take this guy,” he said, holding up a smartphone, “that we’ve all spent money on, and you figure out other cool stuff to do with it. Or you take the iTouch that your kid has and you figure out how to … Next Page »

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The decision to apply to TechCrunch’s Disrupt Battlefield competition wasn’t an easy one. TalkTo had been operating in stealth. We didn’t want to launch publicly, we wanted to launch successfully.

Something changed once that application went forward. None of us knew if we’d even be selected as a finalist but we worked as if we would be. We were laser focused on what needed to happen before the public launch.

It wasn’t just the product that had to come together. It was the total experience, the feel of the brand and logo, the messaging. Making sure you can communicate well with beta users, and that their experience is delightful from start to finish. That the promise of TalkTo––the ability to text ANY local business and get a text response-–-could be realized.

We were somewhat deflated a few weeks later when we hadn’t yet heard from TechCrunch. And then we got an email—at midnight—from now editor Erick Schonfeld asking if we could answer a few questions and demonstrate the product, right away. He was keeping the same hours we were!

We connected the next morning and the demonstration went really well. I think Erick saw something special that fit the Disrupt model. We felt there was a strong chance we’d be selected. And we were.

Riley, my co-founder, and I met Erick in New York one week before the conference to rehearse. We were horrible. The product performed great but our ability to describe it was poor. Erick gave us some much needed advice.

It’s worth noting that this was a tumultuous day in Erick’s life. The drama surrounding Mike Arrington’s potential departure from AOL and TechCrunch had erupted the day before. Just as we were to meet with Erick, it wasn’t even clear if he still worked for AOL or TechCrunch! All was up in the air. Still, Erick took our meeting on time. He was spot-on with his advice. Not once did he let the drama interfere with our meeting. We walked away really impressed.

Final touches were put on the product and website, and we re-wrote our script a few more times with help from friends. The night before the big launch, we asked Erick if we could pitch him once more. Again he hated it. In fact he thought we’d gone backwards. The product could be magic, but our ability to let it shine? Not so magic.

To say we weren’t feeling great at this moment is an understatement. Over a beer … Next Page »

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The grand ballroom of the Royal Sonesta hotel in Cambridge, MA, was jam-packed last night and had a collective energy that I haven’t felt in a long time. Hundreds of people were on hand for the Web Innovators Group meeting, organized by venture capitalist David Beisel (formerly of Venrock, now with NextView Ventures).

I had to miss most of the presentations from TurningArt (Jason Gracilieri) and AisleBuyer (Andrew Paradise)—both very interesting startups—but I did catch the talk from Shawn Broderick and his new social gaming startup, Cambridge-based Play140. (Broderick also leads TechStars Boston.)

Here’s the idea behind Play140, from what I gather. Social games—video games that people play with their friends on social-network sites like Facebook—are all the rage, what with FarmVille, Pet Society, Bejeweled Blitz, and the like gaining in popularity. But these kinds of games “require a certain level of hardware and commitment,” Broderick said. Namely, an Internet-connected laptop or smartphone, and some time to kill. Play140, by contrast, is about simple, text-based games that can be played via SMS texting, instant messaging, or Twitter.

“Text is sexy, super creative, and a powerful way to have fun,” Broderick told the crowd.

He then unveiled Play140’s new game, called TAG (The Acronym Game), and had the audience play it right then and there via Twitter. The audience was given a category (“elevator pitch”) and an acronym (“LTEP”), and players had two minutes to come up with a witty phrase that the acronym could stand for. Some of my favorites from the crowd, which were projected on the big screen in real-time: Long Talker, Everybody’s Pissed; Little Toe Extender Pads; Let This End Please; and Like Twitter Except Popular. Then everybody voted for their favorite—the winner was the “Twitter” one.

Maybe you had to be there to see why this could be a big deal. It struck me as a pretty disruptive approach to social gaming—coming in with a cheap, easy, non-fancy set of games that can be played on traditional cellphones, say, but still actively engage the imagination of consumers. If Play140 gains traction (always the issue with games), it can then move up-market and add graphics and other bells and whistles. Meantime, it’s an inexpensive and revealing experiment—and a glimpse into the possible future of social games.

Broderick said the startup is actively working on more than a dozen text-based games, and plans to make money through subscription models and licensing deals. After the demo, his Play140 partner, Andrea Shubert, said the company is exploring a massively multiplayer online game to be played over Twitter. This might sound surprising, but Shubert says most commands and actions (even in a game that looks as complex as World of Warcraft, say) are simple enough to convey in short-form text.

Play140 previously talked to Mass High Tech about its approach and its first game, a multiple-choice quiz game called MatchUp. According to that report, Shubert and Broderick worked together in the mid-to-late ‘90s on a gaming startup called Genetic Anomalies, which was sold to THQ for about $8 million in stock in 1999.

Shubert, who previously helped conceive the online multiplayer word game Acrophobia back in 1995, pointed out that social games used to be all about text. So it sounds like Play140 has a bit of “everything old is new again” going for it. We’ll be watching to see how things play out, so to speak.

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Yesterday’s annual open house at Intel Labs Seattle, near the UW campus, did not disappoint. I got a whirlwind tour from incoming lab director Dieter Fox (who also talked with me about Intel and the future of robotics). In attendance were some prominent members of the Intel brass like chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and vice president of Intel Labs Andrew Chien. Vice presidents mixed with professors, researchers, students, and members of the tech startup community. (Among the luminaries I spotted were Matt O’Donnell, dean of UW’s college of engineering, Janis Machala from UW TechTransfer and Paladin Partners, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.)

There has been a lot of progress at Intel Labs since last year’s open house. Here’s a quick tour of the most interesting projects I saw, arranged by the type of technology:

—One of the main themes of the lab is everyday sensing and perception. That encompasses everything from smart sensors in the home that figure out what you’re doing in the kitchen to wearable cameras that help inform you about the world around you. Jeff Hightower, a researcher at the lab who did his Ph.D. at UW, showed me a demo of a project called “Personal 3D audio cursor” which involves a wearable camera, compass, gyroscope, and computer that senses where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. The device then speaks to you over earbud headphones to identify the people around you using face recognition—and the sound appears to come from the direction of the person it is identifying.

It’s just an example of what can be done to enhance your information about the world around you. The real innovation, Hightower says, lies in the “online learning aspect” of the face recognition algorithm. You feed the computer three example photos of a person under different lighting conditions, and the software learns to recognize their face. Hightower says they are starting with photo albums to train the computer, and want to try things like people’s LinkedIn contacts as training examples. (Which makes me think of Learn That Name, the iPhone app for helping people recognize their LinkedIn contacts in the real world.) Hightower says this type of face recognition software will “absolutely be ready for prime time” in five years.

—Just across the room, UW Ph.D. Student Shaun Kane was giving a popular demo on “Bonfire,” a new kind of computing interface for extending your workspace from your laptop to your tabletop (see photo left). Using a camera pointed at the area around his laptop and virtual buttons projected onto the tabletop, Kane showed he could press the virtual buttons to do things like scroll through applications on his laptop. The camera tracked his hand movements and also captured an image of a business card placed on the table, which could be stored for reference. The software can potentially do things like make your laptop aware of all papers and objects on your desk; then the computer might do helpful things like turn off music when you take your headphones off and put them on the desk. This was the first time the project has been shown to the public; Kane will be presenting it at a research conference next week (UIST 2009 in Victoria, BC). The big-picture goal, he said, is to “make interacting with laptops richer, more involved, and smarter.”

—One of the big crowd pleasers was a mobile robot that could plug itself into a wall socket to charge up (see photo below). Software engineer Louis LeGrand, a UW alum, showed me how it works. The robot starts with an internal map of the lab space, so it knows where the electrical outlets are. It uses a range finder to get close to the wall, in the vicinity of the outlet. Then it uses an electric field sensor (not vision) to find the right electrical signature for the outlet—so essentially it senses the electricity in the wall. After about a minute of slow-moving adjustments, it plugs itself in. “We expect in the not-too-distant future, there will be a huge new market for robots—and Intel processors,” LeGrand says.

Next door, Dieter Fox showed me some interesting work on robotic manipulation of an object (like an apple or a bottle of water) using a robot hand and computer vision. Using a camera system, the computer figures out a physical model of what the robot is picking up. This way, Fox says, a robot can learn about the world around it the way a person would, by handling objects and looking at them. It’s a longstanding challenge in robotics, and quite a burgeoning area of research.

—Another theme of the lab is wireless power—everything from being able to charge your mobile device without plugging it in, to antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips powered by the sun. Researcher Emily Cooper, who did her Ph.D. at MIT, gave me an update on the magnetic resonance project for charging devices like a laptop or a phone through the air (we saw it last year). The device now sends both radio signals and power in the same transmission, which could help you find power for your particular mobile device over a range of about one meter.

Lastly, outgoing lab director David Wetherall showed me “WISP” (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, see photo left), a type of enhanced RFID tag that contains sensors and a microcontroller and gets its power from an ultrahigh-frequency RFID reader. The device can also use solar cells to harvest more power. The lab is working with academic collaborators who use the WISP for everything from gaming applications to undersea neutrino detection.

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Here at Xconomy, we love our iPhones and Blackberries and Windows Mobile smartphones, and we love the local companies that create cool software and services for them. In fact, we love them so much we’re organizing an April 7 conference on “The Future of Mobile Innovation in New England“—and we’re looking for companies who want to show off their latest, coolest technologies in a series of two-minute, onstage “mobile bursts.”

If your company is based in New England, has a mobile application or service that can be demonstrated live (no PowerPoints), and you’d like to nominate yourselves to participate, please send me a note at wroush@xconomy.com. We’ll pick five or six companies, who’ll have a chance to show their wares to a big audience at Microsoft’s New England R&D Center in Cambridge, MA.

The meeting, scheduled for 1:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a networking reception to follow, is designed to focus on fundamental questions about the technologies and business models that will keep the mobile industry growing through the recession and beyond. It’ll be jam-packed with keynote presentations, panel discussions, and intimate chats with local mobile-technology luminaries and investors, including representatives of Apperian, Enterprise Mobile, Charles River Ventures, FitnessKeeper, Flybridge Capital Partners, Google, Microsoft, the MIT Media Lab, MocoSpace, Quattro Wireless, Skyhook Wireless, Veveo, and Vlingo. The full agenda for the conference is here. If you’re interested in attending, you can buy advance tickets here.

Until March 13, tickets are available at the early bird rate of $125; after that the price goes up to $195. Student tickets are available for $50, and students are eligible for scholarships under Flybridge’s Stay in MA program.

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Late last fall, after discussion with some board members, I decided to apply to show some new features from Evri at DEMO 09, which we were about to start active development on. We got accepted, so now we really did have to get the stuff ready to ship. In fact, one of the great reasons to do something like appearing at DEMO is the motivation it provides to get more done, in less time, than you think you can. Well, we got our new Collections feature done, and a Firefox and IE toolbar to boot, so that part worked out! Here’s how our experience went on the ground at DEMO.

Day 1

I flew down to Palm Desert, CA, early Sunday morning to get to a mandatory noon presenters meeting. This was a good intro—the DEMO team was all there, including outgoing chief Chris Shipley, and incoming one Matt Marshall. They really did a good job making everyone feel that they would do whatever it takes to make this successful for the presenters. After that we (me, our CTO Deep Dhillon, and product manager Keith Williams) tried to do our equipment check and rehearsal. Now, understand that we hadn’t actually pushed our new code to production yet—I was waiting until closer to Monday morning, when the show opened, to deploy. We fought with our VPN and the DEMO network for a long time to try and do our walkthrough with our behind-the-firewall version. After a grueling hour-and-a-half, we finally just launched the stuff live—about 6 hours early—and had a good run-through. This is when it was particularly nice to have a kick-ass team covering us back in Seattle. (Thanks Mark, Ryan, and the rest!)

That night was a CEO dinner, with a panel discussion on public technology policy. I missed most of the discussion, but had a good conversation with James Joaquin, from Xmarks, Raman Khanna, a VC from Onset, and Michael Wheatley from Ensembli. Not yet having looked closely at the DEMO schedule, I didn’t quite realize that James, Michael, and I were presenting in the same “Smarter Internet” group on Tuesday morning, but figured that out soon enough. After more wine than food, I went back to my room to catch up on work, and make sure everything was working in preparation for our first full day at the “booth.”

Day 2

Monday was mostly spent on one thing: talking about the product, over and over. Either we were at the booth giving demos, or I was talking to press, or I was rehearsing my two minutes of our six-minute presentation scheduled for Tuesday morning. But the day went well. Deep was off pitching to a potential partner, so Keith and I handled the booth, with ace PR guy Lane Buschel helping out. Some of the first DEMO stories came out later that day. The first I saw pitted Evri vs Ensembli as competitors. I don’t see it that way, but all press is good, right?

Some good companies that day. I really want to get my hands on a Touchbook when it comes out, and Skout is funny, if nothing else. Fellow Northwest startup Ontier, from Portland, also showed well with Pixetell. The panel that ended the day—with VCs ranging from angel Eric Tilenius to First Round’s Christine Herron to August’s David Hornik—was a bit grim, but interesting. … Next Page »

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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