The vast majority of mobile applications in the marketplace aren’t coming from well-established businesses, but experimental developers. The apps can even accrue a good user following, but those developers don’t exactly have the skills or desire to build a business around their creations.

“It’s laughable how many times I’ve heard, ‘I didn’t get into this to answer support requests,’” says entrepreneur Jonathan Kay.

Kay is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Apptopia, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing a marketplace that condenses the droves of similar, one-off app projects and puts them in the hands of people looking to turn them into real moneymakers. It looks like the lovechild of eBay and a Web domain brokerage, with hints of a mobile strategy consultancy.

As you can imagine, buying and selling source code for mobile applications is just a bit more complex than auctioning off your used electronics. “I’m spending more time than I’ve ever wanted to with lawyers,” says Kay, who I caught up with this week.

The company is the brainchild of co-founder Eliran Sapir, who jumped on early iPhone trends to create the mobile app GPush, which created push notifications for Gmail on the iPhone. Despite the paid app’s popularity in the iTunes app store, Sapir couldn’t quite figure what business to sell it to for an exit, Kay says. But he kept thinking about the problem, and later toyed with the idea of creating a mobile app brokerage while entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge-based Greatpoint Ventures. Last fall, Sapir connected with the boisterous Kay—a former brand evangelist for local startup the Grasshopper Group—and left the venture firm to work on Apptopia full time.

Apptopia’s first step is to formulate a target price range for app developers to sell at, using market knowledge and algorithms. Developers then must give Apptopia access to their apps that enables the startup to gather accurate, objective data on performance, user base, and other information that will inform prospective buyers.

“Much like in eBay, we provide a professional middle ground where a buyer and a seller can actually negotiate,” Kay says.

Sellers can list their apps to be purchased for a fixed price within that suggested range or set up an auction with a minimum starting point.

Connecting buyer and seller is just part of the challenge, though, says Kay. Apptopia continues to oversee that payment and transition process, and has developed contracts with lawyers outlining the details of the agreement.

“If you put the app up, you legally are bound to send us the source code,” says Kay of the developer responsibilities. Sellers also have to agree not to … Next Page »

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When Shawn Bercuson and his family went to Park City, UT, exactly one year ago, they may have been the only people not in town to attend the famous Sundance Film Festival, which is held there every January. “I do enjoy movies, but my family and I go skiing every year during Sundance,” he says. “If you go then, the mountains are empty. It’s unbelievable. And then at night, there are world-class concerts and movies. It’s a ton of fun.”

Still, it wasn’t to be a typical January for Bercuson. The former Chicagoan, who was one of the original employees at Groupon and a former principal with venture firm Lightbank, had just moved to San Francisco. He was thinking about his next career move. His friends knew that, and they were peppering him with ideas.

“I had some friends in the [film] industry who know me as their go-to tech entrepreneur, and everybody was talking about distribution and how DVD revenues are declining,” Bercuson recounts. “I started talking to producers and filmmakers and going to meetings my friends had set up. And it was amazing to me, number one, that this business was so antiquated, and number two, that it was such a huge opportunity. They really needed help.”

By “this business,” Bercuson means independent films—those where more than half the financing comes from sources outside the Hollywood studio system. For indie filmmakers, it’s a fiercely competitive world. Of the 4,000 films submitted to the Sundance festival in 2011, only 200 were accepted, and only 50 of those were acquired for theatrical distribution. “The good movies were getting financed,” says Bercuson. “The problem was distribution. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized how similar the problem was to Groupon.”

In a way, Bercuson suggests, indie movies are like coupons for local deals. There are a lot of coupons out there, but before Groupon they were harder to find, remember, share, and use. Similarly, “There were plenty of repositories for movies, like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, but they were still having a hard time finding an audience. The question is, how do you connect content to an audience that’s relevant when [the filmmakers] don’t have the money to market these titles?”

At Prescreen, the San Francisco startup Bercuson founded shortly after his Park City trip, the answer also looks a lot like Groupon’s. The company picks one independent movie per day to feature on its website and in its e-mail newsletter. People who rent a streaming version of the movie on that first day get 50 percent off the rental price ($4, as opposed to the usual $8).

As with Groupon, there’s a social and reputation-based element: if you’re among the first 5 percent of people to rent a movie, or if you can get at least three friends to rent on your recommendation, your next rental is free. And just like Groupon’s coupons, Prescreen’s offers are time-bound: once users start playing the movie, they have 48 hours to finish viewing, and most movies get booted off the site after 60 days to make room for new additions.

The only catch is that you have to watch Prescreen’s movies on your computer. The service doesn’t yet work with iPads, set-top boxes, or Internet-connected TVs. (That said, it’s not too hard to play streaming video from a laptop on a big-screen TV, if you have the right connectors. See my 2009 column Cutting the Cable: It’s Easier Than You Think.)

To tap into the excitement around this year’s Sundance Festival, which runs from January 19-29, Prescreen has gathered all of the publicly available trailers for Sundance-anointed films—so far that includes 86 of this year’s 112 features. You can’t stream the full version of these movies, but you might be able to after the festival. The whole point of Prescreen—and the reason Bercuson himself will be in Park City again this year—is to offer an outlet to the majority of filmmakers who, come January 30, won’t have distribution deals.

Also starting this week, Prescreen will spend three weeks promoting films from the previous three Sundance festivals that “didn’t get the love they deserved,” according to Bercuson. These hidden gems might even have turned up on Netflix or iTunes, but haven’t yet found their niche audiences. “We are going to show that there is a lot of great content out there that doesn’t have mass-market appeal but does appeal to me or you,” he says.

Bercuson launched Prescreen on September 14 with $1 million in Series A funding from a group of individual investors including former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya, CMEA Capital partner Saad Khan, Kauna Ventures chairman Ed Cluss, Rapleaf founder Auren Hoffman, and … Next Page »

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It is not even Thanksgiving and it has already been a busy November for Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of analytics gleaned from the wealth of comments in the social sphere about television shows. Bluefin Labs, backed by Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and others, was among the startups presenting their ideas to judges during the ad:tech New York digital marketing conference, which ran through Nov. 10.

Bluefin Labs gathers data based on comments shared publicly via social media about television shows. In addition to the number of tweets and status updates that mention shows, the three-year-old company collects anonymous demographic information about the people who make the comments. Bluefin Labs and others such as SocialGuide in Brooklyn are packaging that data for advertisers and television networks to use.

Bluefin Labs’s Jack Flanagan, vice president of sales, gave the winning pitch at ad:tech in the social media category, besting native New York startups Murmur, Taykey, and Percolate. This follows Deb Roy, CEO and co-founder of Bluefin Labs, introducing his company to the city at the NY Tech Meetup on Nov. 2.

But as Bluefin Labs heads home in victory, SocialGuide—which raised $1.5 million in April from angel investors—is busy preparing a new … Next Page »

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Updated 11/11 with clarification
What does 1 billion sound like? At Seattle startup Hark, it’s this clip of Harry Potter deploying the “expelliarmus” spell to disarm an enemy.

Expelliarmus!

That little incantation marked the 1 billionth play of a sound bite on Hark, which has amassed a huge catalog of snippets, speeches, and quotes on its YouTube-for-audio site.

That’s a pretty big sonic load since the end of 2008, when Hark (formerly called Entertonement) switched on its public website. The company has cataloged a fun rundown of facts and figures on its blog today to commemorate the 1 billion listens mark. Here’s one that really tells the tale for me: Hark’s gone from this initial test sound of a crow caw to serious clips like President Obama’s entire 2009 address to Congress about health care policy.

Hark relies on both crowdsourced sounds and professional clips to build its library of sounds. It wasn’t always that way, but after seeing a flood of fan uploads of clips from the movie “The Hangover,” Hark went to the studio and cut a deal to get official sound uploads to feed that demand.

Those partnerships have grown, positioning Hark among a group of Seattle tech companies that are working with Hollywood to help the entertainment industry harness digital content.

Hark splits ad revenues with studios on those official sections of the site, and has upgraded from just audio snippets into pages that also feature photos, cast information, and other content. Hark also has partnered with public radio’s StoryCorps project, hosting pages where users were encouraged to upload their own stories tied to the “National Day of Listening.” [The partnership with StoryCorps has been clarified from the original version.]

David Aronchick

All of this has made Hark into a quietly profitable company—CEO David Aronchick says Hark moved into the black in the fourth quarter of 2010, and has sustained that performance this year.

He declined to discuss revenues, but said Hark hasn’t needed to raise venture capital since its $4.5 million round from Redpoint Ventures in 2007.

“I’m not anticipating needing to take any money, even to do growth,” Aronchick says. ”We’re just having a bang-up quarter.”

I’ve always wondered how sustainable audio-only could be as a standalone media site, given the additional power of video (along with the fact that people already post sounds without videos to YouTube). Aronchick says there’s no need to choose between the two.

“I think what you’ll see and what you have seen to date is the platform for every modality,” he says. “You would never say that text goes away because there’s pictures, or audio goes away because there’s video. Each unit has its place.”

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Y Combinator unleashed its latest class of startups on the world yesterday at its summer Demo Day in Mountain View. The famed venture incubator, which provides mentorship, networking, investor access, and a modest cash stipend in return for an equity stake in each company, admitted a record 63 startups this time around. That’s up from 43 in the winter 2011 batch, and 34 in summer 2010.

To accommodate all those entrepreneurs, Y Combinator has had to expand, literally. For the second time, the organization has moved the signature orange wall in its common room about 30 feet to the west, roughly doubling the amount of space for work tables—and for Demo Day seating for investors and journalists, which is always at a premium.

Summaries of the YC startups’ pitches start below, one paragraph each. But fear not—you won’t have to wade through 63 paragraphs. That’s because a record proportion of this year’s startups, 33 out of the 63, asked to stay off the record, meaning they haven’t launched their services or they’re not ready to have it known that they took part in Y Combinator. Also, I just couldn’t get through all 30 summaries last night, so I’m dividing up this debrief into two parts. Today it’s A through Mo; tomorrow, Mu through Z.

I’m trying something new this time around. As in the past, each listing contains a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by each company (when there is one), and my summary. What’s new is the final line—my quick personal take on each startup. The presentations were admittedly brief (about three minutes each), so I’m not ready to form final judgments about any of these companies. But as they say, first impressions matter.

Aisle50

Chris Steiner, Riley Scott, George Korsnick

“Groupon for groceries.”

The founders of Aisle50 argue that newspaper circulars are losing their effectiveness and that large food manufacturers are looking for new ways to promote their products, including e-mail and the Web. Whereas the incumbent digital coupon provider, Coupons.com, simply reduces an entire circular to a few Web pages, Aisle50 crafts a single, custom page for each promoted product and features one discount per grocery chain at a time. When a member buys the currently featured product via credit card at the Aisle50 website, a matching credit is applied to his or her store loyalty card. The startup is currently working only with the Lowes Food chain in North Carolina, but will soon add hypermarket chain Meijer. A “giant pot of money” is waiting to migrate from paper coupons to digital platforms, the startups says, and it wants to become “the premier way for food manufacturers to market their product.”

My take: Reminiscent of YC S10 startup Anyleaf, which is also out to kill the supermarket circular, but Aisle50 has the Groupon twist. Y Combinator seems to return to certain themes again and again, as if searching for the right solution.

Bushido

Sean Grove, Kevin Zettler

“An app store for the cloud.”

To get their Web or mobile apps distributed, developers have to worry about lots of things outside their areas of specialty, such as hosting, authentication, and billing. Bushido says it can take an app written using the Rails programming framework and “wrap” it in a software package that takes care all of that, liberating developers to focus on their software. Over time, the startup says it will accumulate “all the apps, all the users, and all the data,” giving it an understanding of a “data graph” that will be as powerful as Facebook’s social graph.

My take: Probably the brashest and most cryptic pitch of the day. The company clearly hopes to bask in the glow of Heroku, the Ruby on Rails hosting service that was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2008 term.

Can’tWait

Eric Florenzano, Eric Maguire

If the names Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire sound familiar, it’s because these are the same two Erics who worked with Leah Culver to launch Convore, a YC W11 company that specializes in IRC-style group chat. That probably makes them the first startup founders to participate in two consecutive terms at Y Combinator. This time around, they’re going after the movie business—specifically, trailers. The startup’s iPhone app (coming soon to Android) lets users browse and watch movie trailers, share their favorites with friends, and set reminders so they won’t miss out when the movies hit theaters. Florenzano calls it “the best marketing platform Hollywood could hope for” and predicts studios will pay the startup handsomely to feature their trailers. In the future, the company plans to take on video games, consumer electronics, and other product categories where pre-orders are prevalent.

My take: It will be interesting to see what company Florenzano and Maguire start for YC W12.

… Next Page »

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Seattle’s Hark, an entertainment website that lets users search, play and share audio snippets from movies, TV shows and other pop culture sources, is showing off a new design for its top-tier content. The new approach includes an upgraded display with an easier way to sift through quotes from a particular source, and more prominent buttons for using social channels like Twitter and Google +1.
The look is somewhat similar to YouTube’s, with options for additional plays in a ribbon across the bottom of the screen. Hark CEO David Aronchick says the new “Curated Collection” is in a beta mode right now, testing with the classic film version of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” before rolling out to other offerings.
As we detailed last month, Hark is among the Seattle startups that are trying to build bridges to the entertainment industry, capitalizing on the Seattle area’s strengths to help Hollywood embrace the digital age.

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When Dave Long first started pitching movie studios on a new way to market their old titles, he encountered a fair bit of skepticism. After all, what could a boardgame entrepreneur from soggy Seattle possibly teach Hollywood about selling its own stars?

Nearly 10 years later, the “Scene It?” brand—which builds trivia games around movie and TV clips—has been adapted to iconic titles like Seinfeld, South Park, James Bond, and Harry Potter. The company that Long co-founded, Screenlife, was acquired by Paramount in 2008 and has sold some 20 million games worldwide.

And Hollywood’s major players, Long says, have a different feeling about visitors from up north. ”There is a little mystique around Seattle,” he says. “I’ve had big executives say ‘Hey, what’s in the coffee up there? It seems like there’s a lot of creativity up there.’”

That kind of reception from entertainment bigwigs is helping to fuel an emerging cluster of Seattle companies that are taking innovative approaches to selling entertainment’s products and personalities. These entrepreneurs are building on the area’s traditional strengths in digital media and gaming, with hopes of helping the entertainment industry navigate the fundamentally shifted economics of the digital age.

The roster includes Hark, a startup that aims to spread bite-size chunks of content through the social sphere; Hypershow, a quietly profitable company enabling richly layered digital movies; and Giant Thinkwell, an incubator-stage company that wants to help celebrities of any stripe reach their fans through quirky social games.

Dave Long is back on the job as well. His new company, Exponential Entertainment, is working with the studios to develop promotional digital games—and this time, they’re starting with some major first-run movies.

Building bridges to the star-studded streets of Hollywood still has its challenges, even in a highly networked age. It’s simply harder to build relationships and keep your finger on the pulse of an industry when you’re hundreds of miles away from Sunset Boulevard.

But there are also advantages to being based in the Northwest, says David Aronchick, the founder and CEO of Hark.

“It’s far more cost-effective to work out of Seattle, and you obviously have an incredible depth of technical talent here that allows you to execute very quickly comparatively, and do some really cool things,” he says. “We’re not unique, but we certainly have a lot of cross-pollination because we’re a very migratory city. We pull in a lot of people from all over the place, especially people from on the West Coast. And this is a great place to set up shop.”

Here’s a deeper look at the startups I identified as part of Seattle’s emerging entertainment innovation cluster. I didn’t include folks who produce entertainment-themed content of their own, like the blog publisher Wetpaint, for example. The focus here is mostly on companies that are aiming for business partnerships with the entertainment industry.

Also purposely left off the list was a major name—the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, which is owned by Amazon.com and headquartered in Seattle. Although it might seem kind of odd to think of … Next Page »

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, which makes technology to deliver movie and music files through self-service kiosks, is putting some workers on unpaid furlough as it attempts to raise more money. The news comes via TechFlash, which says it confirmed the furloughs with CEO Anthony Bay today. TechFlash also notes this SEC filing from early last month that said MOD Systems had raised about $500,000 of a planned $8 million financing. MOD has been through rough waters recently: Co-founder and former CEO Mark Phillips was convicted of federal fraud and money laundering charges last month, and the company said late last year that it was cutting about a third of its workforce.

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The inspiration for Fandor, an online movie service for independent and international films, came in late Spring of 2009, as two of its cofounders were bemoaning the fact that neither had been able to see many films lately. Dan Aronson had hardly made it to any of the films he wanted to see at the San Francisco Film Festival, and Albert Reinhardt says he “had a young child, hadn’t been to a festival info forever, and couldn’t even get to a video store.”

The casual conversation quickly evolved into a business idea—a sort of Sundance Film Festival meets Netflix, for people who don’t have the time or the money to spend days and days at film festivals. San Francisco-based Fandor launched its monthly subscription service two weeks ago at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX. The service lets users watch movies directly in a Web browser and also streams data to the Boxee Box, an Internet set-top video device.

The concept for Fandor gelled after Aronson chatted with Jonathan Marlow, who had recently quit his job at Vudu, a pay-per-movie online streaming service acquired by Wal-Mart in early 2010. Marlow was intrigued by the concept. He felt he hadn’t quite achieved what he’d wanted to at Vudu, or earlier at GreenCine, a DVD rental service that was an early competitor of Netflix. And one of the things he’d wanted to do was build a subscription video service with independent and international films.

“I’d noticed for many years that it’s enough of a challenge to separate people from their money for something they already have familiarity with,” Marlow says. “It’s [even more] challenging to do that with films they might love but they just aren’t aware of. [A] subscription model could be useful as a discovery pathway for much of those films.”

The three founders realized they were talking about a sizable market—audiences spend about $2 billion a year on independent and international films, a surprisngly high number considering that these films generally have limited exposure compared to big studio films. “With that, we were able to put together a scrappy little team with this common passion for good films that are underrepresented, and started working on different biz models to bring this to market,” says Reinhardt, who’s now Fandor’s vice president of product.

For Marlow, now vice president of content development and acquisitions, the decision to sign on was all about the timing. “As Netflix moves more and more into competing directly with television, particularly with Hulu, they’ve left this space open for someone else,” Marlow says. A year earlier or a year later, and he wouldn’t have gotten involved. But given the direction Netflix was taking, and with his background in the film industry and Aronson and Reinhardt’s background in tech, he felt the company was “uniquely positioned to take advantage of the space in the market,” he says. “If someone is going to do this, it might as well be us.”

Fandor subscribers pay $10 a month to access a library of about 2,500 film titles, a collection that Fandor’s founders are proud to say is curated by … Next Page »

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Hot on the heels of The New York Times’ new metered-access pay plan for digital content, Remond, WA-based OwnZones Media Network is touting an initial $500,000 round of financing. The investors were not disclosed.

The company says it’s building a digital content aggregation service based around charging consumers a monthly fee to access higher-quality material with more targeted, less intrusive advertising.

Now that the Times has taken the big leap, there are going to be scores of publishers in smaller markets looking for a way to charge an online gate fee and drive people back toward the more lucrative printed product. Third-party providers are clearly going to have a niche to exploit there.

As a longtime participant in and student of the news business, I am personally skeptical that we are headed for a widespread “era of paid Internet content,” as OwnZones says. The New York Times can probably pull it off. But most newspapers aren’t The New York Times. Publishers in the middle tier are trying to find a turnstile price for their content, and I think they’re going to be very disappointed at how low it is.

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And now for something completely different: Jumio’s mock-shock video playing up the sanitary hazards of cash didn’t amuse some Huffington Post readers, but I got the company and its PR firm to talk about why they made the video and why they aren’t worried about a backlash. Animoto’s system for making slide shows from your videos and photos is cool, but now a lot more people can use it thanks to a partnership program rolled out this week by the San Francisco- and New York-based startup. Speaking of partnerships, StudentMentor.org is using the power of the Web to match budding entrepreneurs with business mentors. The Web and how fast you can get to it on Android and Apple phones was the subject of a study from Toronto-based Blaze this week; turns out the browser on Android phones can outrun the iPhone’s Safari browser like Speedy Gonzalez after guzzling a 5-hour Energy drink. On the energy front, Enphase Energy in Petaluma gave me a behind-the-scenes look at its microinverter technology for converting the direct-current electricity from home solar arrays into grid-compatible alternating current; by packing more smarts into the gadgets and ratcheting down the current and voltage they handle, the company has made it possible for general contractors and electricians to install solar panels without the help of specialists. If you’re trying to shine a light on your own startup, you might want to read Guy Kawasaki’s latest book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, which I reviewed in my Friday column. Zediva isn’t enchanting Hollywood with its questionably legal method for letting customers watch new DVD releases online four weeks before Netflix and Redbox get them. Meanwhile investors were enchanted into filling or refilling the coffers of  Solopower, Pricelock, Jawbone, Doximity, CoolPlanetBioFuels, Zero Motorcycles, and the aforementioned Jumio, while Silicon Hive found a home at Intel and Zynga scooped up Massachusetts game startup Floodgate Entertainment. Hat tips to Phil Terry of The Councils and Sarah Kay of Project V.O.I.C.E. for inspiring me to try the stream-of-consciousness approach to this week’s news roundup.

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A co-founder and former chief executive of MOD Systems was convicted of federal fraud and money laundering charges today in federal court. The U.S. attorney’s office says Mark E. Phillips, 36, of Seattle, could get up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced in late May. Federal prosecutors say Phillips transferred $1.5 million from MOD Systems to his own account for a down payment on a penthouse, and also spent company money that had been transferred into a girlfriend’s account. Seattle-based MOD Systems, which makes technology to deliver movie and music files through self-service kiosks, announced in December that it was cutting 35 percent of its workforce. It had better news last fall when it raised $6 million in financing.

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I was going to write an impassioned column this week attacking David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin for the hatchet job they performed on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. I can’t remember the last time a movie made me so angry; no entrepreneur who’s created such a beloved and successful service, even if he’s the world’s youngest and smuggest billionaire, deserves such shabby treatment.

But a few days after I saw the film, Facebook came along with an update to its Groups feature that really does deserve to be hammered. There’s an unfortunate flaw in the new Groups that once again illustrates the company’s curious social ineptitude—its seeming inability to anticipate how users will react to changes that reduce their ability to control their experiences on the site. The move reminded me why an organization that’s so widely admired is also so widely feared and resented. So I’m going to look instead at why parts of The Social Network do seem to hit the target.

The overhauled Groups feature allows people to chat and share posts, links, photos, videos, and the like with hand-picked subsets of their Friends list. Considered alone, that’s a nice improvement. It’s a common experience to have news or links that you want to share just with a few friends or family members—but the way the News Feed used to work on Facebook, you had little choice but to shout them out all 300 people on your Friends list. Lately, whole companies like The Fridge and MicroMobs have sprung up to offer “private Facebooks” that address the reality of people’s multiple, overlapping social networks, some of which are small and closed, others large and open. (More on one of these startups in a moment.) The new version of Facebook Groups finally allows you to have multiple personas on the site: you can share different stuff with different groups, just as you do in real life.

The problem—and it’s a pretty big one—lies in the way groups get created. Any Facebook user can create a group by unilaterally selecting people from his or her Friends list. (It’s just like tagging friends in a photo.) These friends get added to the group immediately—in other words, there’s no “opt-in.” Unless the creator of the group categorizes it as “Secret,” everyone on Facebook can see who’s in the group. People who’ve been added to a group (which can also function as an e-mail list) have the ability to leave it, but to do so they have to take a few steps—read their e-mail, go to Facebook, click a “Remove” button.

This new feature creates endless room for mischief and spam and almost guarantees that users will end up getting added to groups that they would never join, given the choice. Yesterday, Mahalo CEO and frequent Facebook critic Jason Calacanis published an e-mail to Zuckerberg complaining that he and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington had been added—presumably as a cheap stunt—to a group called NAMBLA, which happen to the initials for the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Calacanis pointed out that he was “never asked to join” the NAMBLA group and claimed that he was … Next Page »

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All this talk about “The Social Network,” and Mark Zuckerberg this and that, got me thinking. What if they made a movie about a technology company that’s doing something really innovative now?

A modest company that’s expanding nationally and helping to set the agenda and culture for a new generation of techie entrepreneurs…One with deep connections to many of the top investors and venture capitalists around the country…

OK, I chose TechStars, the seed-stage investment and mentoring company, mostly because I think Robert De Niro could do a fantastic Shawn Broderick (head of TechStars Boston). I’m sure I’m not alone. Plus I’ve met or seen most of the TechStars folks in person, so I have some sense of their style and mannerisms.

Sadly, Hollywood’s not going to green-light this one unless TechStars makes it big—and a whole lot of backstabbing occurs—but here goes.

This is who I would cast in the key roles of “TechStars: The Movie.” We even have an A-list producer/director (see below). Now we just need a script, perhaps involving AngelGate and/or Y Combinator…

David Cohen (founder and CEO), played by Jon Favreau (photo: Thomas Crenshaw):

Brad Feld (co-founder), played by Seth Rogen (photo: Phil Konstantin):

Nicole Glaros (general manager), played by Mary-Louise Parker (photo: Gage Skidmore):

Shawn Broderick (Boston director), played by Robert De Niro (photo: Petr Novák, Wikipedia):

Andy Sack (Seattle director—photo: Randy Stewart), played by Michael Douglas (photo: Stephen P. Weaver, U.S. Navy):

David Tisch (New York director), played by Shia LaBeouf (photo: Nicolas Genin):

Jared Polis (co-founder), played by Peter Sarsgaard (photo: Patrick McBryde):

David Brown (co-founder), played by J.J. Abrams (photo: David Shankbone):

[Celebrity photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]

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Salem, NH-based Laser Light Engines, a maker of laser-driven light sources for 3-D and digital projectors, said today it has closed a $13 million Series B financing round from existing investors Braemar Energy Ventures and Harris & Harris Group, and from existing strategic partner IMAX. Laser Light, which is developing a custom light source for IMAX’s digital projection systems, says it will use the new money to expand its product development, engineering, and marketing efforts. The company previously raised a $5 million Series A round in 2008.

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As summer draws to an end, the deals seem to be trickling back in. Take a look at the highlights from the past week.

—Bellevue, WA-based technology business management developer Apptio raked in $16.5 million in Series C financing led by continuing investor Shasta Ventures. The four-year-old company, which designs software to help businesses manage the cost, quality, and value of IT services, saw a 300 percent growth in its bookings over the last year. And with money still in bank from both its $7 million Series A in 2007, and $14 million Series B in August 2009, analysts are starting to speculate whether the company may be getting ready for an IPO.

—Marketfish, an online marketing startup out of Seattle, raised $1.5 million in financing in a round led by Rustic Canyon and Accelerator Ventures. As part of the deal, Rustic Canyon principal Neal Hansch joined the company’s board of directors, and Accelerator Ventures’ founder and managing partner Alex Lloyd came on as a board observer. Marketfish provides e-mail and direct mail lists of potential customers for marketing agencies to purchase or rent.

—Seattle-based real estate website, Zillow.com, formed a partnership with Chicago-based Apartments.com, giving Zillow syndication of Apartments.com’s national database of 90,000 managed apartment rental listings. The partnership brings the total number of listings for single-family homes and apartments on Zillow to 150,000. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

—Digital-media delivery systems developer MOD Systems raised $6 million in a round led by current investors, a lifeline in the Seattle-based company’s rocky history over the last two years stemming from co-founder and former CEO Mark E. Phillips’ very public indictment proceedings. The company develops technologies that allow consumers to purchase digital movies, TV shows, and music, and load them onto SD cards portably through touch-screen kiosks.

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, a developer of digital-media delivery systems, has had a rocky couple of years, but now it has found a new lifeline in the form of a $6 million investment.

The company, which develops technologies that allow consumers to purchase digital movies, TV shows, and music, and load them onto SD cards portably through touch-screen kiosks, raised an impressive $35 million Series A in September 2008, led by Toshiba, NCR, Deluxe Entertainment Services, and private investors. But the company drew less glowing attention after its co-founder and then CEO Mark E. Phillips was sued by an investor for fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation, and breach of fiduciary duty in February 2009.

However, despite the public and drawn-out case—resulting in Phillips being charged in a federal wire fraud case in March—the company has found a way to regain confidence of investors, through a $6 million Series B round being announced today.

“When we raised money two years ago, the purpose of that money was to do what we’re doing now—relaunch the company and implement the technology we’re doing now,” says MOD co-founder, chairman, and chief executive Anthony Bay.

The new round of financing is being used to deploy the company’s digital entertainment download kiosks in the market. MOD’s first commercial customer, InMotion Entertainment, rolled out around 20 of the 57 kiosks it will deploy at InMotion stores in airports nationwide—including SeaTac International Airport, which was the first to host a kiosk—two months ago. Bay says the company expects to install the rest before the end of the year.

MOD chose airports as the first locations to host kiosks because of the large market for travelers who are looking for entertainment while they’re traveling by plane. Through one of these kiosk systems, consumers will be able to browse, rent, or purchase digital movies and TV shows, and load them onto an SD card (or purchase one on the spot) before boarding a flight.

“This is the first real commercial deployment of major studio content through kiosks,” Bay says. “With movies and television shows, the studios are very, very picky about content protection. SD cards are the only format that allow you to protect the content on the card—SD cards are standard secured digital. Using SD cards, we can protect the movie or the TV show, and then essentially either make it permanent use so you can keep it, or you can rent it, so you have 48 hours to watch it.” This capability means the studios don’t have to worry about content protection, and consumers still have the ability to watch a movie or TV show streaming right from their computer, without an Internet connection.

“There’s a lot of buzz about the world moving to digital content distribution. Most companies are focused on content delivery system to the home. MOD is focused on content delivery outside … Next Page »

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With each new product that Apple announces, including the revamped Apple TV and the new Ping social network, Steve Jobs reveals a little bit more of his plan to dominate the media universe. But I can summarize that plan’s fatal flaw in one word: iTunes.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Apple’s hardware is unbeatable, and my admiration for it has only grown since I got my first iPod back in 2003. My home/office is virtually an outpost of the Apple Store: with the exception of the TV, the videogame console, and the coffeemaker, almost every device in my house is an iGadget of some kind. The operating systems that power my Apple devices are pretty good, too. I love OS X and I’m very glad that Xconomy is a mostly Mac shop. On the mobile side, Android is impressive, but iOS is the slickest and most user-friendly mobile operating system out there, in my judgment.

But there’s one piece of the Appleverse that I’ve always detested, and that’s the desktop version of iTunes. The ugly duckling of the iFamily, this program is hard to understand, hard to use, inelegant, and ill-behaved—in short, the very opposite of most other Apple products. I dread booting it up every day, yet I can’t sidestep it. What makes iTunes’ deficiencies so infuriating is that the program is indispensable: it’s the nerve center that stores all of your Apple-related media content, mediates all of your Apple-related purchases, and connects all of your Apple devices.

The rollout of iTunes 10, the latest “upgrade” to this nearly 10-year-old program, was one of the two centerpieces of Steve Jobs’ keynote talk on Wednesday, the other being Apple TV, of which I’ll say more in a moment. And the big new feature of iTunes 10 is Ping—a Facebook-like social network designed to help users discover music by seeing what their friends are buying for their iPods.

I’ve been playing with Ping, and it seems to have most of the features you’d expect of a media-centric social network circa 2010—profiles, friending, news feeds, comments. Plus, of course, you can easily preview or buy the songs or albums mentioned in your friends’ news feeds. It’s easy to see how Apple might expand Ping beyond music to facilitate conversations around media of all sorts, including movies, books, and mobile apps.

That said, Ping has some serious limitations that, to me, are symptomatic of the larger problems with iTunes. For example, there’s no integration with Facebook or even with your contact lists, so it’s virtually impossible to find real-world friends to connect with. For a social networking tool, this is a bit of a problem. (Kara Swisher at AllThingsD grilled Steve Jobs on this very issue, and his suggestion for finding friends was to “type their names into search or send them emails inviting them to join.”)

And there’s an even bigger issue: Adding a social networking interface, on top of all of iTunes’ other functions, is like grafting another limb to the forehead of an octopus. It’s just too much.

Few people may remember this far back, but iTunes predates even the iPod. It started out in early 2001 as nothing more than a program for ripping CDs and playing the resulting MP3s from your computer. (It was based on … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Internet retailer Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is working on a new online digital TV and movies subscription service, challenging established competitors such as California-based Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). The e-commerce company has been pitching the Web-based service to media companies including General Electric’s NBC Universal (NYSE:GE), Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), News Corp. (NasdaqGS: NWSA) and Viacom (NYSE: VIA), according to The Wall Street Journal. Amazon is reportedly following a similar model to Netflix’s catalogue of older movies and TV shows available for instant streaming. For more information, see the WSJ story.

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Michigan’s highest-in-the-nation 42 percent tax credit for filmmakers is often called the “film incentive,” but if you ask the folks at PixoFactor Entertainment in Royal Oak, MI, the bigger beneficiaries are those who work on videogame and animation productions. Plus, they argue, those jobs are longer-lasting and more local than movie production.

That’s why Sean Hurwitz, PixoFactor’s president, is in the business. “We feel like the digital side of this incentive has greater potential to create jobs and economy—or, Xconomy [Hurwitz motions over to me, and smiles]—here in Michigan.” A Hollywood film crew comes in for a short time with their own directors and actors, “underpays a lot of interns and a lot of local crews,” he says, shoots the film and then leaves. But it takes nine months to a year to produce a videogame, with local animators and programmers working the entire time.

There are currently about 20 people employed with PixoFactor. But that is about to double with the company’s latest project, one that Hurwitz is visibly excited about. They’re going to produce a new Ben Hogan golf game for the Nintendo Wii. Hurwitz says it will be the first Wii game developed in Michigan. The 42 percent tax refund is sitting on the desk of the Michigan Film Office, awaiting approval. Once that happens, Hurtitz says, PixoFactor’s office on the top floor of a Fourth Street building across the way from the Royal Oak Music Theater is going to be hopping.

The best thing about the project, says Nancy Kelley, PixoFactor’s marketing and business development principal, is that it’s local Michigan money being invested, so that the tax credit comes back to local Michigan people.

The primary local investor in PixoFactor is Envy Capital, based in Farmington Hills, MI. Hurwitz won’t say exactly how much Envy has invested, only that it’s “over a million dollars.”

Hurwitz brought Envy onboard a couple of years ago. He had partnered with the firm back when he was in the commercial real estate business between 2003 and 2007. Prior to that, Hurwitz, 41, a compact but muscular man, had spent 17 years as owner of a landscaping and construction business. PixoFactor … Next Page »

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