And…the next third of the class (not in preference, just order of appearance :) ).

Meal Ticket @mealtickets I missed Meal Ticket’s BDNT presentation this week, but I had heard it was hard to grok. From what I can tell, these guys made a huge effort in the last few days to refine their pitch, and from the final pitch, I’d say it paid off. Meal Ticket attempts to tackle the problem of customer acquisition and poor customer retention for the food distribution business. It’s not an industry many of us tech folk know a lot about, but these guys seem to have food and tech covered. Their distributor product allows distributors to create promotions for the restaurants they serve that will help them clear excess inventory. The distributor gives the restaurant a deal on a product, and the restaurant can in turn use this product as a promotion or deal for their restaurant. It’s quite clever really. They have aligned the interests of food distributors, restaurants, and consumers by reducing waste and increasing profits. This also makes the food distributor more than just a supplier to the restaurant–they become a marketing partner, which creates much more of a barrier to switching than exists today. Meal Ticket already has paying customers and a pipeline that is poised to expand their reach to distributors servicing 50K restaurants in the next 90 days. Interested? You can download their consumer-facing app for IOS and Android now.

Mocavo @mocavo Mocavo is a genealogy search engine. When I heard this, I wasn’t impressed. Uhm, doesn’t Ancestry.com already do this? Yes and no. Mocavo’s offering is different. While Ancestry allows users to search through birth, death, and marriage records, Mocavo indexes the free web for the 250K genealogy sites and forums that Google largely ignores, because as one of the founders stated, “dead people are neither fresh nor popular.” Mocavo is also social, meaning that you can build and share your family tree and link it in to your Facebook family connections. When you search for an ancestor, Mocavo tells you who else has been searching so that you can connect with likely family members. Most exciting of all, Mocavo’s subscription model will automate your search of their database of 4.1 billion names, which is projected to be at 9 billion by the end of the year. My take? I expect Mocavo to be receiving a buy offer from Ancestry any day now. Mocavo would be a powerful addition to their already strong offering.

Go Spotcheck @GoSpotCheck Go SpotCheck wants to send you on a mission to check inventory, product placement, and displays in merchandise, maybe even take a photo and report back. Why? Brands pay big money for better shelf placement in stores and suffer when product isn’t stocked properly or is out of date. Right now, they rely on sterile and outdated data found by merchandising auditors. It’s expensive, weeks too late to solve many problems, and it’s simply not very rich. Go SpotCheck uses crowdsourcing to gather data from smartphone-armed consumers who are already in the stores. They pay consumers a couple of bucks for a minute or two of work and Go SpotCheck for the platform. It’s win, win. One early client, a local chocolatier, learned that a local business had merchandise on the shelf that was 6 months past its expiration date. That’s not good for the consumer, store, or manufacturer. With Go SpotCheck, suppliers can learn this information quickly and inexpensively, and most importantly, make corrections before weeks worth of damage is done.

Report Grid @reportgrid ReportGrid makes it dead simple (looks like two lines of code) to add incredibly insightful analytics to your service offering, even if you’re dealing with really, really big numbers of data points. ReportGrid is the product that I want the services I’m already using to buy. Instead of spending months and months and tons of cash to have a solution that might work, companies can spend an afternoon to setup analytics on their site using ReportGrid. Better still? You get the expertise of a serious mathematician built-in, which most companies don’t have hidden in cube land. I expect to see this product used on my favorite sites over the next year. If not, they may not be my favorite sites anymore ;)

Coming soon–Part 3 and my overall thoughts on Techstars Demo Day 2011!

I spent my morning at the Techstars Demo Day for the Class of 2011 in Boulder. It was my first time at the ‘big show’, although I did watch practice pitches both this year and last at Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (BDNT).  For the uninitiated, Techstars is arguably the top startup accelerator on the planet, and it was started right here in Boulder. Each year, they give about a dozen teams $18,000 to start their own business, but even more valuable, they get 90 days with top minds in tech to guide them, all while working out of the Bunker together with the buzz that comes from so many smart and ambitious people in one place. Over the last couple of years, Techstars has expanded into a few other cities and now gets a few dozen companies started each year. They are a big deal, and Techstars is one of the reasons that I now live in Boulder. It’s the heart of this entrepreneurial mecca that I call home.

Now, onto this year’s class!

Simple Energy @simpleenergy This customer engagement platform for utility companies was an obvious crowd and local favorite. It’s the company that I heard the most buzz about leading up to Demo Day. Simple Energy has built a platform to engage utility customers where they are already–Facebook, mobile, email, and more. It’s a huge step away from the antiquated snail mail engagement campaigns that currently dominate the industry. When I first saw their practice pitch at BDNT on Tuesday, I wasn’t all that impressed, honestly. Much of their demo focused on the overlay of the social graph, basically putting friends into competition with each other on Facebook to save energy. It’s just not something I’m personally interested in, although it’s very Boulder. That’s what worried me. I was afraid that they were making assumptions based upon Boulder’s very skewed demographics. However, after today’s pitch and further reflection, it’s clear to me that they don’t need the level of engagement that they would be likely to get in Boulder to be successful. Current utility customer engagement is 1%. Out of one hundred people, I’m sure there are at least several that would be interested in making utility consumption a game. Even if it’s just three, they’ve increased engagement by 200%. That’s a win. Furthermore, the email campaigns and mobile application have a good chance of engaging me. Pair that with the deals with large utility companies that they have already secured, and I believe this team is set up for huge success.

FlixMaster @getflixmaster After an apparently large pivot and name change, this team has come out of their Techstars summer with a very sexy product. Their product is a web-based tool for creating what they call branching video. From inside the video player (on your website, youtube, etc), a user can have a choose your own adventure experience. Their HTML5-based platform allows content creators to drag and drop video, stills, websites, forms, and more to create a variety of paths for the user. These types of videos exist today, but they are created by high end web development companies, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and can still only connect to other videos. So why is anyone doing this now? These videos get sixteen times the views of non-branching videos. Even better for users of FlixMaster, they use  Techstars Class of 2011 grad ReportGrid (more below) to deliver analytics about the path that the users take through the experience. Note, I called it an experience rather than a video, because with FlixMaster, it’s so much more than video. I do have a couple of concerns for these guys, though. 1) I’m worried about copy cats. 2) I’m also concerned that for smaller producers and companies that do this work in house, there won’t be a lot of demand. Sure, they’ll want to use it, but it will probably only be a couple times a year. It feels like they should be targeting mid-size to large marketing agencies. Even with the huge cost savings of this product over using a web development team, the cost of video production for multiple paths through a video feels like a barrier for smaller companies.

Creative Brain Studios @bookergames This is one of the products I want to get my hands on–like now-ish. Creative Brain Studios has built a game engine. You build it once, it’s published and deployed on all of the most popular platforms, both desktop and mobile. The game engine looks like it’s easy to use and will help you through the entire process from design & development through publishing & monetization. Gaming is exploding, especially the types of games that can be built with this engine. This team is well positioned to help new game developers into the market, as well as speeding up time to market for those already there. I’m excited for their future, and I really do want to play with that game engine. Guys, are you listening? ;)

Truant Today @truanttoday I’m going to be honest here. When I saw that the youngest Techstars team of 16 & 17 years old had built an app to cut down on school truancy, I thought ‘how cute’. I need to apologize to these two young men. They did what all entrepreneurs should do, build what they know, and it looks like they’ve done their research and built a great product. Truant Today automatically texts and emails parents when their children are absent from school. In a test they did earlier this year, they had a 50% rate of same day return and 75% increase in attendance. That’s wonderful right? But how are they going to make money from already cash-strapped schools? That school I just mentioned? They reclaimed $800K in funding due to increased attendance. That’s win, win. With more kids in the seats and more cash to work with, these schools will be much more successful. And if TruantToday doesn’t help the school reclaim more funds than its price, TruantToday will give the school a credit on the next year’s subscription. Considering that schools lose $30-50 per student per day missed, I don’t think that TruantToday will have to make good on that promise very often. While I so wrongly didn’t take these two entrepreneurs seriously at first, if I had the cash, I’d be happy to invest some of the several hundred thousand dollars they’re seeking.

That’s the first third. Keep watching for Part 2 and Part 3 to learn more about this year’s class!