2008 DEMOgala Showcase Companies

ARC Science Simulations ARC Science Simulations was incorporated in 1981 as Applied Research & Consulting by Thomas Ligon in Loveland, CO. In 1989 the business was redirected towards science software with the release of Dance of the Planets® (affectionately known by thousands as Dance). After many good Dance years with regular updates, a decision was made to pursue Earth-from-space visualization products which lead to the creation of the Face of the Earth™ cloudless earth image released in 1995. This lead to museum and other exhibit projects, and most recently the invention and development of the OmniGlobe®, the first self-contained spherical digital and educational display capable of showing earth or space based images, animations and movies. ARC Science Simulations has long been recognized as the leading provider for accurate, high quality earth imagery. The 1 km/pixel Face of the Earth™ master image, cloud cover and night lights are all derived from satellite data using ARC software, methodology, and aesthetics. Modeling results using ARC’s imagery can compare remarkably well to photographs from space.

BeatPort Beatport is the recognized leader of electronic music downloads by DJs and fans alike delivering content in premium-encoded formats that match the professional performance quality standards of the world's leading sound systems. Beatport.com allows users to access the world of club music through secure, legal, hi-speed, high quality downloads in MP3, MP4 and WAV formats on a pay per download basis from an impressive library of the world's leading independent labels. The first version of Beatport launched in January 2004 with 79 record labels on board. Beatport 2.0 soon became the recognized global leader in Independent dance music, building a catalog over 100,000 tracks supplied by 2,700 signed labels. To help with music discovery, Beatport launched a corresponding community site, Beatportal.com. Beatportal is a result of Beatport's goal to be the most relevant online resource for electronic music, and to provide music lovers with up-to-date information about the world of electronic music. This site offers access to music news, industry news, music reviews, Podcasts, videos, DJ profiles, event listings, nightclubs, and much more. Beatport's main office is located in Denver Colorado with satellite offices in New York and Berlin.

Brightkite Brightkite is a location based social network based in Denver, CO. In real-time it lets people see where their friends are, share their experiences and make new friends based on the places that they frequent. Businesses and venues can capture and syndicate the activity around them via their website, and RSS. Brightkite can be used via the web, text messaging, e-mail, WAP, and the iPhone, giving users an immersive experience. Brightkite is a TechStars company.

ColoradoFirst Robotics FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire an appreciation of science and technology in young people. This not-for-profit organization designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge and life skills while motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math. FIRST's Vision is to positively transform culture by inspiring young people, their schools, and communities to appreciate science and technology. The FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is an exciting, multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. In 2006, the competition reached over 28,000 high-school-aged young people on over 1,125 teams in 33 regional events. FRC teams came from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, Mexico, the U.K., and almost every U.S. state. The competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events, the result of lots of focused brainstorming, real-world teamwork, dedicated mentoring, project timelines, and deadlines. Colleges, universities, corporations, businesses, and individuals provided almost $8 million in college scholarships to FRC participants in 2007. The competition shows students that the technological fields hold many opportunities and that the basic concepts of science, math, engineering, and invention are exciting and interesting.

Denver Botanic Gardens IT Task Force Denver Botanic Gardens CEO Brian Vogt has assembled the Technology Task Force Committee to help transform the Gardens' ability to communicate with the tech-savvy audiences of today. The purpose of this exceptional team is to bring in cutting edge technology to achieve the latest and greatest for Denver Botanic Gardens, creating an environment that is second to none for the next 10 years and beyond. All members of this external team are sharing their talent and expertise on a volunteer basis. As chairman of this committee, Michael Vaughn of TEKsystems has two main teams to help maximize efficiency: infrastructure and Web. Vaughn leads the Gardens' infrastructure team, while Tom Whittaker and Becki Dilworth of Indigio head the Web products team. The committee is working closely with the Gardens' internal IT and Web departments, including external vendors, to accomplish this transformation.

EarthgamZ EarthgamZ connects people to their passion of sports through the power of place. By combining a 3D virtual globe with sports and a social network, EarthgamZ has created an immersive online experience of being as close as possible to being there live. The EarthgamZ technology displays and organizes public, personal, and live content, social networking, location-aware devices, and self posting of teams and players as well as relevant e-commerce for major sports activities on the Earth. EarthgamZ is the first one-stop-shop web application to show information such as teams, players and venues on a 3D landscape. Version Web 3.0 combines the most fundamental aspects of human behavior: geography (a sense of place), the need for social interaction, a passion and interest in a specific topic, and the power of purchasing around that passion.

EffectiveUI EffectiveUI is an award-winning and recognized leader in the design and development of custom rich Internet, desktop and mobile applications, enabling companies to maximize their business results while offering exceptional interactive experiences. Leveraging emerging technologies and expertise in user experience, strategy, design and development, effectiveUI helps today’s most respected brands deepen customer engagements by creating more compelling, dynamic and useful customer interactions. effectiveUI has developed groundbreaking applications for organizations across multiple industries, including eBay, GE Health, NBC Universal, Viacom, Discovery Channel, Dow Jones Adobe and Microsoft.

Efficient Forms, LLC Founded in 2004, Efficient Forms, LLC is a privately-held Colorado company who specializes in automated electronic solutions for efficient and cost-effective forms completion, data collection and process workflow. The horizontal design of the Efficient Forms platform, the Transaction Origination Platform, is quick and easy to deploy, and it allows Efficient Forms and its premier partners to maintain complex solutions in diverse markets, including applications for business, education, government, and more. Its unique Single Entry Multi Company Interface (SEMCI) environment allows industry knowledge leaders to create a strong viral network and quickly gain wide-market penetration.

Envysion, Inc. Envysion is an innovator in web-based video management that is redefining video surveillance. The company is driving the development of Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS), which builds on the concept of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. With the MVaaS platform, Envysion centrally manages software upgrades and version control and addresses the scaling challenges of managing distributed video systems across multiple locations. The Envysion Video service enables organizations to leverage remote video and gives operators the insight to improve performance in every location, every day. Operators benefit from easy to use remote viewing of live and recorded video from an unlimited number of locations, saving time and fuel expense. The service goes beyond traditional security and loss prevention applications by integrating video with business tools such as Point-of-Sale (POS) systems. Envysion Video is easy to install and manage across multiple locations and is constantly and seamlessly upgraded, allowing users focus on their business. Target markets include restaurants, retail, hotels, and financial services.

Fuser Fuser develops tools that improve Internet user's digital lifestyles. Their tools make it easier to communicate online, whether that means one web-based inbox for email and social networks or some other method our community has yet to dream up. With Fuser technology you can use one login to send and receive email, keep up with friends on Twitter, read and reply to Facebook and MySpace messages from within a single mailbox and more. Fuser believes that the annoyance and complexity of managing multiple email and social networking accounts takes too much time and is having an adverse affect on people's digital lifestyles – causing undue stress and annoyance. Most people have multiple accounts with too many logins, too many conflicting interfaces and too little time to check them all. All of this is making it harder to stay in touch with friends, family and co-workers – which goes against why these communications technologies were developed in the first place.

HiveLive.com HiveLive's on-demand software enables companies to rapidly deploy custom-fit enterprise communities built around people, their relationships, and their shared knowledge. The foundation of our patent pending technology is a new Web 2.0 building block (called a Hive) that can be easily configured to function as a wide range of community applications (blogs, wikis, forums, FAQs, and more). With HiveLive’s platform, companies can connect to three community solutions: Customer Communities...that increase brand loyalty, Employee Communities...that increase organizational intelligence and innovation and Partner Communities...that align goals and increase revenue.

Home & Abroad Home & Abroad's is the travel's industry's leader in providing online trip-planning services. Both small, privately-owned businesses and large, multi-national corporations have adopted the unique trip planning service on their websites. Current notable clients include Starwood Hotels, Air Tran Airways, Hawaiian Airlines, Marriott Hotels, Affinion Group, Upromise, and others. Home & Abroad has recently announced the launch of its fully-owned subsidiary, Fogglight, which it will preview at the 2008 Demogala. Fogglight is the travel industry's first OnDemand application that enables a user to create a travel web site, or trip planner for a travel site, complete with content, travel-planning tools, booking engine and more. For free. And in just minutes. Home & Abroad decided to create Fogglight OnDemand out of a desire to see what would happen if every travel business had the freedom to create their own travel website - to take advantage of our trip planning tools and widgets, our content, and also access qualitative data on traveler preferences, goals, and objectives - and in the end, create something uniquely theirs.

iggli, inc. iggli has built an invitation-based social application that monetizes friend-to-friend communication to help ticket distributors, artists, promoters and venues generate event awareness and increase ticket sales. Sites with ticketed events enable the application by placing the invite widget on event pages, which allows users to invite others to that event. From the invitation, invitees can post comments, import contacts, invite others, purchase tickets, and broadcast details via Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, SMS, and mobile communications.

Ignighter Wish dating could be as fun (and as easy) as going out with your friends? Yep, us too. That's why we created Ignighter, and that's why we created group dating. It's about hooking you and your friends up with someone else and their friends. About you all going out together... and about you all having a good time. About making dating less awkward, and about making dating more fun.

IOU Note IOU Note enables people to keep track of the things they owe each other and represents a new kind of personal lending movement, in which people borrow from friends and relatives rather than the traditional lending institutions. With IOU Note, people can easily track and manage their interpersonal loans with a personal manager, loan documentation, and reminders using interactive web tools. IOU Note may be used not only for monetary loans, but also for services and items, such as barter exchanges and tools. Unlike other social lending sites, IOU Note is not a credit union, where people make bids on the lowest interest rates and rely on the traditional credit scoring system. IOU Note manages interpersonal loans between friends and family only, making it the first site solely focused on true social lending.

LifePics LifePics is an online imaging solutions provider headquartered at the base of the Rocky Mountain foothills in Boulder, Colorado. The LifePics business model merges the retail photo and technology industries, combining the convenience of the Internet with the trusted relationship between local photofinishers, professional photographers, and consumers. Since its inception, LifePics has aggregated the world's largest network of photofinishers to provide the latest in online imaging services. LifePics partners with professional photographers, independent camera stores, large retail chains, and photofinishers of all sizes that want to offer their customers a superior online digital photofinishing service.

me.diumFounded in Boulder, Colo. in 2005, Me.dium is a social surfing application. From a window inside your web browser it gives you a personalized map of the Internet based on what you're clicking. You can use it to discover new people and places that are relevant just to you. It also allows you to surf with friends in real-time. It's just like hanging out in the real world, but online. By revealing this new Social Exploration Environment TM (SEE), Me.dium graphically connects users with their friends and others enabling users to interact online, similarly to how one interacts with people in the real world. In June of 2007, Me.dium was recognized by CNET's Webware100 as one of the top 10 community products on the Internet.

Orchestr8, LLC Orchestr8 is a technology startup located in Denver, Colorado, specializing in the creation of data mashup and "structured web" solutions. Orchestr8 has been operating in stealth mode since mid-2005, developing the AlchemyPoint platform and its underlying technology. The AlchemyPoint mashup platform understands "structured" data residing within web pages and uses this information to expose a whole world of related online content. It provides advanced content manipulation and "mashup" capabilities that enable websites to be easily manipulated. Users can share these manipulations with friends or coworkers, or publish them for access by the entire world. The AlchemyPoint platform employs unique proxy mashup technology that allows new functionality to be easily and transparently embedded into any existing website, Intranet portal, or network application (Email, Instant Messaging, etc.).

Quark Inc.Quark was founded in Denver, Colorado in 1981. Named after the subatomic particle proposed as the building block for all matter, the goal was to create software that would be the platform for publishing.  Two decades ago, Quark helped spark the revolution in desktop publishing with the 1987 release of QuarkXPress®. Desktop publishing was in its infancy, and most publications were produced mechanically. QuarkXPress introduced precision typography, layout, and color control to the desktop computer, and it delivered those features to designers at a fraction of the cost of proprietary typesetting systems. There are now more than three million QuarkXPress users worldwide benefiting from a new generation of rich design capabilities for print, Web and interactive media.

Travelfli Travelfli helps frequent flyers maximize the full potential of their miles. Our user-friendly solutions address the major hassles associated with searching, booking, and managing award travel online. The solutions allow users to manage all of their frequent flyer programs from one secure and convenient place, find ways to get free travel using their miles or points and book award travel online instead of making a long phone call. Travelfli is the only site on the web that is taking a comprehensive approach to an extremely inefficient industry. Although frequent flyers only make up 18% of airline travelers, they account for 58% of the travel bookings. This is a highly sought-after demographic and Travelfli is the first company that addresses all of their major pain points in one place.

Techstars TechStars’s motto is "the geeks shall inherit the earth." It was co-founded in 2006 by Brad Feld, David Cohen, and two others. Think of it as a summer boot camp for wannabe Internet entrepreneurs. It’s a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund located in Boulder, Colorado which is quickly becoming one of the country’s top startup hubs. Teams from all over the world apply for the program; ten are selected. This year, 400 applied, most of whom learned about it through the blogosphere. The chosen teams of start-up founders move to Boulder for the summer with nothing more than an idea. Once in Boulder, TechStars gives them up to $15,000 seed funding, office space, and, most important, access to 50 mentors who spend time with each team over the summer. In exchange, TechStars takes 5 percent of each new company’s equity. After the first summer last year, seven of ten have raised additional angel or VC money. TechStars companies get immeasurable benefits that come from introductions and connections to potential partners and customers. At the end of the summer, each company also has the opportunity to pitch during an investor event. Techstars estimate they receive around 600 ideas a year, almost all of which originate from Cohen’s blog. Feld says he has funded at least two entrepreneurs he first met through his blog: FeedBurner and NewsGator, and estimates he’s backed as many as 50 local entrepreneurs since he moved to Boulder.

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