MadKast - Share the love, bloggy style

There are several companies at TechStars that are nearing an early launch. One of them is MadKast, which you might have noticed this blog for the last week or so. It’s the little green icon next to the end of the title of each post (visit the blog if you’re seeing this in a reader). MadKast makes it easy for people who are reading a blog post to quickly share it with their friends. It supports both email and MMS sharing, as well as all the popular social bookmarking sites. They also plan to support sharing via instant messengers soon. MMS is neat because the recipient actually gets the full blog post on their mobile phone. MadKast also plans to deliver a suite of analytics that help publishers understand reader engagement, sharing statistics, and more.

I like that MadKast saves every contact that I share content with, so that next time I want to share something, I don’t have to re-enter the recipients information. I can just tag an existing contact or two, and click share. It’s even nicer that this works across any MadKast enabled blog, not just the one where I initially created the contact.

Johann, Josh, Doug, and Tony are all from the Los Angeles area and are the founders behind MadKast. They’ve spent the last eight weeks or so here in Boulder building MadKast and falling in love with the place. Now MadKast has decided to stay here in Boulder after the summer, officially making MadKast a Colorado startup. Woot!

Try out MadKast for your blog, and let the guys know what you think. They’re on about 35 blogs so far and it’s still in beta, but they’ve made this really easy to do - it’s a single snippet of javascript that goes right before your </HEAD> tag. If you use Blogger or TypePad, they’ve made it even easier with auto-installers. Either way, it should take you about 30 seconds.

Let the MadKast guys know what you think. There’s a feedback button right inside the widget itself and contact information on their web site. They’ve been great at taking feedback all summer and iterating quickly.

Todd Vernon – the CEO of Lijit - went on vacation last week. While searches continued to happen, the gang from Villij got together with the some of the Lijit folks and they worked on a new top secret project.

Yeah, well. I’m not sure that’s what he meant when he said “keep up the good work” before heading to Paris.

Dan’l Lewin, Don Dodge, and Dave Drach from Microsoft visited TechStars this past Tuesday. They did a great job of describing how startups could leverage Silverlight, PopFly, and the Microsoft Startup Zone.

I’ve been a fan on Don Dodge’s blog “The Next Big Thing” ever since his well-known rebuttal to the Microsoft is Dead linkbait of 3 months ago. Don has a post up tonight talking about his visit to TechStars and highlighting a few of our companies.

The dynamic of the session with our 26 founders was really interesting in and of itself. Only two of our ten startups utilize the Microsoft stack. Dan’l, Don, and Dave showed genuine interest in understanding why this was the case and I think they got some fantastic feedback from our founders. There is certainly the impression that “it’s just too expensive” and there are some very real reasons why this perception exists, even though it’s not necessarily true given the right connections or access to the best information. We also talked extensively about open source and how early stage companies can simply get their hands on “all the code” vs waiting for their particular bug to become important enough to get fixed. Whatever your religion on this topic is, you couldn’t help leaving this meeting feeling like Microsoft “gets it” and wants to do everything in their substantial power to win back the minds of more startups.

When I did my first startup, it was “pure” Microsoft. For us, this was a no-brainer at the time because we were building public safety software and reliability, support, and platform recognition were key to our ability to sell. The Microsoft Developer Network was a big part of our success, and today the company has evolved fully to .NET and it continues to scale affordably in the largest ambulance operations in the world.

We spent another hour with the guys from Microsoft by allowing our teams to each stand up and give their elevator pitches. After all, it’s not every day you meet the Corporate VP of Strategic and Emerging Business Development at a fifty billion dollar company. Make them nervous while you can, right? Each team had 2 minutes (a long elevator ride) to get their vision across to the group, and then got asked a few pointed questions. I think it was a great exercise for the TechStars teams.

Earlier in the day, the group from Microsoft had also visited many of the other promising companies in the area, showing their support for what’s going on here in Colorado. From what I heard, they were impressed with what they saw. The night ended with a quick talk at the Boulder New Tech Meetup.

Thanks to Dan’l, Don, and Dave for the time at TechStars. All in all, I felt that this was one of our best sessions of the summer so far. And I think they got to take something away from it too.

Here’s the TechStars (sort of) weekly update from week 7. Brad Feld and David Cohen are joined by Kimbal Musk of Me.dium, a Boulder company focused on revealing the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. Me.dium recently raised $15M and Kimbal talks about the company, as well as his experience providing mentorship to the 2007 TechStars teams.

Untitled from David Cohen and Vimeo.

On June 14, the founders of MyBlogLog (Todd Sampson and Eric Marcoullier) visited TechStars for a couple of days. They met individually with many of our founders, and then told the story of MyBlogLog which was recently acquired by Yahoo.

In the video below, Eric remarks that this is really the first time they’ve had the chance to down and tell their story from start to finish. MyBlogLog started as a nights and weekend project for Todd and Eric and when things started to take off they added Scott Rafer into the mix, who helped take it to another level. Overall, the story of MyBlogLog is a great lesson in building extreme value quickly and cheaply, and another excellent lesson for our 26 founders.

The video is about 90 minutes long, but I can promise you that you’ll gain a bit of wisdom if you take the time to check it out. Listen carefully - Todd and Eric talk about really interesting subjects like cookies vs profiles, how to leverage “pro accounts”, eating when dinner is served, and thinking about value from day one.

Thanks Todd and Eric. We appreciate the time you gave to TechStars.