Q. What’s better than a million users?

A. Two million users.

Congrats again to J-Squared Media. Just days after the official end of TechStars, their Sticky Notes application has crossed the 2 million user mark.

Jesse and Joe have started to nail the formula for monetizing their app. They’ve worked with all the major ad networks and have figured out how to get the most bang for the page view. They’re seeing some pretty impressive early revenue and their app is clearly scaling well now.

I know they’re about to launch their follow-up app. I can’t wait to see how it does.

TechStars has officially come to an end this summer. What a blast.

Last Thursday was investor day. We had about 100 media, angels and VCs in the audience to hear 12 minute presentations and demos from our ten teams. Don Dodge had great coverage, as did TechCrunch. GigaOM picked their favorites, and many others commented on the teams. Everyone did a great job of presenting their ideas and plans.

As a result of investor day, I believe that 7 of the 9 companies who were seeking funding are making good progress on their angel rounds. Hopefully we’ll see at least that many get funded. We’ll cover their announcements here on the blog as they announce.

We’ve received many questions already about next year. We plan to open up for applications again in January of February for next summer. We’ll be making many improvements based upon our experiences this year, so stay tuned for details.

One of the biggest things to come out of this for me has been the lifelong friendships I’ve developed with these 26 founders. On our last “official” day together, we partied it up. The next day when I had a chance to reflect on this summer for the first time, I had a big emotional release. You give a little bit of yourself to every startup you help.

If you’d like to get to know the companies from this summer, please visit their sites to learn more:

MadKast, EventVue, Intense Debate, Search To Phone, BrightKite, J-Squared Media, Villij, SocialThing, KB Labs, and Filtrbox.

As always, thanks for following along.

Wanna help get rid of the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere? There are billions of blog comments on the internet, and we’re basically blind to it. What are your friends saying on the blogs? How about the people you respect? Right, you have no idea.

About a week ago, I started using a blog comment replacement plug-in from one of the TechStars teams called Intense Debate on this blog and on the Colorado Startups blog. If you comment on this or any relatively new post on either site, you’ll notice that the comment system is not the typically crappy one you see on other blogs. That’s Intense Debate - here’s how it looks.

Intense Debate is super simple to install, and supports WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad blogs. Right now they’re still in a closed beta, but you can request early access. One of my major concerns was that I’d lose my existing blog comments, but Intense Debate does a great job of preserving them when you upgrade. On my older posts, you’ll notice the plain old WordPress comments are still intact.

Intense Debate gives me a ton of new features, including:

• Threaded comments
• Reputation tracking
• Tracking of comments
• Detailed statistics

One of my favorite features is that I can get an RSS feed of basically anything of interest within comments. I can track all comments made by a particular user across any Intense Debate enabled blog (here’s mine), or I can have a single feed that shows me any comments any users that I mark as friends. I can also just track comments in any sub-thread within the comments. It’s very easy - I can access these features and more for each user via a menu right inside the comments.

Intense Debate solves a major problems with blog comments - namely that they just suck. Go sign up for the closed beta, and you can get it on your blog soon. And feel free - go ahead and comment here to try it out. I’m sure the founders (Jon, Isaac, and Josh) will be hanging around here to answer your questions and would love your feedback.

About six weeks ago, one of our TechStars teams this summer called J-Squared Media launched the Sticky Notes Facebook app. Sticky Notes took off like a rocket and has just crossed the one million user mark today. This has made J-Squared Media immediately profitable - they’ve signed interesting ad deals with several ad networks and it’s paying off for them quite nicely. It’s been said that a Facebook user is worth at least $0.30, and J Squared has data and impressive early revenues showing this is actually quite conservative.

Like many teams this summer, Jesse and Joe came to TechStars with a completely different idea in mind. Within the first week or two of TechStars, they had dropped the original idea and came up with dozens more. At about four weeks in to TechStars, the Facebook platform was looking really interesting and Jesse and Joe decided to focus on making applications for it while they were deciding on their next big thing. Well, as it turns out this was their next big thing. They’ve gained tremendous knowledge about the Facebook application ecosystem by experiencing every corner of it firsthand. They understand how most users think about their time on Facebook, what they want and don’t want, the non-obvious pitfalls of the F8 platform, how to deal with “The FaceBook Problem“, and how to build and scale Facebook apps for millions of users affordably.

Jesse and Joe of J-Squared Media are now among the worlds top experts on the Facebook platform and how to make it sing. They’ve got several more apps in various stages of development and I can’t wait to see where they take it next.

Not many people in the world have built something in just six weeks that touches a million users. Congrats guys.