BusinessWeek Names BrightKite and Foodzie Among Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs

This morning BusinessWeek published a list of the top 22 “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs 2009.”  On that list were 2007 TechStars alumni BrightKite and 2008 alumni Foodzie.

They write about BrightKite and founder Martin May:

Dozens of startups offer mobile location-based applications, but few have gained wide traction. Brightkite amassed a big enough following that by April it was bought by Limbo. Now, Brightkite founder Martin May is charged with merging the two products, both of which let users add notes and see others’ posts on such locales as restaurants or music festivals.

Not on the list was cofounder Brady Becker who missed the age cutoff by just a year.  Here are both founder pictured last year at the TechStars Boulder office:

Also highlighted was Foodzie:

Friends since their first year at Virginia Tech, the founders of Foodzie reconvened after college to build an online outlet for artisan food. Chief Marketing Officer Olson had worked at a specialty food retailer and saw how tough it was for local producers to get shelf space.

Here is the Foodzie team after their presentation at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup in 2008:

Congratulations to the teams!

Limbo acquires Brightkite

I just saw the news that Limbo has finalized their merger with Brightkite and announced $9M in new funding.

I’m pumped for Martin and Brady – they built a fantastic product that’s had very strong adoption over the last 18 months or so since they left TechStars after the summer of 2007. Congrats are also due to Alan who was also an original founder of the company. They’ve come a long way since first thinking of the possibilities of asking the simple question “Where are you?”

I had the chance to chat with Martin on the phone tonight and he told me that they feel like they have found the perfect partner. He told me that this deal adds major support for Brightkite that they didn’t have before, such as strong business development capabilities and deep carrier relationships. Limbo previously raised about $15M in funding from Azure Capital Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and New Enterprise Associates.

Best of all, Martin said, was the fact that Brightkite would not suffer the sad fate of not being enhanced further after an acquisition. According to him, Limbo is fully committed to Brightkite, as evidenced by the pending re-branding of the new joint company which will continue to use the name Brightkite. Martin told me that Brightkite users can expect even more great stuff in the future.

I feel very fortunate that the first year of TechStars produced such great companies. Three of those ten have now been acquired and all but a couple of the others are still going strong today. It’s been so cool to see that all of the founders who went through the program together are still such great friends. I think they will be for life.

Congrats again to Martin, Brady, and Alan. Well deserved.

Related articles

• The State of Location Based Social Networking on the iPhone (techcrunch.com)
• Where are Twitter and Facebook’s Geolocation Features? (mashable.com)
• Facebook, MySpace Ignore Location on iPhone At Their Peril (techcrunch.com)
• Mobile Social Network Brightkite Launches Facebook Connect Integration (insidefacebook.com)

Announcing HackStars

We’re excited to announce a way for great local software developers who want to gain valuable business experience to hack in to TechStars. It’s called HackStars!

If you are a UI/UX guru and/or a strong coder with PHP, Java, Flex, .NET, Ruby/Rails, or Javascript skills and you are intrigued by the idea of donating some of your spare time to help interesting startups for a summer in exchange for meeting all the mentors and founders and sitting in on the mentorship sessions, then HackStars might just be for you.

Applicants must be able to donate 15 (or more) hours a week from May 11 – August 8th.  You’ll need to live in the Boulder/Denver or Boston metro areas as this is a hands on opportunity.

Check out the HackStars page for more information and to apply.