Last week at the Mountain View Demo Day Automattic CEO Toni Schneider came on stage an announced the acquisition of 2007 TechStars team Intense Debate.

Here are some outlets that wrote about it:

Last week it was confirmed that SocialThing!, a 2007 TechStars team was acquired by AOL.
The Inquisitr has an interesting post on why it is great to be purchased by AOL.
TechCrunch was on the story first with many other fine news outlets piling on details.
The SocialThing! team is staying in Boulder, setting up a more permanent [...]

I love using BrightKite, the best location based social network in the land.  They have done some really smart things, like focus intensely on privacy and introducing ‘always not public’ location checkins.
Today, I read about another fantastic little tweak, via Colin:
Brightkite knows how their user’s are using the system.  An example of this was brought [...]

BrightKite, my favorite location based social network, doesn’t have an iPhone app.
I feel like several people have told me this since the Apple Apps Store opened last Friday. I feel like they have screamed it from the top of buildings.
The reason?  They are waiting to launch something rock solid, and without being able to test [...]

Big news from FiltrBox tonight, they just opened to the pubic.
What is FiltrBox? Think of it as a professional media monitoring service. Set up ‘filtrs’ on your company, name, competition, and FiltrBox runs a persistent search on that topic, stores past mentions and gives you sorting functionality across all your filtrs. You [...]

Ari Newman and Tom Chikoore are the founders of FiltrBox, which is the favorite web app I currently use.
Yesterday I saw a great piece in Inc about their fine company (and some competition).
Founded in 2007, Filtrbox targets professionals who want to keep tabs on specific search terms, like a competitor’s name.
The title surprised me, “Horse [...]

One of the 2007 TechStars teams, J-Squared Media is in the offices visiting the past teams sharing lessons learned. Joe Aigboboh and Jesse Tevelow rode the FaceBook app wave to a few very popular applications. They did not seek funding. A 9 minute interview is below.

28 minute video from the session “Starting Your Startup” with Todd Vernon, Brad Feld and David Cohen.

What does it take to launch your company and brand?
Brian Dewitt, a founder of SocialThing! gives 3 tips on launching your company, which include
1. Focus/ Refine (listen to your advisors and mentors)
2. Plan Attack/ Roadmap
3. Followup
8:19 in length, hit the play button below to listen in.

The new class of TechStars has arrived today. Of course this brings me a good bit of nostalgia and reflection back on what it was like for Josh and me to start at TechStars one year ago. So in the time-honored blogosphere tradition, I’m going to offer some unsolicited advice to all my new TechStars [...]