(techstars.com)

TechStars New York has had three classes for a total of 37 startups since it launched in the beginning of 2011. The guys at social media sentiment analysis startup Buellr have arranged a ranking of the top ten of graduates from all but the current class.

"What we're doing now is culling together sentiment analysis from a variety of data providers," cofounder Adrian Grant explained. "We then combine them in hopes of normalizing the dataset. Then we rank them by positive mentions, number of mentions, who is saying the comment and various other components that have their own respective weights assigned to them."

Unsurprisingly, the popular Foursquare app Timehop came in first, even though cofounders Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong were working on another idea entirely, FriendsList, during the first session of TechStars back in January of last year.

Speaking of working on another idea entirely, that's how Buellr came about. "We viewed this product, social media reviews, as a 'day off' kind of project, in the vein of the movie 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off,'" Mr. Grant said in an email.

The rest of the rankings are:

10. Onswipe, which makes publishers' content look good on mobile browsers
9. Wantworthy, a bookmark list for fashion.
8. SideTour, the marketplace where amateur tour guides, chefs and art buffs can curate activities for travelers and idle locals.
7. Nestio, the apartment hunt organization system.
6. Shelby.TV, which creates a video playlist by pulling links out of your social media streams.
5. CrowdTwist, a consumer loyalty analytics tool.
4. Coursekit Lore, the socially-enhanced classroom management platform.
3. Contently, the marketplace for mercenary bloggers and content-hungry publishers to find each other.
2. Ordr.in, which turns any website, app or device into a menu and a way to order food.
1. Timehop, an email reminder of where you were a year ago today.

CORRECTION, April 25: An earlier version of this post said the rankings include all three classes of TechStars NY; that is incorrect. The original rankings also included TechStars graduate Red Rover--but used data for an unrelated company by the same name. "We are building Buellr lean and thus far have gotten some solid feedback. That being said, our internal processes clearly still need to be refined," Mr. Grant wrote in an email. Betabeat regrets the errors.

bring on the advertorial army

Contently, a startup which managing an online marketplace that matches freelance writers with work, has raised $2 million in a series A round led by Lightbank, the firm run by Groupon investor and board member Eric Lefkofsky. Local investors like ff Venture Capital and Consigliere Brand Capital also participated.  

The funding was reported by Ad Age, which notes that the company pulled a small pivot, deciding to help journalists connect with brands looking for editorial content, instead of matching them with traditional media outlets. Having played the freelance game ourselves, this is a way better business model. There is little money in freelance journalism and most editors at these publications already have a stable of writers and tons of pitches to sort through.

Brands, on the other hand, are increasingly discovering the value of having blogs and forums full of editorial content that bring in potential customers and raise their SEO. Contently has worked with companies like American Express, Best Buy, Rackspace, Mint and Elle.

The company currently has six employees including founders Shane Snow Joe Coleman and David Goldberg.

Abe the dino helping you recall

It was all sort of an accident. Developers Jonathan Wegener and Benny Wong decided to take a break from TechStars NY and have a little fun at a foursquare hackathon. "It was the one day during the entire program we didn't go to the office, just a way to step off the grind of 15 hour days," Mr. Wegener told Betabeat.

The product, originally called Foursquare-And-Seven-Years-Ago, sent users an email reminding them where they had checked in one year prior. "People had a really strong reaction to it," said Mr. Wegener. "We kept thinking of it as this jokey little app we built, but when we had so many users it was starting to cost us money just to send out the daily emails, then we couldn't ignore it anymore." 

Today the product relaunched as Timehop, which adds Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to the list of services from which users can cull their digital memories. It was a move inspired by Yipit's Vin Vicanti. "He took us to breakfast and told us that our email was one of the things he looked forward to reading each morning," Mr Wegener said.

The boys had a great product market fit, but Mr. Vacanti felt that their market, Foursquare's 15 million users, was too small. "That was the conversation that got us to bring all these other services on board as well," Mr. Wegener said.

For now the company is relying on some help from a fellow TechStars alum to get the emails out, but they are considering bringing advertisements or daily deals into the service in order to monetize. "When we tell people about the service, its kind of split down the middle," Mr. Wegener said. "Half of them get it right away and the rest look at me like I'm crazy. 'Why would I want to remember what I did a year ago?'"

Mental note, not a good service for people who feel they've peaked. But a pleasant reminder that our best ideas often come when we stop trying so hard.

Things are crowded when the mayor sits on the arm of your couch

When someone gets around to writing the history of Silicon Alley, 36 Cooper Square is going to be front and center. The long time home of foursquare will now be the new office for TechStars New York, helping to incubate the next generation of Silicon Alley startups.

"Big things happened in that space, and its going to be inspiring for the young entrepreneurs coming through our program," said TechStars New York's managing director, David Tisch. "For us, we've never had a permanent home, so this will allow us to create a more full-fledged workspace."

Mr. Tisch says the additional room will mean TechStars can bring in more Hackstars, their roving rockstar developer types, and give mentors visiting from around the country more space and time to hold court while they are in town. "Plus we can provide desks for alumni and stop kicking them out when the program is over," Mr. Tisch joked.

Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai said that he and Mr. Tisch were having breakfast recently and found themselves both bemoaning their lack of space. "It made perfect sense, and it felt great to give the space to another member of the New York tech scene."

The move won't happen officially till January, which means things are getting pretty tight at foursquare, which has grown from about 35 to around 100 employees in the past year. "We're using poker tables as desks right now. And people have been turning the supply closet into a quiet space for conference calls," said Mr. Selvadurai.

The team at foursquare used some of their geographic know how when selecting their new office at 568 Broadway. "We mapped out the commute for a lot of our employees and the 6 train turned out to be this really central line. It will be great not to have to work in our kitchen, but I'm also gonna miss that scrappy startup feel."

Have you identified which cloud the perps are in?

Our personal favorite among this recent crop of TechStars NY startups was Dispatch, mostly because we can relate to the pain point they are trying to solve.  The company gives users a single login and interface for managing their files across all their different cloud hosting services. So I can, for example, bring together all the different music I have on Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music.

The service raised its seed round from a host of New York names, as reported by TechCrunch. The round was led by Thrive Capital with SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, the GroupMe founders, David Tisch, Kal Vepuri and Zelkova Ventures.

Dispatch CEO Jesse Lamb had previously been working as an attorney because, as he told Betabeat, "I got hit by a car." During the aftermath Mr. Lamb came to know and like his lawyer, and ended up taking that career path for a while. But the startup life, she is a siren.

Disclosure.

Bloomberg's TechStars finale, which included a cast reunion.

The finale of the TechStars reality show is out, and it's starting to look like Bloomberg took the Davids for a ride. Everyone in TechStars was required to participate--Bloomberg kept referring to the show as a documentary, and the program directors insisted it would be good publicity for everyone. "Tisch and Cohen fought VERY hard to make sure the finale episode was positive," Melanie Moore, one of the first New York session alumni who was uncharitably portrayed, wrote on Hacker News last night when her blog post, "TechStars, Lies and Videotape," hit the front page. "They felt just as disappointed and betrayed by Bloomberg as I."

The show stitched together unrelated scenes and built a narrative that was in places entirely fabricated. It made Ms. Moore look like a ditz, David Tisch look like jerk and Jason Baptiste look like a braggert. But how did it make TechStars look?

From the Hacker News comments:

• "It's nice that the startup founders are defending Techstars, but as a potential applicant, this whole thing does raise red flags for me. Doing a startup is hard enough with your personal emotional ups and downs. To add a reality tv show to that just seems like the worst idea ever. Maybe it's good for media startups to get as much press as possible, good or bad. But this blog post seems to suggest otherwise. If the people running Techstars really got fooled by Bloomberg, then how can I trust these people about giving good startup advice?" -revorad
• "This actually reflects poorly on TechStars that they gave so much access to a media source without proper negotiaion and/or enforcement." -badclient
• "But still, forcing companies to do something or drop out? That is not how an accelerator should treat its companies, like they were your bosses. The only boss a startup should have is its customers, and now TS, due to its poor judgement has done the opposite of what it was meant to do. Not only do they make poor calls, but they also bully founders?" -abbasmehdi

And the worst:

• "I would be shocked if PG allowed a program like this about YC to air." -marcamillion

Ms. Moore and the other Bloomberg stars jumped to the incubator's defense. "Please do not let the show color your opinion of TechStars. I would do the program over in a heartbeat, and made lifelong friends and mentors along the way," she told one potential applicant, who answered: "I'm not. Friends and advisors who have gone through it or are otherwise related to the program have very highly recommended it so we're still full speed ahead on the application. Incidentally, our company is working in technology around video editing."

Says Mr. Tisch, by email: "The show presents only a tiny fraction of what actually happened--under one percent of what was probably filmed was used, and obviously focuses on drama. Our goal was to encourage mentorship and to help others understand the difficulties and challenges of doing a startup and we hope that's the case. But people do have to remember that they're watching TV--a narrated and massively summarized version of events."

UPDATE 7/26/2011

ThinkNear has announced that Google Ventures, who the team met during their time at TechStars NY, is one of its backers. Other investors include Metamorphic Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, FF Venture Capital, Real Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, BoldStart VC, David Tisch, Bill Boebel, Ben Sun, David Cohen and Matt Turck.

"We had only planned to raise $1 million but got $2 million worth of interest before we stopped looking," says Founder Eli Portnoy. "We chose mainly to raise from the mentors we met through TechStars, people we knew could add value."

The company won't disclose how many clients it has yet, because it sees its "smart marketing engine" in competition for the same slice of the budget at restaurants and small businesses who might try out heavyweight services like Groupon and Living Social.

and now back your the original post...

- - -

There isn't a lot of buzz around the field of "yield management" these days. But while ThinkNear's seems to have settled on a boring tagline for their business, it actually sits at the middle of some of the most interesting trends in the much hyped mobile space right now.

Betabeat has learned that ThinkNear just closed their funding round, raising $1.63 million instead of the $1 million they announced at TechStars NY Demo Day back in April. The round, led by Roger Ehrenberg's IA venture's, includes a number of interesting investors.

"Its Sunday night, my kids are sleeping and I am back in the office listening to John type as he whips out some groundbreaking code," Founder Eli Portnoy wrote on his blog this week. The company recently had a bad experience with a contractor that left them with shoddy work which delayed their progress. But Portnoy's blog is filled with excitement about the company and burning the candle at both ends.

IA is all about big data. ThinkNear helps merchants by pulling together information from public check ins, weather, local events and more to help merchants maximize the flow of customers through their store. Portnoy and his co-founder John Hinnegan, earned their chops at Amazon, where they first conceived the idea for ThinkNear.

ThinkNear weighs all these different factors and delivers mobile ads and deals to nearby customers during times when business is slow. It's the kind of ad inventory that is going to be growing very rapidly over the next year, as services like Google Offers and Groupon Now compete to win the loyalty of smartphone users. ThinkNear wants to build an ad network for serving these sort of real time proximity based ads/deals.

These are not the blogger you're looking for

It's not a million dollar round on the first day of class, but Contently.com, which just joined the second class of TechStars NY, has raised a $335,000 debt round from Founder Collective.

The start-up has positioned itself as the anti-content farm, helping freelance journalists to manage their careers and big brands to produce editorial content that stands out, all while avoiding the SEO optimized schlock pumped out by Demand Media and others.

Speaking from personal experience, there isn't much money in making freelance journalists your clients. But connecting professional writers with big brands looking for some high class advertorial could be a strong play. A corporation can afford to pay premium freelance rates, since they are chasing pageviews and online engagement, not a return on their dollars via advertising.

“Contently is something that literally every one of our portfolio companies could use," Founder Collective Managing Partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch. “Contently makes content marketing turnkey for it’s growing base of clients."

The danger here is that what makes for really effective content marketing, take the wildly popular OkCupid Trends blog, is an authentic voice and a deep engagement with the subject. Yes, Contently is finding experienced writers to help create great posts. But a freelancer is never going to have the voice and insight of a person who actually works at the company, the path taken by blogging stars like Robert Scoble and Marco Arment.

Check please.

The hottest ticket in town for young start-ups is TechStars NY, an accelerator which wrapped up its inaugural class with a demo day at Webster Hall that packed the house with a who's who of East Coast investors. Today Techstar's NY announced its second class, which is slightly larger than the first, more experienced, and features a much higher percentage of Silicon Alley companies.

There are twelve companies in the new class and all but three were founded in New York City. Two start-ups are out of Philly, CourseKit and Want Worthy, but Coursekit just raised $1 million and moved to the Big Apple. The third out-of-towner is Zferral, a platform for driving social referrals.

"I think there was definitely a strong network effect, and that's why you are seeing so many more local companies in this class," says Managing Director David Tisch. "A lot of these were companies we were able to meet and watch over the past months, which gave us confidence there was more than just talk to their pitches."

As for the companies being more fully formed than the first class, Mr. Tisch says that may change the dynamic of the program. "Last time we had four or five companies change over the course of the three months. It's harder to see the natural pivots for a lot of these start-up."

TechStars NY has also added on a number of new mentors including Partick Keane, Laural Touby, Mark Suster and Andy Weissman, who admitted at demo day that he encouraged TechStars standout OnSwipe not to join when he first heard of the program, but had completely changed his mind after watching them grow.

Here are the members of the new class is alphabetical order.

Arootz - NY, NY - Marketplace for Authentic Experiences

Chat id - Florida; UK; Pakistan - Unified Chat Platform for Businesses

Contently - NY, NY (via Idaho) - Marketplace for Professional Content

CourseKit - Philadelphia, PA - Social Learning Management Software

Dispatch.io - NY, NY; Florida - Cloud Sharing, Movement, and Management Service

Fred Rover - NY, NY - Web and Mobile App Discovery

Ordr.in - Brooklyn, NY - API for Food Service Industry

Piictu - NY, NY (via Caracas, Venezuela) - Mobile Photo Meme Game

TimeStream (Spontaneously) - NY, NY - Social Calendar and Discovery Platform

Urtak - NY, NY - Publisher Polling Tool to Increase Engagement

Wantworthy - Philadelphia, PA - Brand for Discovering and Sharing Women’s Fashion

Zferral - Detroit, MI - Social Referral Platform

The round will be led by Spark Capital and followed on by Lightbank, Yuri Milner, Lerer Ventures, SVAngel, Betaworks, Morado, Eniac and Thrive Capital.

The tablet publishing platform is prepping a launch for June 21st when it will announce major partnerships that we hear includes the nation's biggest newspapers, magazine publishers and online properties.

The big sell of Onswipe is that is integrates easily with almost any CMS and, with just a few lines of Javascript, turns a publishers website into a touch enabled tablet experience on iPad, iPhone and Android.

Tellingly the service does not currently work with Android tablets. Onswipe is keeping a close eye on the sales numbers for these devices and will add it to the arsenal if it becomes a viable option.

Beyond easy conversion of any site to a tablet friendly format, Onswipe is hoping to help publishers deal with the Instapaper problem. Readers love to save articles to consume at their convenience, whether they are on or offline. But services like Instapaper strip out all the branding and advertising. Onswipe plans to solve that problem with MyOnswipe, which caches stories for users to read without stripping them bare.

Disclosure.