But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

Techies love high value dining.

The most interesting part of today's news that mobile advertising startup Place IQ had raised $4.2 million was that the Boulder, Colorado based company is packing its bags and heading to New York. Roger Ehrenberg, whose IA Ventures has been backing Place IQ since the seed stage, says it's the natural evolution of the company. "The partners and the clients are here. The engineering talent is here. They did a great job building out the core tech and finding some traction. But when it's time to scale, you want to stop living on an airplane."

New York as a hotbed for engineering talent is becoming a familiar refrain. But if Facebook is also opening an office in Silicon Alley to try and tap into these in-demand workers, won't hiring here become an absolute nightmare? "I think its actually two very different kinds of people," Mr. Ehrenberg said. "There are folks who appreciate the stability and scale of a Google or a Facebook and then there are want to be the big fish in the little pond and make their mark on a company."

Mr. Ehrenberg hinted that future funding announcements would be paired with a move to New York (okay, that's two; three times is a trend story). "The old line is that Silicon Valley VCs only want to fund companies in their backyard. We try and take a more flexible approach."

Having startups relocate to New York does give Mr. Ehrenberg a chance to flex his muscles as a recruiter. "I work with the engineering and data science folks at Columbia, so we can tap a ton of great young talent coming out of there."

There are outliers of course. TechStars NY grad ThinkNear, also backed by IA Ventures and working in the mobile advertising space, decided to head for Los Angeles after graduating from the accelerator. But with foursquare, Hyperpublic, Localresponse and many others, New York stands out as the nation's biggest hotbed for location-based tech companies.

Every Apple Has Its Thorns

The average user may not have noticed some changes to Apple's UDID, but with iOS 5 the company has closed off a valuable source of information for independent mobile ad networks. "A lot of people are scrambling to find alternatives," says Giancarlo Maniaci, the CEO of TapIt. "The UDID allowed people to track what apps a user had installed and give our clients a sense of how well their campaigns were working. Now Apple is the only one who can offer that."

On the location-based advertising side there were similar complaints. Eli Portnoy, who runs the ThinkNear—a service that helps merchants optimize their flow of customers by serving up location based mobile ads and deals—took note of it on his blog: "“So let me get this straight: mobile publishers on iOS are not allowed to pull location to serve more targeted ads. However, Apple owned iAds is allowed to pull location just to serve ads targeted to a customers location regardless of what the publisher says. To add salt to injury, this feature is turned on by default and buried in the menu system not under ‘Location Services,’ but under ‘System Services,’” Mr. Portnoy wrote. “The FTC really needs to crack down on Apple’s anti-competitive practices.”

It's Apple's prerogative to decide what user data from apps on their platform gets shared with third parties. "It's always been a tug of war in terms of Apple passing any type of user data to ad networks," said Devin Radford, a senior manager at Amobee. "The data on a user's location is very valuable, because the whole point of mobile is to deliver these highly targeted ads."

Location, says Tom Limongello, VP of Marketing at Crisp, is a value-added service in mobile advertising: "It's fair for ad networks to bitch, but they can't argue with Apple for wanting a competitive advantage."

Already some advertisers are considering a switch away from Apple. "If we can't get at the most valuable inventory on iOS, then we'll be moving more into Android and mobile web," TapIt's Mr. Maniaci concluded.

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.

DO NOT GO TO THERE!

Venture capitalist Peter Thiel pushed the debate about whether a college education is worth the student debt past the tipping point--he'd rather pay smart kids $100,000-a-piece to build a start-up--but the argument has taken on a life of its own.

Entrepreneurs have long romanticized the notion of a boot-strapped, self-taught success and held a healthy skepticism over whether a classroom can prepare you for the business world. But Eli Portnoy, a TechStars alum/Harvard MBA and CEO of ThinkNear, a location-based services start-up that helps merchants drive traffic to stores during down periods, takes an updated look at the current landscape.

It's no longer just a choice between going to college or venturing out on your own. With the proliferation of incubators and accelerators, especially top programs offering a credible alternative, Mr. Portnoy delves into the specifics, outlining the upsides of going to TechStars versus getting a Harvard MBA. His conclusion?

If you know you want to start a company there is nothing more helpful than TechStars and I would strongly suggest going through the program ahead of an MBA. The experience is more relevant, the network more concentrated, and the cost (hard cash and in opportunity) lower. In the long-run I am not sure which will prove more helpful (though I suspect the brand cache of an MBA program will be longer lasting), but the direct benefits of being in an incubator/accelerator are unmatched and the opportunity unparalleled if you are thinking of starting a tech based business.

Sounds good in theory. Too bad TechStars is now harder to get into than the Ivy League.

THINKNEAR GOING FAR. The pre-launch TechStars grad ThinkNear has closed a round of funding, a source tells Betabeat, and is heading out to... Culiver City! We've heard of Culver City near L.A., but ThinkNear's job listings page, which lists openings for four engineers, plainly says Culiver. Anyone know how much they raised, by the way?

LEARNVEST'S BIG ROUND. "We had not given that to TechCrunch by any means," a slightly harried-sounding PR rep for LearnVest told Betabeat when we called to ask what the heck a content site needs $12 million more dollars for. "Wtf will they do with $19 million,'" a source Gchatted Betabeat. "For a newsletter that says 'don't take cabs every day! Use a 401k!'" Speculation is that LearnVest's long-awaited money manager tool, something with more of the functionality of Mint.com, may be on the horizon. "They were trying to build some tools this time last year, and I think just needed a lot more tech resources," another source said. Well, LearnVest? "In the next month or so LearnVest is going to be making some pretty big announcements," the PR rep told us, and wouldn't say more. Their jobs page is still mostly editorial and sales positions, though, with one opening for a web developer and one for a java coder. 

PAY TO PLAY. Entrepreneurs are getting sick of the "meat-market atmosphere" at pay-to-play events like TechCrunch Disrupt's Startup Alley and the upcoming $990 New York Venture Summit, as well as the $125 to $475 it costs to submit a site or campaign for the Webbys. "This is a pet peeve of mine, a start-up should NOT pay to present," one user wrote to the New York Tech Meetup email list, citing all the free forums where pitches are chosen based on merit and a bit of who you know, i.e. NYTM, the other million tech meetups, the SpeedGeeking pitch event at ReadWriteWeb's 2WAY Summit, the $10 Hatchery events, and on.

MYSTERY SOLVED. That early-stage VC fund seeking 5,000 sq. ft. in Midtown, which we rumor-reported six weeks ago? It's "super-angel/micro-VC firm" ff Venture Capital, where Infochimps's John Frankel just hired Hashable CEO Michael YavonsoldQuigotoAOLfor340million and Harvard Business School Angels organizer David Teten.

SNACKS! Supposedly Mark Zuckerberg was chillin' in the Coding Soundtrack room on Turntable.fm today; Chris Sacca and Dave McClure were also rumored to have stopped by. French start-up Balloonup is visiting and considering a move! Nerd Collider has an office in Midtown! Tumblr is having an Internet Week party tonight, at the Hudson Hotel!