Mr. Klaus, Cofounder and CEO of K2 Labs (facebook.com/dklaus)

The New York tech scene has been flush with news of emerging incubators recently, so it's no surprise that one lucky winner has scored a few mil to help get their projects off the ground.

K2 Labs, "a new model for early stage investing," differentiates itself from the herd by focusing on and healthily funding just a handful of fledgling companies at once. Instead of throwing a ton of new ideas against the wall and seeing which ones stick, K2 funnels its resources into the few startups it believes in, nurturing them until they blossom into mature companies with Ivy League IPOs.

They're the helicopter parents of incubators, if you will.

The people behind K2 Labs are all bigwigs in their own right: cofounder and chairman Kevin Wendle had a hand in founding Fox and E! Online and was named one of Entertainment Weekly's "101 Most Powerful People in Entertainment." He also "helped to launch the careers of Will Smith and Johnny Depp," which we think are critical qualifications for successful incubator execs. Didn’t have a hand in Pirates of the Caribbean? The door is over there, sir (or ma’am)!

Other K2 Labs team members include Music Nation cofounder Daniel Klaus, ex-Limewire engineer Paul Tepper Fisher, and Chris O'Brien, CEO and cofounder of Motionbox.

K2 has three startups on its plate right now: the creepily knowledgeable Sonar, which tells you which of your Foursquare, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter connections are in a room with you; Fingerprint, a "mobile learning and play network" for kids; and Tracks, which allows you to make photo sets called "tracks" to share "social photo stories."

As Mr. Klaus told AllThingsD, "We’re not giving people $25,000 and space to hang out at. We’re really building businesses." No pre-revenue pool table in a sick Manhattan loft? What kind of operation are you running here?

Time to make Tracks

It's been an interesting path for Tracks, a mobile photo sharing app that hopes to connect users around what it calls the "experience graph". "We came out at TechCrunch disrupt in May," says founder Vic Singh. "But then we relaunched in September and found some real traction. That let us put together a seed round and it feels great to go into the new year with some momentum and capital,"

Today the company announced a $1 million seed round from General Catalyst, TMT Investments, Eniac Ventures (where Mr. Singh is a general partner), AppFund, BHV Ventures, Harbor Road Ventures, Atventure.us, and a handful of angels investors including Photobucket founder Alex Welch, who will be joining the company's board. "It's a big validation to us that Alex is so interested in the company, given his history in photos."

Mr. Welch built up Photobucket into one of the web's biggest photo sharing sites, eventually selling it to Fox Interactive for $250 million. “I’ve spent time with Vic and the Tracks team for the last few months and was continually impressed with their maniacal focus on building a beautiful product and their ability to crystallize a powerful and big vision around mobile social networks” said Mr. Welch in today's press release.

Tracks lets users build micro-social networks. So, for example, a group of users could make a track for their vacation, making it simple for them all to share photos to the same place and interact with them. Tracks can be pegged to a certain location or span of time, so there are comparisons to be made to the original Color. Users could create a track that lasts for the duration of the Super Bowl, for example, and allows people within a certain range of the stadium to contribute.

"We're not at the hockey stick growth just yet," says Mr. Singh. "But this funding shows we can stand out in a very crowded space."

Nihal Mehta

"Things move so fast in the mobile space these days," says Vic Singh, founder of the mobile photo sharing app, Tracks. "I've spent more time as a venture capitalist investing in the space, than I have as an entrepreneur. But the truth is if you're not building something yourself, and seeing what works on the ground, you're going to get left behind."

Tracks is a social publishing service that lets users create and share photos in multiple distinct groups, or tracks. Singh is one of the many residents at Local Response headquarters in Chelsea to wear a number of hats. As a founding partner of ENIAC Ventures, he has also invested in startups like SpotOn, which share the same space and, more recently, the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. "We practiced our pitches on one another and perfected our schwag. Whenever I have a problem, whether its email marketing or my analytics platform, I turn to the other companies in the space."

The desks just a few feet away belong to AppFund, a mobile incubator and seed fund. Brett Martin, founder of Sonar, helped to launch a few companies with this team before leaving to start his own. Sonar, which debuted at Disrupt, eventually became one of three finalists for the grand prize. "We're all in here sort of chewing over the same ideas and that makes for an incredibly productive environment."

Martin points to Nihal Mehta, a partner at ENIAC and founder of Local Response. "My last company was trying to solve the problem that Local Response is working on right now," says Martin. "And my current venture, Sonar, is really looking at a lot of the same issues that Nihal's previous company, Buzzd, was trying to crack."

SpotOn CEO Gauri Manglik says the informal relationship and proximity to her investors is one of the best things about working out of the space. "Having an email relationship with a backer is one thing, but when I have a question for the guys at ENIAC, I just turn around and yell." SpotOn gives users a simple way to rate venues and recommends where to go based on a user's profile and social graph.

Like Betaworks, there is an enormous amount of data and insight being collected in a single place around the theme of mobile location and sharing. "The companies influence each other in some way, shape or form; and completely subconsciously--just from overhearing phone calls or running into common investors," says Nihal Mehta. Issues like the "ghost town" of a young consumer app or the best way to leverage the APIs of big companies become a shared knowledge base. "Mobile is moving at a lighting pace, and when you share a space, you find yourself evolving even faster."