NYC Seed provides seed funding (very, very early stage) to NYC technology companies. They will invest in 10-15 companies this year and take an equity stake for the investment. They like teams and applications must be submitted by mid-September.

NYC Seed is a partnership between several NY State NYC organizations along with Poly Tech Institute. To qualify you must be located in NYC so you either must live here or get yourself a UHaul and move here.

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Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Ipoki

20-word Description: Ipoki is a GPS-based social network that allows you to share and track your position with our friends.

CEO’s Pitch: Ipoki allows people to share geo-location data using a small application installed in their mobile devices. With Ipoki you can track the position in Google Maps or Google Earth of all our friends. Keep your tracks in Ipoki and upload your photos in Flickr. Now you can geo-locate all your Flickr photos from Ipoki just with one click! Embed your map with your real-time location in your Blog or any other site. Geo-locate live video with Qik integration. Send your position to Fire Eagle automatically, too.

Mashable’s Take: Working the international, location-based social scene from its place of origin in Galicia, Spain, Ipoki’s play for a broad, mobile and well-connected membership is all about bridging connections. That goes for friends as well as popular Web services. The company’s CEO mentions names like Google Maps, Google Earth, Fire Eagle, Flickr and Qik. Such references help to explain clearly what it is Ipoki’s role is for its users. Location integration, is how I would frame it.

Ipoki hasn’t been around for very long, even when compared to other location-based services. There certainly are more veteran names in the sector. Loopt is just one. But Ipoki is nonetheless a good choice for those who wish to share their mobile lives as broadly as possible, with friends, family, and the network at large. And fortunately, many mobile phone users can enjoy what Ipoki provides. Downloads are provided for Windows XP, Vista, Pocket PC, Smartphone platforms as well as Symbian S60 and BlackBerry devices. A mobile-specific URL, “http://ipoki.mobi” is available as well. For users of phones which can scan mobile QR codes, Ipoki displays one on its website for fast access.

Of course, if you use Ipoki simply for the sake of tracking, there’s not much to it. It’s a little too simple in that sense. But employ it to its full potential as the hub or nexus it is, with the few value-added connections it can establish for networkers, and everything seems to mesh. Or “mash,” as we’d like to put it. It is only as powerful as its users allow it to be. You can make your account singularly dish short blog posts. Or you can get involved with photo and video, too. Your call. Tread lightly or heavily. Within reason, Ipoki allows it all.

Sponsored By: Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

There was interesting talk about venture capitalists and their role in Internet startups last week. It started with a post by John Casasanta of Taptaptap simply entitled “Fuck the VCs.” Responses from Hacker News and John Furrier, among others, led to a lot of heated debate over the role and significance of venture capital.

Although I clearly cannot provide justice to the topic of venture capital in one or even a thousand articles, I did want to talk about the changing face of venture capital for Internet startups.

Venture capital is a spread-out game with a large cast of players. Angel investors, professional VC firms, incubators, bankers, lawyers, investment funds, and entrepreneurs are all involved in nothing less than a tangled mess. Finding venture capital often takes luck, great networking, or eye-popping credentials, not to mention dedication and a thick skin to streaks of constant failure. You could submit your business plan to a hundred VCs and get a response from ten or from zero depending on when you send, what they’re looking for, and who you know.

In other words, it can be a crapshoot for both the VC firm and the entrepreneur.

But that model is slowly changing to one that takes out some of that uncertainty and disarray and acts as a filter for venture capitalists to reach good, solid business ideas.

The leader of that model is Y Combinator. Y Combinator is altering the game as the university of Internet startups by providing some of the resources, education, and networking many entrepreneurs need, providing its brand credibility, and most of all, acting as a filter for solid, developed Internet business ideas.

What’s the mission of a university? Well, I could read you Harvard’s mission statement, but it essentially boils down to the advancement of education.

But what’s the purpose of a university for a society? Beyond the learning, I argue that the university is a filter for society to sort people by their intelligence, talents, and interests, especially in regards to the corporate world. When the high school grad finally comes out of college with that diploma, you can assume that they have the dedication, intelligence, and personal interest to work in certain industries and companies. McKinsey and Google know that when they hire a graduate of Harvard, Stanford, or Northwestern, they’re going to (usually) get a quality product. The university serves as a gatekeeper.

Yes, I am simplifying the role of the university, but the result is just the same - companies generally hire college grads for higher-level, thought-intensive jobs and can initially gauge your intelligence based on the college you attended and your GPA. Oh, and in return for this social filter, you cough up tens of thousands of dollars.

Y Combinator is similar to the university. You join a class of peers when you arrive. You get startup education, networking, and those lovely entrepreneur dinners. And most of all, you get the right to show off your work at the Y Combinator demo day, where venture capitalists will come, rip your idea to shreds, and then hopefully pour a couple million dollars into your idea. Oh, and in return for this startup filter and the Y Combinator brand name, you cough up ~6% of your company.

Sure, Y Combinator is probably not the first firm to do these things, but it is the first to become so well known for it. The class model is unlike how any incubator or angel investor operates. Y Combinator now has brand credibility, and that’s why VCs come to the demo day - they know they’re going to find quality ideas. The Y Combinator has served its purpose. It has brought up the best ideas for the next level.

In this sense, Y Combinator is the premier university of Internet startups. Hundreds apply, no more than a few dozen get in. And those few that get in have been successful or are on the right track. 102 startups have been through the program with 81 having been funded, purchased, reached profitability, or are in the process of funding. Those are great success rates in the world of venture capital by any standard. And that success has spurned several competitors or copycats, whichever way you see it.

Y Combinator is helping create a more streamlined path and a new filter for startup ideas. Now as more firms like the Y Combinator pop up and more entrepreneurs and VCs choose to go to Y Combinator seed firms for the support, brand name, and filter, the question becomes this:

Do we want Universities of Internet Startups to be the regulator, filter, and gatekeeper for startup ideas?

We need to confront the pros and cons of having Universities of Startups in the world of entrepreneurship and venture capital, especially as the Y Combinator model grows and expands. We may very well be seeing the transformation of venture capital.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Soup.io Offers Simplest Microblogging YetGoogle Apps Education Edition Becoming More Widely AdoptedGoogle and IBM Hook Up on Cloud Computing InitiativeBuddy University: Attack of the Facebook CloneChaCha Partners with Indiana UniversityIn Your Face, RIAA. The University of Oregon Takes A Stand.Woman Sues University Over MySpace Controversy

Editor’s note: This news was embargoed for 9am but the news hit the wire at 7am so we will post now. 

NY-based Angelsoft is announcing the launch of version 3.0 of their angel funding platform. The new version connects entrepreneurs to over 400 angel funding groups across the world. Angelsoft offers entrepreneurs a common submission form for funding and the software determines which angels to send the application to.

There’s an interesting Google Maps mashup on the Angelsoft homepage which functions like a newsfeed displaying activity across the entire Angelsoft network. This past April, Angelsoft CEO David S. Rose presented an excellent overview of how the angel funding process works. If you are new to angel funding, check out my full event recap.

The company notes that over 2,000 entrepreneurs apply for funding each month and 11,000 investors are listed. Looking at their 2008 stats, so far 1% of applications have actually been funded. Angelsoft offers an angel funding industry profile as well which shows that for 2008, media and entertainment is the hottest overall category.

We profiled Angelsoft last month at their parent company launch party. Here’s a video overview from the company on how Angelsoft works:

Angelsoft 3.0 Introduction Video from Angelsoft on Vimeo.

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Found via Mark Davis, Ty McMahan at the WSJ has a look at the NY venture capital scene. Ty begins by noting that, "a total of 67 New York-based start-ups received funding in the first half of this year - the highest amount since 2001 - and investment jumped to $828 million from $480 million in the first half of 2007". He says this is down from $4.24 billion invested in 2000.

The article looks at DoubleClick, Facebook, Clickable, DFJ Gotham and a variety of other companies either based in NYC or with a heavy presence here. It’s well worth a read.

One of the biggest things holding back NYC from shining is the fact that so many products and services are developed in the dark. When I ask people at events who raise their hands saying they are working on a startup, no one wants to talk. I go to the west coast and they can’t stop talking about what they are working on. My hope is that our city starts to open up so myself and the other writers here can show off the great work that happens here. I want to write about more NYC-area companies!

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Lotame has announced that they have raised $13 million in a Series B round of funding. Emergence Capital Partners, led the round with support from previous investors Battery Ventures and Hillcrest Management. Lotame notes that the new funding will be used to support product enhancements, marketing and business development efforts.

Lotame offers engagement advertising instead of the traditional online advertising. Sites using Lotame report user and usage data back to Lotame which in-turn Lotame uses to find advertisers to match the users and the social networking site engagement. We’ve seen lots of chatter about engagement advertising and getting away from ad buys based solely on raw numbers. This type of online advertising typically pays more because the advertiser is getting closer to the actual intended customer instead of blasting a message to everyone on the network.

Don over at Mashable has a lengthy look at Lotame. He notes, "I can’t fault Lotame’s intent on innovation.  For the first time, advertisers can capture real data in real-time for a specific demographic that they really want to target.  And although Lotame would be best-served working with larger organizations, it thinks it has found its niche and as it continues to grow, will continue to create a value proposition for advertisers that want to capitalize on the social networking space."

I am always excited to see companies challenge the current online advertising model and over-time it can help move the advertising conversation forward.

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Editor’s note: This news was embargoed for Tuesday morning but the embargo was busted this afternoon so per our embargo policy, we will post now.

NY-based Appointment planning and physician review service ZocDoc has announced today that they have raised $3 million in a Series A round of funding. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and David Weiden from Khosla Ventures will join the ZocDoc board. This is Khosla Ventures first investment in the consumer healthcare industry.

ZocDoc helps you book doctor appointments online and find immediate openings. You can also check out Yelp-style doctor reviews. The service is currently only available in NYC but the founders say San Francisco is coming in 2009. Check out our ZocDoc coverage including video demo, launch of dermatologists, What I’d like to see is pricing information when services are outside an insurance plan.

While ZocDoc isn’t as "sexy" as some of the other startups out there, it is one of the most useful out there today. I continue to be impressed with the service and how they are expanding into more healthcare practices. Last week I booked my first doctor appointment using ZocDoc and will have a full review after my appointment tomorrow.

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CaptainU, the online recruiting network dedicated to soccer players and athletes, is officially launching this week with a few notable new features, most of which provide more attention to end users as a way to further differentiate itself from other online recruiting tools like Takkle and BeRecruited.

For starters, a new piece of software from CaptainU provides online guidance to help players with a useful checklist/schedule for the recruiting process, with tips for things like finding the right school and getting a coach to see you play.

Another way CaptainU is hoping to make its players feel special is a new one-on-one counseling option, where users can have sessions with former NCAA coaches. As I learned from my initial review of CaptainU, NCAA standards are rather important to the site’s CEO Avi Stopper, who is also a former NCAA coach. The entire recruiting platform is NCAA-compliant, offering all users a standardized platform they can be comfortable using.

One feature that private beta users requested was a dynamic player profile option, which enables athletes to more easily link between their CaptainU profile and other sites, such as a team site, as well as to easily provide a useful “front page” to send to coaches, as an athlete can upload their image and video content to their CaptainU profile.

With an online platform for something as life-altering as recruiting, it’s necessary for CaptainU to find ways in which it can provide more individually-oriented features that will help each user feel more special while offering additional value towards the overall CaptainU experience. This will hopefully be scalable and valuable features that help CaptainU stand apart from the crowd, as CaptainU has also informed me of its plans to expand its recruiting platform beyond soccer to all sports.

I asked CaptainU how it plans to scale its counseling feature with the upcoming expansion. The site’s Director of Business Development Michael Farb said “the one-on-one counseling will scale because we already have a network of ex-NCAA coaches in place across all sports that are recruiting experts and are ready to set up time with athletes.” As CaptainU hopes to become more competitive with the other established online recruiting sites, such differentiating features are important.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:CaptainU Gets Soccer Players RecruitedPrepChamps Raises $1.2M to Recruit High School JocksiPhone Arrives in the UK and Germany TodaySpock Serving 400 Pageviews Per Second at LaunchBlyk Still Not Ready to Launch Free Mobile ServiceStreakr Exchanging Clothes for Beta TestersMore Details on Gphone Emerge

Source:Mashable!

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

STARTUP DETAILS:

Company Name: Sparkle*Shelf

20 word description: Online community focused on beauty and fashion, featuring original editorial content and user generated product reviews, Q&A, photos and more.

CEO’s Pitch: I started Sparkle*Shelf in May 2008 to deliver honest opinions and information about beauty & fashion trends to fashionistas everywhere. We have a team of talented writers who round up the latest trends and buzz-worthy products on a daily basis. In addition, the site features user-generated reviews, questions and answers, and wish-lists, as well as social networking features such as profiles, friends and activity feeds. We also offer entertainment in the form of beauty related games, quizzes and polls. Our goal is to be the trusted destination for all things beauty and fashion in a fun, vibrant community.

Mashable’s Take: A trend in the online fashion industry is to have a network that enables experts to promote their knowledgeable opinions and become valued influencers within the community. A new network called Sparkle*Shelf is making this a direct incentive to fashionistas that are interested in the fashion and beauty space, with a new platform for receiving and contributing related content.

To start, Sparkle*Shelf has a team of writers that add content to the site, offering informative articles about various fashion and beauty trends. Anyone can sign up for a user account, but options are limited to begin. By participating in more site activities such as adding bookmarked items, reviewing products and commenting on others’ submissions, a user earns points to move up in rank. After earning 500 points, a user can add their own fashion and beauty polls to Sparkle*Shelf, which other users can take for fun. A full on Expert, who has earned 1000, gets to add content to one of the site’s featured blogs.

Incentive-based systems are often a good idea, especially when it comes to encouraging users to offer things like product reviews. Sparkle*Shelf’s particular application of its incentive-based system appears to be one that merely offers supplemental user content for its online publication, leaving the focus on the content created by its own editorial staff.

Something that Sparkle*Shelf could benefit from is an easier way in which to add bookmarked items to the site, which could then be reviewed and commented upon. Right now, a user must visit the Sparkle*Shelf site and manually submit an item, inserting the link and uploading an image from their desktop. A more useful option would be a browser toolbar add-on that allows users to bookmark items as they surf the Web. I also wouldn’t mind seeing some import options for items users have already bookmarked on sites like Delicious or even another style site like StyleFeeder.

Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Michael Cerda. He blogs about startups, people and the variety hour at Cerdafied.

There is a certain psychology to fund raising. Here are seven questions VCs ask, what they really mean, and how you can answer them:

1. How long have you been fund raising?

Translation: How important am I to you; are you giving me the first look or has everyone already seen it?

Talk to a friendly VC or two to beta test your pitch and if you don’t know any, well just don’t go into the most popular firm in the valley as your first pitch. But then, rather than slowly engaging VCs, get as many meetings on the calendar in a given few weeks as you can schedule. That way you can honestly say “we’re just getting started.” You also get the potential of having multiple VCs in the same deal pace.

2. Who else are you meeting with?

Translation: Who can I call after this and compare notes with? Are you pitching firms I would consider working with.

Best answer: “The usual suspects.”

This way you don’t reveal anything you don’t have to.

3. Do you have any customers or business partners expressing interest?

Translation: How much homework have you done?

Ideally you will have some validation points from some people who are willing to use or spend money on your stuff when it’s ready. So a good answer might be “We’ve talked to a potential partner at company X and they said they were interested and would be a beta site” or “We’ve held some 3rd party focus groups of our target audience, and the feedback was…”

4. Who are your competitors?

Translation: How much homework have you done? (You aren’t the only company thinking about this idea!)

A good answer: “Our top three nearest competitors are X, Y and Z, although all of them are trying to be destination sites and the teams behind them don’t have a history in the target market. We on the other hand are multimodal, being a website, mobile application and social web application - and we’ve been living and breathing this space for the past 3 years”.

5. Where do you see your company in five years?

Translation: Do you think you’re going to pump and dump or are you trying to build something for the long term? Oh - and how much thinking have you done about how this fits into your industry?

Answer: Our vision for our type of product is ______. We plan to execute our plan which we hope will earn us a leadership position in this market. If we’ve done that right, we’ll have a variety of strategic options by then.

6. How much money are you raising?

Translation: What can you accomplish on a particular amount of money and how do you think about?

You need to have done your homework on how much cash you need and how far it takes you in your plan. You should actually have a slide that answers this, in the form of a simple abstract chart of Use of Capital vs. Time. So something like “Our plan calls for $3MM which gets us from beta product through a 1.0 launch and an early partner business model over the coming 12 months”.

7. What’s your valuation expectation?

Translation: Dance rabbit!

Best answer: We’re obviously very excited about our company, but we’re going to see what the market says.

You don’t want to project a valuation expectation early on, because that answer might derail the situation.

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There’s always a lot of talk within the NY venture community about how well the region is doing as a place to found and grow technology businesses. Working with some of the folks at DFJ Gotham, I recently did some analysis that quantifies a few of the strengths of the NY Region – I’m going to share a few of those findings below. Looking at the data one can objectively state what all of us who live here know to be true: NY is a growing hub of high-tech activity.

Methodology

The AEA Cybercities report provides a great deal of data about the high-tech sectors in the top 60 US cities. However, the city view doesn’t accurately capture the regional tech communities – these ecosystems often span more than one city. As a result we rolled up the territories defined in the report into regions that parallel the actual technical communities. While the AEA has Silicon Valley as an isolated territory, we integrated San Francisco, Oakland, Menlo Park, etc. into what we called the Silicon Valley Region – a more realistic view of where Sand Hill VCs actually invest and where entrepreneurs out there consider their stomping grounds. Similarly, the SoCal Region includes San Diego, LA and a few other independently listed geographies. The NY Region includes East PA, East NJ, West CT, Westchester, etc.

Findings

Here’s the scoop. Based on the AEA data, of the major regions the NY Region is:

• 1^st in total high tech jobs
• 1^st in the number of new high tech jobs annually
• 4^th in high tech salaries, behind both Boston and Silicon Valley

Making Sense of This Information

Given the sheer number of people in the densely populated NY region, it’s not surprising that there are a lot of high tech workers. However, the fact that there are more techies here than anywhere else in the US might surprise some. My gut tells me that this viewpoint may be a result of the reality that the NY tech scene is sometimes overshadowed by the other prominent industries in the region (finance, advertising, pharma). However, living in a land of giants doesn’t make you small.

It’s worth noting that based on this the implied percentage of the technical talent in the NY Region is currently working in startups in smaller than that of the Valley, leaving a deep bench of talent to join companies or start the next big thing.  We’re poised to continue to grow.

On another note, it’s common to hear those who don’t know NYC well state that it’s an expensive place to be a startup. I often hear the local entrepreneurs argue otherwise. The data point about NY tech talent being less expensive than it is in Boston or out West supports the argument that NY is an affordable place to start a company, at least with respect to the biggest cost for most start-ups: people.

It’s nice to see some data that supports what all of us on the ground here already knew: New York is hot.

This column was provided by Mark Davis. Mark is the author of Get Venture, a column designed to help entrepreneurs raise venture capital. In addition to his column, Mark is active in the venture community as an entrepreneur, advisor and venture capitalist. He currently works at DFJ Gotham Ventures, a leading early-stage IT venture capital fund based in NYC.

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