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TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release . The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding. TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability. Sponsor Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as “other” (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means. The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie , which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator . Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or “other” (e.g. merger or private investment). The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party). TechStars attributes this success rate to its “mentorship driven approach.” The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity. TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, “I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It’s powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program.” I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it’s a city with plenty of vitality and smarts. If you’re a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon. Discuss

Mark Hedrickson is 24 years old. He grew up in Menlo Park, California, down the street from Stanford, raised by a high-tech marketer Dad and a Mom in banking. Then he went to college and studied Nietzsche. He has now set out to build The Future – specifically your future, your intentions, your plans as a platform for analysis and software development. The story became particularly interesting today: Hendrickson’s new company Plancast is submitting its much-anticipated iPhone app to Apple days before SXSW and announced on Hendrickson’s alma matter tech blog TechCrunch that it has raised just short of $1m from a list of industry stars. We offer below some perspective on what Plancast aims to do: nothing less than “to be the platform for all ‘intent’ data,” Mark Hendrickson says. Sponsor Plancast is a website where people post their plans. Plans to attend a conference, plans to go to a party, perhaps plans to get a haircut. “We have the same ‘who wants to share that?’ issue as Twitter,” Hendrickson told us today, “the standard ‘I dont use Twitter because i don’t care you’re eating a sandwich.’ What we’ve learned though is that semi-mundane stuff is actually interesting. So, perhaps we wont have a lot of the ‘getting a haircut’ stuff because that’s indeed quite mundane, but we will get ‘getting drinks tonight downtown’ or ‘heading to Palo Alto for the day’ type stuff. Which actually leads to very cool serendipity.” Now that Twitter is such an unqualified success in all but monetization, it’s cool to say you’ve got the same problems Twitter had. Mash up all those plans from friends and you get an interesting stream of forthcoming events. The site is simple, if smart, today. The little company has big plans for the future, though. “We want to host and distribute all content that pertains to what individuals, organizations and businesses have planned for the future,” Hendrickson says. “If you break the idea of an ‘event’ down into its basic units (what’s going to happen, when, and where), there’s a ton of relevant social content through the long tail. We’re designed to host a superset of all this event data.” Leveraging the Future If the web first enabled people to publish diaries of their past actions, then moved on to status updates and check-ins about current thoughts and locations, then Plancast aims to be focused on the Future. “I think [the future has] been a neglected area in geo-location discussions,” Hendrickson says. “Check-ins have dominated the conversation over the past year, and check-ins are great for what they are – but they have a certain limited value. If someone checks in somewhere across town, what are the chances you’re going to get up and hustle over there to join? You also have limited data — often you dont know why they’re there. From an advertiser’s point of view, you have to grab their attention immediately. Whereas if you have intent, you have more time to give them an offer and have them consider that offer and act on it. The scope of planning data is larger than check-in data in other ways too. Check-ins are really specific to particular venues — bars, retaurants, parks etc. so the scope of content/ads you can serve up is quite local.” This conversation about the future needed to move on to something other than advertising. “It’s absolutely a platform,” Hendrickson told us. “It’s not just a consumer destination. We’re building our API early [expect to see it launch very soon] because we want to be the plumbing for future intent data. We want to power third party website calendar systems, third party apps, mash ups, etc. We want to do analysis on big data sets that compile intent data from all over. Once we start pulling from lots of sources — Facebook, Meetup, Linkedin, Twitter, Dopplr, Tripit, etc etc — we can then match intents and figure out really cool stuff. 50% more people are planning to see Avatar this weekend vs Hurt Locker. And we can pump this data back out to other companies that have special needs for it. “Let’s say one day you can search ‘movies’ on Plancast and it knows A) your location, B) your past behavior, C) your friends’ activity, and D) aggregate activity. The top result could be a movie showing that 2 of your friends have already planned to see and which is very popular in aggregate in your city.” Hendrickson says he’s hard at work building out privacy settings that will help more people feel more comfortable sharing more plans. That’s easier said than done, of course. This young, philosophically-trained startup co-founder from Palo Alto would be well-served by reaching out and bringing close to the company some advisors who specialize in understanding the privacy concerns of everyday people online, if he’s going to build a platform for the future of our communication around intent. Location based social networks in general face a big challenge in making people comfortable using them and demonstrating their utility before they can become mainstream phenomena. For now Plancast is hiring engineers with its new money, which was just announced today. Investors include SoftTech VC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. Angels Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim and Paige Craig put in money as well, bringing the total to $800,000. Things have come along quickly since Hendrickson was writing blog posts at TechCrunch, he left the staff there one year ago this Wednesday, and bought the domain Plancast.com for $500 last summer. (“I thought about buying Plancaster,” he says, “but some guy named Paul Lancaster had it.”) Can this young man and his team build “the platform for all ‘intent’ data?” Marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been bullish on Plancast for months. He described it as a leading example of the forthcoming “intention web” in December. Expect the real-time web to quickly evolve into the intention web. People will work together to share their information about what they plan to do, and improve how they work or organize. Expect Social CRM systems (Salesforce, SAP), Brand Monitoring vendors (Radian6, Visible Technologies), and Search Engines (Bing and Google) to quickly try to make predictive models on what could happen, and what are the chances. Businesses that have a physical location like retail, events, or packaged goods can use this data to anticipate consumer demand. They may offer contextualized marketing, or increase or decrease inventory or store hours to accommodate. Don’t be surprised in the future and you walk into a store with your preferred items, meal, or drink already nicely packaged for you. Plancast may or may not play a big role in transforming visions like that into reality, but it’s definitely a startup worth watching either way. Look for the company’s iPhone app later this week (built by high-profile developer Leah Culver ) and check out the many listings of SXSW events on the site already, including our very own ReadWriteWeb event on Saturday night . We’d like to know if you plan on joining us. Discuss

For entrepreneurs trying to form a startup, one of the first challenges they face that persists throughout the businesses life is how to find and keep talented partners and employees. From finding that first co-founder to finding the prolific programmers to fill your ranks later down the line, talent acquisition is always a major step in any business. Just look at some of the deals that have gone down in the Valley; Facebook didn’t buy FriendFeed for their technology, that deal was mostly about getting FriendFeed’s talented employees on the Facebook team. Sponsor A new book from author David Russo, 17 Rules Successful Companies Use to Attract and Keep Top Talent: Why Engaged Employees Are Your Greatest Sustainable Advantage , seeks to make this process more clear for businesses. Russo is the CEO of Eno River Associates, Inc., which is a consulting service that helps business executives build better team relationships. Their portfolio of clients includes American Express, Johnson & Johnson, and the CIA. With his new book, Russo outlines the key strategies he has learned over the years as a consultant and human resources executive that has helped him and others create winning teams. The book doesn’t waste any time getting into its 17 rules; after a brief introduction the entirety of the book consists of one chapter per rule. The rules cover a broad base of topics, including the more straightforward rule #4, “Provide Ample and Appropriate Resources,” to the more abstract rule #12, “Understand Human Capital.” One of the key rules that sticks out to me is #3, “Cultivate Leadership, Not Management, and Know the Difference!” “Whereas managers administrate, leaders have the power to influence, to motivate, even inspire, and those are distinctly different traits,” writes Russo. “Indeed, true leadership is the ability to display attributes that make people want to follow.” Russo points out that leaders need to have passion, vision, and energy, as well as recognize that each employee has value to the success of the business. He likens this value to a tight end in a football game running “a crisp pattern” and distracting the defense despite knowing before the play that he’s not going to be the ball carrier. Another rule which will likely strike a chord with the startup culture is #10, “Make Room for Fun in the Workplace (Nurture Lightheatedness/Levity).” Anyone who has seen the popular workplace movie “Office Space” knows what a bland work environment can do to employees spirits, but I don’t think we have to worry about startups not having enough fun on the job. Aside from being passionate about the job they’re doing, most startup employees are probably used to everyday being “casual Friday” and taking a brain break in a game room. Granted, not every experience is like this, but we all know that many startups are a very relaxed environment, which Russo says is very important for attracting skilled employees and keeping them happy. Other important rules Russo includes on his list include knowing how and when to “cheerlead,” acknowledging and rewarding efforts and contributions, and the lastly, telling the truth. While this book isn’t aimed directly at startups, young entrepreneurs looking to lead their team to success should certainly take a look at this book. One of reasons I would suggest it is that at times, young entrepreneurs who have little or no workplace experience are suddenly thrust into a CEO role. If your company takes off, you might be in charge of a lot of people very quickly, and this book will certainly help keep them happy. Disclosure: A review copy of 17 Rules was provided to ReadWriteWeb by Pearson Education, Inc. Photo by Flickr user madebytess . Discuss

It’s not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world. Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn’t able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them. Sponsor In the late 90’s Di-Ann Eisnor was the founder and CEO of Eisnor Inc., an “alternative” marketing agency that helped companies launch and grew to 60 employees with $15 million in annual revenue. In 2000 she sold that company to Omnicon . Then she traveled the world and did independent marketing work for large companies and small cultural institutions. In 2004, Eisnor co-founded Platial in Portland, Oregon with Jake Olsen and Jason Wilson. The company’s pre-launch website described the project as “a rapidly developing application and community pivoting on the anchors of user annotation, layerability, collaborative mapping, social networking and real world publishing.” The three founders said they were taking advice from people like Clay Shirky , Anselm Hook and Arturo Duran . In addition to an email list you could sign up to learn when the product was available, the Platial website was filled with a tag cloud linking to Delicious pages of community bookmarks on topics like folksonomy , groupmaps and where2.0 . Platial put itself right in the middle of those heady times. We were all going to describe, categorize and display our world on our terms. Blogger had just been bought by Google the year before and WordPress had just launched. Delicious and Flickr had just gone live and would be acquired by Yahoo a year after Platial’s founding. These were revolutionary tools, like tiny virtual Gutenberg dynamos, the number of publishers and amount of content and data published exploded. People were telling their stories through blog posts, they were posting their photos and using Platial and Frappr, which Platial later acquired, they were making maps. They made maps about the history of Palo Alto, California. About the reconstruction of New Orleans. About the companies that make London, England the arms trade capital of the world. In the end Platial held 5 million user-created maps. For perspective, the field of cartography began roughly 1500 years ago. Only 1,000 European maps of the world are known to still exist from the years 500 through 1600. Platial’s properties saw users make that many maps every eight hours, on average. Now people are making maps all over the web, including on Google’s MyMaps service. Eisnor says Platial was particularly innovative among map making services. But it wasn’t able to build a sustainable business. Eisnor says the business model was always local advertising but local advertising didn’t arrive in time. The company’s 500,000 map widgets embedded in blogs around the web never brought in more than a pittance in revenues. Delivering those widgets cost thousands of dollars per month. The company had a half a million iPhone app users to serve after being featured by Apple. The small staff worked without pay for the last 18 months. Several acquisition conversations fell through. This weekend co-founder Jason Wilson put up a post on the company blog titled Geographic Euthanasia: The End of Platial As We Know It . Eisnor says she has very mixed feelings about the elephant in the middle of the room, Google. “Without them we would be going out of business and there would be no where to send the data.” “They started MyMaps two years after us. They executed really well. We didn’t pull it off… In terms of telling stories, I don’t know that there’s a business in [user created maps]. Google’s [map making effort] doesn’t have to be sustainable, it has an infinite amount of money. But Google is allowing people to tell their stories and is not in danger of having to shut down peoples’ maps. Plus they are very active in places like Africa where it’s even more important and hard to get people to contribute. “Never mind that we used their maps. We took the movement further than they could have.” Eisnor works at Waze now, a company that’s building real time street maps through shared driving data. It’s not the same, it’s an attempt to disrupt an established market instead of an effort to create a new user behavior, Eisnor says. Neither are the numerous location based check-in networks the same as what Platial was doing, they aren’t really about telling a story. The market’s enthusiasm for user generated mapping may be contracting after a few years of initial excitement, but make no mistake: there is a big new way for people to publish the way we see the world now. That’s important and it will never disappear. Platial says it was all about “AutoBioGeography, Place Memory, Location Awareness.” Those are important concepts that were changed by this ambitious little startup, whether it survived as a business or not. You can stay abreast of future projects the Platial team develops on the side on its Twitter account and keep up with the work and thoughts of Di-Ann Eisnor , Jason Wilson and Jake Olsen . Discuss

It looks like while half the Web will be holding its breath over how Facebook will wield its newly-found patent power, with its patent of the news feed , the other half just found a reason to take a big gulp of air and look around. Google was awarded last Tuesday a patent for location-based advertising , the potential bread and butter of a number of emerging mobile applications. Sponsor Kim-Mai Cutler at VentureBeat first discovered the patent, which it says “covers using location for targeting, setting a minimum price bid for an ad, offering performance analytics, and modifying the content of an ad.” Google filed for the patent in April 2004, several years before location based check-in services ever came into popular use. Now, companies like Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite have to be wondering what this means for them, as do some of the established big-time players, like Facebook and Apple. Cutler points out this could be a cause for concern or it could just be a bargaining chip, like in a cold war, writing “it’s uncertain whether other start-ups should be alarmed by this. It’s standard for companies to file patents on technology they have developed as a defensive practice, rather than as a tool for pressuring other companies to desist or pay license fees.” The patent, titled ” Determining and/or using location information in an ad system “, gives a fully detailed description of what we would expect of any advertising network, from the basic idea of serving an advertisement according to a user’s location to analyzing resultant traffic and advertising success according to a number of factors. Google further expanded its bussiness in the direction of mobile advertising last November, when it bought the mobile advertising service AdMob for $750 million . We weren’t all that puzzled by the move then, but now it makes even more sense. Discuss