Yesterday at the AOL offices in Palo Alto, StartX, a Stanford-affiliated accelerator and community for startups that contain students of the University’s various schools, held a demo day to showcase a number of its member firms.
StartX also announced this week that it has raised past the $1 million mark in 2012. Fresh investment from Microsoft pushed the organization over the seven-figure threshold.
According to a statement provided to The Next Web, the agreement, which will see Microsoft become a ‘Signature’ partner, provides financial assistance, ‘technical resources,’ and what StartX calls “significant scaling and distribution opportunities” through the BizSpark program. Microsoft is, put another way, investing in a meaningful manner in the StartX project.
Other StartX partners include the Kauffman Foundation, Greylock Partners, and you guessed it, AOL. I’m highlighting all of this as I found both the professionalism of the event, and the quality of the teams present to be top notch. Thus, I spread the word.
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Sadly, TNW was only able to meet up with some of the presenting firms. However, what follows are a few of the groups that we had the pleasure to meet. The three companies are in no particular order.
LessThan3
Music fans gather ’round, especially if you like electronic tunes. LessThan3 wants to let you build a living resume for your musical tastes. It’s beautiful to boot.
Working off of a successful electronic music blog, the LessThan3 team is building a platform that lets fans of music and music-related content flaunt their tastes. Every user has their own virtual room, where they proudly display the bands and music that strike their fancy. A radio button allows for other users to ‘tune in’ to the music presented.
The team mentioned connections to electronic artists (built via their blog) as component to how they plan to grow the product once it reaches general availability. LessThan3 will profit by selling digital goods to users, something that gaming title League of Legends, through its sale of ‘skins,’ has shown to be a scalable business model.
Keep your eyes tuned to their page for more. When LessThan3 launches, we’ll let you know.
Ballers Bridge
Becoming a star athlete isn’t always a direct path, especially if you don’t live in a market with a firm conduit from high school to college and pro teams.
Ballers Bridge, and I really think that there should be an apostrophe in that name, is a tool that will build the connection between younger athletes of skill, and coaches looking to find the next all-star team.
Want to find the list of high school students who both have 4.0 GPAs and a killer free throw? Well, Ballers Bridge wants to become the place for people to look and find the next generation of talent.
Here’s a taste of what they are up to:
Pixelapse
It’s almost like GitHub+DropBox for creatives, but in a very compelling and aesthetically pleasing way.
Pixelapse works as so: Save your file. Pixelapse will upload it to the cloud. From then on, you can view and version your files, as your work on them. You can even watch the saves in sequence, showing off just how your work has progressed.
For a better look at what I’m trying to say, hit their demo. For the lazy:
The company will eventually monetize around a freemium model it told TNW, a somewhat proven approach now..
We like Pixelapse, which plays a role similar to Shipment and an aspect of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, as it solves a real problem: creative backup, and blends it with versioning in a way that I’m not sure too many people thought of. I suspect that for the active illustrator, once they use Pixelapse, they won’t want to go back.
TNW will be keeping a close eye on StartX in the future. Top Image Credit: giuliana_miranda
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