It’s great to see a TechStars come to NYC. David Cohen and team know the model, how to replicate it and have the track record.  The largest beneficiary of the model and track record are the startups, they know the value they gain from it, its one less unknown.

They have lined up some amazing mentors in people like Fred Wilson, Roger Enrenberg, Howard Morgan, Kal Vepuri, Jeff Clavier,  Dave McClure, Jon Steinberg, Phin Barnes and many more (click here for the full list of mentors).

We are very excited to be an investor in TechStars NYC and look forward to seeing the program do great things for startups, investors and the community.

They couldn’t have selected a better guy to run the program in David Tisch, he is going to kick ass!

To learn more about the program or apply Click Here

If you are interested click here to learn more.

About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world’s largest video encoding service with over one-million media files encoded per month, makes video transcoding into all popular formats easy, cost-effective and instantly scalable. Over 500 global enterprises and SMBs–Video platform providers, professional video agencies, and video websites–realize substantial efficiencies, reductions in capital costs, infinite scalability via cloud computing, and guaranteed service level agreements when entrusting the essential and dynamic transcoding portion of their video creation workflow to Encoding.com. Encoding.com received Series A funding in 2010 from Metamorphic Ventures and angel investors: Patrick Condon, Fred Hamilton, Zelkova Ventures, Dave Morgan and Allen Morgan. It was selected as an Editors’ Picks for 2010 by StreamingMedia.com. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business is based in Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California.

Click here for the job description and application info.

If you are somebody I personally know and want to chat about this, I could even make a personal introduction.

Prior to investing in seed rounds we tend to have several in person meetings and both Larry and I meet the teams.  Occasionally there comes an hurdle that not everyone is able to meet in person.  To get around this we try to use technology to help bring everyone together, but it never works as well.  For a while we were doing live skype calls, which area always awkward and marred by technology issues.  Lately we have been asking companies to do intro videos, which seem to work better as they can be watched anytime, multiple times and are less awkward on both sides.

One of these deals is Rapportive, in fact this is the only deal we have invested in without meeting in person prior.  Here is their video, as you can see it very much focuses on who they are, which is a critical element of seed stage investing.

6:00am – Wakeup to catch an early train, I hate getting up this early.

7:30am – Walk into bathroom at Penn Sation to wash hands, full of homeless people brushing their teeth.

8:00am – Take Acela to boston, nothing exciting here.

11:45am – Walk into bathroom at Boston South Station…  Man fully naked taking a shower in the sink, I walk out, but apparently doesn’t phase the other 10 people using the bathroom.

1:00pm – Judge mass challenge (more to come later)

7:00pm – Take train back, delayed about 1.5 hrs, sucks!

12:00am – Arrive at Penn Station.

12:15am – Man falls on escalator and cant get up about a dozen people just stand and watch, I run up the escalator and lift him up.

What has happened to people in this country, you see a person in distress and you don’t do anything?

Qualities You Need to Have:
- Creative Problem Solving Type
- You get and are into the ‘real-time’ web
- You like working with small teams, these roles are the 3rd and 4th tech hir

Stuff You Need to Know:
- JavaScript, JQuery, JSON, AJAX, PHP, Python, MySql, HTML, CSS
- Other acronyms

Bonus if you know:
- Photoshop, Illustrator, SEO, XMPP, Java Server

Other Info:
- The position is in San Francisco

More Info Here – http://hackerjob.livefyre.com/

Re-tweet this one so we can help reduce unemployment!

Constant Contact, the premier provider of email marketing, event marketing and online survey products for small businesses, nonprofits and member organizations. Together with Constant Contact, the NutshellMail team will continue its commitment to providing tools and services that make it easy for you to manage your relationships across the social media universe.

NutshellMail will remain a free service and we will continue to improve and extend the product based on the great feedback you have given us over the last two years. In addition, as part of the Constant Contact family, we can’t wait to start developing new and exciting offerings that will empower individuals and small organizations to efficiently and effectively engage with their friends, fans and customers through social media.

Constant Contact has distinguished itself as the leader in small business email marketing through its unparalleled commitment to customer service and by providing effective, affordable, and easy-to-use products and services for some of the busiest people in the world: small business owners.

Constant Contact makes email marketing simple; NutshellMail makes social simple, and together we plan to make small business success simple.

To learn more about the powerful combination of Constant Contact and NutshellMail, we encourage you read the press release and to watch the video interview with Constant Contact’s CEO Gail Goodman and the NutshellMail founders.

There are some interesting commonalities between boxers and startups.

Dedication:  In order to be a boxer it takes incredible dedication and restraint.  In the months prior to the fight your life is consumed with training and preparation.  This same dedication is needed in a startup.

Focus: Throughout the training regiment focus is key, but it’s also key in the ring.  Focusing on your abilities, the landscape, the competitor and the goal is important to win in boxing and business.

Strength: It goes without saying a boxer must have strength to go the distance and win.  A startup needs the same.

Agility & Speed: Boxing is not only about strength its about having the agility and speed to adapt and ‘roll with the punches’.  A startup needs to have the  same ability, while being focused.

We are very excited to announce our investment in Klout, the leading platform for understanding the ‘who’ behind the ‘what’.  Klout is about determining who people are providing data around them that can help people and companies make decisions.

Were excited about Klout because as the social web continues to grow among people and businesses the ability to identify, rank and sort people is going to be more and more important in getting thru the clutter.   Klout allows you to do just that determine who is important in what areas and is poised to become standard measurement of influence online.

Klout is arguably the leader in the space with some terrific partners using the platform, these include Co-Tweet, TweetUp and HootSuite, to name a few of the 200+.

We look forward to continuing to work with the team along with our investment partners, ff Asset Management, Bobby Yazdani of Saba, Allen Morgan of Mayfield Fund, Nova Spivack of Lucid Ventures, Grape Arbor VC, Paige Craig, Tom McInerney, Michael Yavonditte of Quigo Technologies, and Ofer Ronan.

We added Twitter’s @Anywhere to the Zelkova Ventures website and blog over the weekend. We liked how @Anywhere enabled more engagement with Twitter without being overly intrusive and hope to implement it for other clients who’re active Twitter users.

There are three main things that @Anywhere offers:

1. You can embed a Tweet Box, making it easy for users/readers to Tweet right from your site. You can customize the initial text in the box, so this might be useful if you’re trying to encourage people to RT something.
2. The Hovercard brings Twitter data right to the page, making it easy to see and follow someone’s Twitter account info without leaving the current site. Also, any username mentioned on the page gets auto-linked to the Twitter account page.
3. Connect with Twitter lets users log in to a site/app with their Twitter account. For the Zelkova blog, this wasn’t necessary since it already uses Disqus for commenting with an option for Twitter login.

We first checked out Add Twitter @Anywhere plugin for Wordpress and felt it was too limited for what we wanted to do. We wanted to go beyond just having Hovercards for @usernames and thought @Anywhere could be more integrated with the blog entries. Using the Insert Link Classes plugin, we created a “twitterlink” class that could be called right in the body of post. This way, it would be easy to activate Hovercards on someone’s name and also have that link go to their website instead of their Twitter page. We should note that Insert Link Classes didn’t work out of the box; we had to sift through the comments to find a way to get it to work.

We set up Wordpress to make it easy to enable Hovercards beyond just @usernames.

Next, we added the Tweet Box to the sidebar, which was fairly easy. One thing to note was that because it’s in an iframe, the ability to style the Tweet Box is limited. We prepopulated the box with @ZelkovaVC to encourage a reply tweet from the blog’s readers.

The rest of the Zelokva website runs on ExpressionEngine, which meant adding a few lines of code to the template files. One area where we found @Anywhere helpful was for the company portfolio pages. Each company already has a Twitter feed showing their three latest Tweets, so we were able to add Hovercards for each one.

Overall, implementation was fairly straightforward. We should warn that @Anywhere does slow down the site a bit when it loads. And sometimes you’ll see a bit of a lag on the Hovercards as well, but we’re hoping this is something that’ll improve over time.