In a program called TimeSpace announced Tuesday morning, the Grey Lady said it will accept three to five early-stage companies for four month partnerships. Those selected will get an opportunity to demonstrate their products while teaching and learning alongside Times employees in the company’s 8th Avenue headquarters. The Times suggests the best candidates will come with seed stage funding and be focused on products like mobile, social, video, advertising technology, analytics and e-commerce.

So will all this help the Times navigate a path to digital prosperity? On one hand, these type of projects can feel more like sizzle than substance. The Times already has an ideas lab called beta620 while the Boston Globe is partnering with MIT students to inject more technology into the news process. So far, nothing earth-shattering has emerged from either project. Likewise, Philadelphia’s major news outlets have been tinkering with incubator-style projects for a while with mixed results.

On the other hand, these type of ventures deliver intangible cultural benefits. Startup companies, including those in the media space, typically have little idea how the news process works and how media companies actually run. Meanwhile, old-line media types are often suspicious or dismissive of new technologies and the people wielding them. Opportunities like TimeSpace, which will also give the startups a gloss of prestige, thus represent a welcome occasion for the two cultures to rub shoulders in a real world news and business environment.

Would-be New York Times partners have until February 19 to apply.

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One of the newest signs is the emergence of a startup conference called beLaunch, a two-day event in Seoul which will kick off next week. The inaugural conference is being touted as the first entrepreneurial event created by and made for other startups. Despite its grassroots origins, the gathering has attracted some big name sponsors including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Samsung. I’ll be there moderating a panel on fundraising with Maverick Capital’s Eric Kim and David Lee of XG Ventures and also looking for cool startups.

James Jung, the organizer of beLaunch and the CEO and founder of local tech blog beSuccess, said the vision for the conference is to help catalyze the startup community, providing tools and lessons that can help local companies go global. He said Koreans have traditionally shied away from startups, but thanks to more government prodding, corporate support and local success stories such as daily deals provider TicketMonster, which sold to LivingSocial last year, entrepreneurs are getting a taste for startup life. Facebook, through the movie The Social Network and its recent IPO, has also helped convince more people to give it a go.

“From last year to this year, people are really starting to get into startups,” Jung said. “People feel like this is a great ecosystem to make money.  There were startups before but there is an atmosphere now that is shaped by the media and successful stories.”

Startups like e-commerce site Coupang, which is now on a $600 million annual run rate, and Kakao Talk, a mobile communications app with more than 40 million users, are part of this new breed of startups in South Korea. They are showing that local companies can combine some of the best of East and West in creating successful ventures.

Jung said more private investors are also emerging to help support entrepreneurs, taking the place of the government, which has also been doling out money to startups. Big companies like local telecom operator KT have also started launching their own incubator programs to help encourage more innovation.

There’s still a chance that Korea’s newfound interest in startups is more of a passing fad. And it remains to be seen if more break-out hits can emerge on their own instead of being swallowed up by the big corporations. But Jung believes the first step is to get the community on the same page and to encourage local entrepreneurs to think big. And he’s hoping that events like beLaunch can bring about more of the other tools needed to make a start-up community successful.

“Money is important but that’s not everything,” said Jung. “We need more mentors and advanced entrepreneurs to give us lessons.  We need media and universities, the whole ecosystem.”

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With that many start-ups and a limited amount of time, I wasn’t able to hit every booth. But I wanted to highlight a handful that caught my eye.

Unroll.me — Unroll.me offers users a way to tame their email inboxes, making it easy to get rid of unwanted email newsletters while keying in on the stuff they want. The service works with Gmail now and will have Yahoo support in the next couple of weeks. Users of the product can easily see which newsletters they’ve subscribed to and can quickly delete any of them from a list. They can also select certain newsletters and have them rolled up in a daily email that summarizes the emails and lets people click on them for further reading. And soon they’ll be able to categorize their email newsletters and enroll in new newsletters right from Unroll.me.

MyStream lets you broadcast your music to others nearby

MyStream — This app lets people share their music and playlists with the people around them, creating a Turntable.fm-like experience in the real world. Users create playlists of their music library on MyStream and when others with the app are nearby, they can either hear what you’re playing at the time or they can get access to your playlists if you give them permission. MyStream is able to support up to five people on a Bluetooth connection or 30 people on Wi-Fi. It could be a way for people to discover you and your musical tastes by finding your MyStream profile at a venue.

BiteHunter — BiteHunter aggregates local deals for restaurants, but it’s more than just a more narrow version of Yipit. The service, which offers 50,000 deals a day from Groupon, Restaurants.com, Gilt, Living Social and others, works to recommend the best deals for people based on Yelp reviews, pricing and popularity of the deal. It also includes local reviews, pictures, information and menus from restaurants, pulled from Yelp, LocalEats, and SinglePlatform. And now with the most recent update to 2.0 two weeks ago, users can buy a deal quickly without leaving the app. Users can enter in their information ahead of time or connect their accounts on different deal platforms to BiteHunter and when they buy, the transaction happens with one click.

Mobli – Mobli is vying to be the next Instagram, with its ability to share pictures but also videos with friends and strangers. The service of course has filters and powerful editing tools, but what’s cool about Mobli is that users can share their pictures out to various channels that are open to the world. So even if you don’t have any friends on the service – a big barrier for any social service — you can still get good feedback from people interested in the same things. You can create any kind of channel from the desktop version, a feature that is coming soon to mobile. Or you can find relevant channels or see what’s being shared around you. The service, which has 2.5 million users, has raised more than $4 million from some well known investors including a guy named Leonardo DiCaprio.

The Mutual — This is a small startup that’s just getting going but I like the way it’s trying to incentivize people to donate to charities and non-profits. The service works with five non-profits at the moment–The Carbon Fund, Oceana, The Trust for Public Land, Center for Ecoliteracy and World Resources Institute–and tracks what you donate to those organizations. If you donate more $10 in a month, you get free access to The Mutual’s perks, which range from free and discounted items to exclusive invites to events. The perks are limited now and designed for New York residents but The Mutual is trying to increase the number of companies it works with, as well the non-profits it partners with.

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Fab.com co-founders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer

A year ago, Fab.com got a new lease on life, pivoting to become a design sales site after a lackluster showing in its first incarnation as Fabulis, a gay social network. As you might have read, this year has been huge for Fab, which is now up to 2.5 million members and is on pace to bring in $100 million this year in revenue.

But what stood out to me was the backstory of the restart for Fab. Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO said in a blog post that the company repositioned itself after realizing that it needed to focus on what the team was passionate about and was in a position to succeed at. And that, they decided after 20 minutes of discussion, was design. A social network was not, in fact, what they loved doing. It was yet another reminder for me that entrepreneurs, as skilled as they may be, need to care deeply about what they’re building to be able to build it.

It might seem intuitive or obvious that if you’re going to stake your life to a new startup, you might as well do what you love. But that lesson can get lost in the quest to build a successful start-up. That’s what happened with Fab, Goldberg told me. He said he initially built something for him and his friends but realized he was really just chasing an opportunity. Goldberg told me in an email:

It was driven from being opportunistic, not from pure passion. I think a lot of people often mistake opportunity for passion. Too many people are passionate about building a business vesus being passionate about building this business.

Not built to flip

Or as former AOL co-founder Steve Case told GigaOM in an interview last year, some entrepreneurs are looking at building businesses they can flip quickly, rather than committing to something they love. ”A lot of people are starting businesses because they think it’s an opportunity to make some money,” Case said. “You occasionally get lucky, but that doesn’t really work. You have to be passionate about it.”

Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen

The misunderstanding can sometimes come from the signals entrepreneurs receive from investors. Charlie O’Donnell, a former principal at First Round Capital who started his own fund called Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, recalled his regret passing on Kickstarter when he first met co-founder Perry Chen in 2008. In a blog post, he said he was caught up on the murky details about how Kickstarter was going to build a business and a roadmap. But he didn’t key in on the “why” behind founder Chen’s quest to build Kickstarter. He said after hearing Simon Sinek’s TED Talk he realized that people don’t buy “what” you do, they buy “why” you do it. And Chen, to his credit, kept plugging away on his idea.

I didn’t understand how important that pattern was at the time, but now, four years later, I get it.  Nowadays, one of the first things I ask someone is why they do what they do.  I used to ask it out of curiousity, but now I get how important that is to the success of your business.

Getting the passion thing right can mean the difference between success and mediocrity — or even failure. Billy Chasen, founder of Turntable.fm, recounted the story in November behind his start-up, which began life as Stickybits, a QR-code provider. He said he made the decision after losing interest in QR codes and what the company was doing with it. But what really excited him was music, which led to Turntable.fm, even though Stickybits was a modest success.

When passion meets opportunity…

Simply having passion doesn’t guarantee anything. But the opposite can be true too. You can have a great opportunity and a solid team, but if you don’t have a burning passion and a vision, things can get muddled quickly and the drive can desert you. As Goldberg points out, he needed to find a place where his passion was matched with a market ripe for disruption and a belief that Fab could be the best at what it does.

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley

Looking at companies like Twitter and Square under Jack Dorsey or Foursquare under Dennis Crowley, you can see founders who are locked in on a passionate goal. They may not know all the details of how it will unfold but they know what they want to see ultimately because they’ve been obsessing about their ideas for a long time. As Crowley told me recently, one of the reasons why Foursquare has been able to separate from other location-based rivals is because he and many others in the core team have been ruminating on location for years. This is built into the company’s DNA and guides its direction.

Again, passion is not the only ingredient to success, but trying to build a successful business without it is tough. If you can align work and passion, the payoff can be rewarding, said Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham in blog post several years ago:

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

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If you’re a startup, how big a stake would you give up to get thousands of influential users to test and share about your product? That’s a question that Wahooly, a new company, is trying to answer. The Minneapolis-based company has just added the last members of its initial pool of 25,000 influential testers and is now opening the doors to startups to apply to engage this group of users. You can sign up here.

Startups that need users, a social media boost and some helpful feedback from knowledgeable users can work with Wahooly to create testing groups of 5,000 to 8,000 people. Those groups will share in a pool of equity ranging from 4–6 percent. In exchange for giving up a small chunk of its company, the startup gets a very influential group of users whose Klout scores are in the 90th percentile. The users, a collection of bloggers, coders, web celebrities and others who choose to sign on with a startup, will see their share of the equity pool increase or decrease over time based on their individual feedback to the startup, their activity in sharing about the product, and their reach and conversion success.

Wahooly, which gets its name from the fast Wahoo fish, is now receiving applications from startups who want to be part of Wahooly’s 2012 class. Wahooly said it will accept 200 startups for next year, with 50 selected each quarter. Already, 160 companies have already expressed interest in joining Wahooly for 2012. Startups that sign on will engage with Wahooly until they exit, either through a sale of the company, a share buyback or an IPO.

Wahooly’s co-founder Dana Severson said the startup, which is also looking for seed funding, is a hybrid between an accelerator and a crowdfunding provider. He said Wahooly is designed to help companies that have recently launched or are poised to launch, enabling them to get past the early adopter phase. Wahooly is ideal for companies looking to score a Series A round.

“We’re delivering traction. It’s one of the biggest issues start-ups face and without it, they can’t get funding. We’re here to help start-ups that are getting close to Series A and need a boost,” Severson said.

This is complicated business, verifying the influence of users, engaging them and directing their attention to specific companies. There are also disclosure concerns for users, who will be de facto investors in companies. Wahooly has signed a deal with Klout to use its scores and has also inked a deal with Cmp.ly to include disclosures and tracking services for users, so their activity can be measured and their financial interest in a company can be shared with their followers.

I wonder if this model will fly or if it’s a sign of the bubble times we’re in, with so many people drawn to the startup game. Many companies that are already doing well won’t need to turn to Wahooly for a boost. But it’s another example of new startup services that are helping developers and entrepreneurs fill specific needs, in some cases in exchange for equity. Kayweb Angel is an investment group in New York City that provides development services, advice and mentoring to startups in exchange for equity. There are also more resources like AngelList, CapLinked and Kickstarter, which help unite entrepreneurs with funders.

It’s still early to see if Wahooly can make its model work. I have questions about how effective it will be for startups and how much users will stick with Wahooly when exits, many of them paltry or worth nothing, could take some time to happen. Severson said Wahooly can handle the traffic and is building in systems to prevent people from gaming the system. It also requires startup applicants to get enough users signed on to their company or risk getting pushed out of the system, which provides a vetting system so only worthy startups move forward. And he said as users get involved with more startups, there is a better chance to back a winner.

Overall, it’s another sign that in this gold rush era, there are opportunities of all kinds for startups, including helping other startups.

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Fast Society’s co-founder Matthew Rosenberg told me the company saw the writing on the wall at South by Southwest this past spring, when a number of messaging apps went head to head at the show. While the market seemed white hot, Rosenberg saw the limits of how far he could go with the group text messaging model. Rather than throw itself into the next version of the app, the New York-based team started plotting a new product, one that harkens back to the original vision for Fast Society.

“We originally thought of Fast Society as a way to save moments and capture experiences together but because of the circumstances and the competition, we got caught up in group text messaging,” Rosenberg said. “So much of it was about the technology but when we got to SXSW, we realized it wasn’t a tech problem, it was an experience problem.”

Rosenberg said the group messaging space has become saturated and the products have become fun features but not good businesses. Fast Society was one of the early pace setters and introduced things like including voice calls and sharing pictures and location. It was among the first to strike deals with brands, partnering with companies like MTV and others.

But Rosenberg said the business has low barriers to entry and some of the monetization models including like sponsored groups or advertising based on what people were texting wasn’t attractive. More fundamentally, he said there’s only so much that can be done through group messaging. And now that companies like Apple and Google are moving into the space while Facebook bought Beluga and Skype bought GroupMe, it becomes even less attractive for a start-up.

“It’s been a great place to build our chops and it’s been a street brawl with other companies, but we saw that the barriers were getting lower and no one was really winning,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg is tight lipped about what the future holds but he said it will explore emotions and experiences much more deeply. The company continues to survive on $380,000 in seed funding it received last year and has enough to launch Cameo.

Some of Rosenberg’s words could be looked as the parting shot of an entrepreneur who couldn’t keep up in the group messaging space. But he raises some good questions about how many companies can really succeed in the space and whether it can support stand alone businesses or is basically a feature that will replicated by bigger companies. WhatsApp, a company I profiled, has been thriving but it’s unclear how many others can join them. Also, it’s a good lesson on what happens when start-ups begin chasing fads rather than remain focused on their original passion. Rosenberg sounds like he’s fired up again. We’ll see if the plucky start-up can make a go of it on the rebound.

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The company is looking at all kinds of companies offering everything from mobile and online payments and location-based offers to loyalty and rewards programs, security and analytics. American Express will look to take a minority stake in these companies and create partnerships with them that will ultimately help bring new technology to the company’s audience of more than 90 million customers worldwide. Portfolio companies will be able to leverage not only American Express’ customers but also its employees, customer service and data analytics.

The fund will be run out of American Express’ new Palo Alto, Calif. office by Harshul Sanghi, who previously ran Motorola Mobility Ventures and is now managing partner for the Enterprise Growth Group at American Express. Sanghi will also focus on building the brand for Serve, American Express’ digital wallet product.

It’s another sign that American Express is anxious to keep evolving. It’s been investing in startups like PayFone and it’s been innovating in the offers market with partnerships with FourSquare, Facebook and SCVNGR. As I wrote earlier, it’s got a good shot to be a major player in the local deals market because of its direct relationship with merchants, its valuable data, its experience in building loyalty programs and its sales force.

For a 162-year-old company, AmEx is showing its got some ideas on how to stay fresh. But it understands that it can’t come up with all the innovation itself so this is a good tool to ensure it stays close to really promising startups, especially ones out of Silicon Valley.

Image courtesy of Flickr user The.Comedian.

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The $10 billion in listed deals means the amount of total money sought by companies looking to raise capital or sell assets. It’s unclear how many deals have actually closed and how much the transactions are worth.

CapLinked — which was founded by PayPal’s first head of marketing Eric Jackson and Christopher Grey, the former managing director at a subsidiary of Emigrant Bank — has tried to bridge the gap between companies looking to find financing and private investors looking to support start-ups. The company bills itself as a sort of LinkedIn meets Salesforce.com and provides a secure and social channel to facilitate deals, including CRM tools for entrepreneurs to pitch investors, manage their relationships and organize their document flow. Investors get an easy tool to track their portfolio and create a public profile and they can connect with entrepreneurs in “private deal rooms.”

CapLinked is now up to 90,000 accounts, a 4,000 percent increase since the beginning of the year. And there are 8,000 companies listed on CapLinked covering a range of industries. Though CapLinked was initially used by tech companies, now tech deals make up only one-third of the deals on the platform.

In August, CapLinked signed a deal with Microsoft  allowing startups enrolled in Microsoft’s BizSpark accelerator program to get access to DealRocket, which was just rolling out with a limited number of angels and early stages VCs. Now, CapLinked is opening up its DealRocket program to any start-up, so they can choose to make their private deal room available to about 1,000 professional investors. The company expects to have 10,000 professional investors on the platform by the end of the year.

CapLinked has raised $1.25 million to date from members of the PayPal Mafia that include Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Joe Lonsdale and Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos) as well as from David Anderson (7th Rig). CapLinked has emerged at a fortuitous time as investing in start-ups has become a huge business. As long as the bubble doesn’t pop, it should be in a good place helping facilitate more and more deals.

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What makes Kim so vocal? Well, he just organized the largest engineering job fair in New York last Saturday called SA500, an event staged at the New York Stock Exchange that brought together more than 50 of the top east coast companies with 500 top local engineering students. The event featured companies like Kayak, Tumblr, Living Social, Stack Exchange and others. Kim said he was pleased with the turnout but he realized there’s a lot more that east coast companies need to do to compete in the extremely tight market for engineering talent.

Though he looks at the issue through the lens of east coast companies, Kim has a lot of good thoughts for any emerging company looking to pick up talent. Engineers are prized commodities and success and failure depends on more than just ideas but talented workers who can put them into practice.

Kim said it comes down to three keys:

• Exploit home field advantage — East coast companies needs to really focus on recruiting in their backyard, specifically on college campuses. He said the east coast has some of the top engineering schools in MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and others and yet many of the best students migrate to the west coast because of the lure of Silicon Valley or direct recruitment from companies there. Kim said in a talk he had with Stanford president John Hennessy, Hennessy told him part of the success of Silicon Valley was Stanford’s commitment to local companies, which helped build a virtuous cycle with many entrepreneurs coming back and recruiting from Stanford and giving back to the campus. Kim said local companies need to build those bonds with universities and connect with students, who have a lot of reasons to stick around on the east coast but often feel they must head west. He said a new proposed engineering campus in New York by Bloomberg will be helpful but companies need to start sewing up east coast talent now.”A number of graduates want to stay on the east coast but they get courted by Facebook and Google,” Kim said. “You have to work harder to attract the same talent.”

• Bring out the big guns – One of the requirements of the SA500 was that companies had to send a CEO, founder or head of engineering. Kim said that’s critical because for companies who are not at the top of the heap, it takes the commitment of their key executives to sell students on their company. He said NextJump sets aside a whole Saturday with top executives to chat with prospective hires and convince them to join the company. The lesson is that to build for the future, CEOs and founders need to get deeply involved in filling the pipeline if they want to attract the next rock star to their team.”The CEO, founder or head of engineers can beat out a recruiter from another company. No one can sell their company and answer questions better than these people,” Kim said.

• Play for the long haul– Many companies are looking to fill holes, said Kim, trying to hire someone who can start Monday. But he said the biggest pool of  engineers don’t become available until they graduate in May. The key is getting on campus and courting them early, making sure they’re familiar with your company. NextJump, which has only been in stealth mode until only recently, often gets some of the prime position at campus job fairs because the company is very active in recruiting interns and hiring graduates. Kim said the company hires up to 25 interns a year – sophomores and juniors – paying them almost full salaries, which he said helps spread the word the company on campus and convinces many to join after graduate. He said NextJump hired about 25 engineers this year, almost all of them who had worked for the company as interns.”People try to win in the short term but they don’t get better and lose in the long term. You have to look at it in the long term. You need great top talent and if they’re becoming available in May, you need to work as hard for that person as the person who becomes available on Monday,” Kim said.

The bi-coastal talent war

Now, many companies are already doing these things. But there are lot of companies that could stand to invest more in some of these lessons. Engineers are key to the success of many start-ups, and there’s a talent war going on. This is one way in which Silicon Valley has an edge: Because it’s got such critical mass and recognition, so many companies there sometimes don’t have to work as hard to attract top engineers. The start-up scene in New York and the east coast is rising fast and companies are showing there are great ideas at work outside Silicon Valley. But I think Kim is right in that for the east coast in general and New York in particular to aspire to be a rival to Silicon Valley, it needs to take recruiting more seriously.

As Bob Mason, Co-Founder and CTO of Brightcove, who attended SA500, put it:

“A startup or emerging growth company’s success is primarily driven by the quality and passion of the team. Often each new addition can provide an opportunity for a step-function increase in company performance. CEOs, founders and other key executives would be foolish not to play an active role nurturing the emergent culture.”

Images courtesy of NextJump

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TechStars NYC managing director David Tisch introduces the new class

TechStars New York, now a TV brand thanks to a new Bloomberg series, graduated its second class of would-be breakout stars, plucked from a pool of 1,200 applicants. The class shows that the program is still churning out a lot of quality, with a pretty polished group of graduates debuting Tuesday. Many of the start-ups offered services marketed to businesses and looked to help smooth commerce or increase consumer engagement. Six of the start-ups had already raised money and many demonstrated some impressive traction with customers.

The demo day even attracted New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who seems lately to be on a barn storming tour touting the New York tech scene. He exhorted the start-ups to thrive and help turn the city into a tech capital, hiring many people along the way and ultimately paying taxes to the city.

I’ve already written about two of the graduates Piictu and Urtak, which put on strong demonstrations Tuesday. Of the companies I had yet to see, these caught my eye:

Ordr.in looks to create a Sabre for restaurants, enabling any website, app or service to offer food ordering from restaurants. The idea is to unite all the different ordering services around the country like Seamless Web and others through one API into a larger platform that can serve companies and destinations looking to offer food services. Wyndham Hotels, for example, is building a virtual room service widget for guests who use its Wi-Fi network. The service is finding its way on to Facebook, Boxee, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and also a new food decider app through a partnership with Hunch.

Just like Sabre has helped power Kayak and Hipmunk while Multiple Listing Service (MLS) helped enable Zillow, Ordr.in is looking to have a similar effect on the restaurant industry, helping the sector make a leap similar to when franchising appeared in the 1950s. The start-up is already working with more than 70 local food ordering services, which allow Ordr.in offer service in all 50 states. I like Ordr.in because it seems like a smart way to expand the market for restaurants, who are often seem stuck in the past and are slow to embrace technology improvements. This gives them much broader reach and it helps brings food ordering to a lot services that we might not have thought of in the past. The company has already raised money from Google Ventures, which led its seed round, and is now looking for a Series A round.

Contently bills itself as a structured market bringing together freelance journalists and brands looking to add content. The service has generated more than $1 million in sales and is doubling in sales every six weeks. It already has 2,000 journalists from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and other publications who are making an average of $60,000 annually, 40 percent more than average journalists. Companies such as LinkedIn have already turned to Contently to create content and American Express Open Forum has just signed on for a pilot.

Contently is taking advantage of a couple of trends including the often forced migration of 90,000 journalists into freelance jobs in recent years. Brands are also becoming publishers as they look to engage consumers with original content. I like Contently because it looks like a good solution for the times we’re in. I know a lot of journalists who have moved into freelance work and though it sometimes seems like a more uncertain place to be in, I think a service like Contently can solve a lot of problems for journalists and companies who are increasingly looking to put these writers to work. Contently has already closed a $335,000 seed round with Founder Collective and is raising $3 million with $500,000 already committed.

ChatID is a universal chat platform that lets any business or company connect with consumers through existing chat channels. Right now, users who want to connect to a brand need to head off to their company site to get questions answered. But ChatID allows users to connect through their existing chat services and through popular retail destinations to talk to a company, which should help foster more communication and engagement, increase conversions and cut down on consumer support costs.

This is helpful for companies who sell their wares and services over a lot of different websites. A user who visits Amazon.com, for example, could connect directly to a manufacturer though a chat button on their product page that connects them directly into the brand’s instant messaging system. This makes sense because people increasingly favor text messaging over phone calls. And companies want to be able to reach out to users in real-time just as they’re looking to buy. ChatID has already raised $1 million. I think it’s headed for a lot more if it can become the go-to resource for companies looking to reach out to consumers in real-time.

Here’s a complete list of all the companies in the TechStars NYC class:

Ambassador: Social Customer Acquisition Platform for eCommerce

ChatID: Universal Chat Platform Enabling Businesses to Communicate with Customers on Any Site or Device

Contently: Professional Writing Marketplace for Brands

Coursekit: The Social Network for Education

Dispatch: Service for Cloud File Sharing, Movement, and Management

MobIntent: Ad Optimization and Analytics for Mobile App Marketing

Ordr.in: Restaurant eCommerce Platform Connecting Restaurants Anywhere to Clients Everywhere

Piictu: Visual Network for Mobile Photo Interactions

SideTour: Peer-to-Peer Marketplace for Authentic Experiences

Spontaneously: Mobile Service for Sharing Social Plans and Availability

Urtak: Addictive Q+A Tool Creating Structured Engagement with Web Content

Wantworthy: Shopping Utility that Bridges the Gap Between Browsing and Buying

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