Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Venture Capitalists Converge on Colorado to Look In on Startups

So, this week I returned to Vail, Colo., for the annual Venture Capital in the Rockies conference, and sat through 19 of 22 early-stage companies presenting, all of them seeking investments from VCs in the area. All of the companies presenting are either from Colorado or from surrounding states. Here are a few that caught my eye.

Cloud Elements: Based in Denver, this company of 12 employees specializes in making cloud applications work together. When the other option is to hire a bunch of programmers to write a bunch of custom code to get two or three or more cloud applications to play nice together, this company has designed a growing list of pre-built integrations.

GeoStrut: While not technically a digital company, this company fascinated me with its carbon fiber lattice designs that are used in the construction of, among other things, wireless towers. Carbon fiber isn’t a new material, but GeoStrut has perfected a way to mass-produce it. It’s getting a lot of incoming interest from companies in India and elsewhere in the developing world where wireless infrastructure construction is likely to boom. It’s based in Lindon, Utah.

Lendio: Based in South Jordan, Utah, Lendio is basically a matchmaker for small businesses looking for commercial loans. It helps small business owners find the right loan from the right kind of institution — a bank, credit union or other source. It’s not a lender, but makes fees on the referrals.

MobilePulse: Ever wished you could hire someone to evaluate all your wireless plan device options and tell you which one was best? Imagine having the same problem for a business, where you’re managing a fleet of hundreds if not thousands of smartphones, tablets and the like. Denver-based Mobilepulse has a software-as-a-service product that measures, compares and diagnoses mobile performance. It uses a client application that gets installed on all of a company’s devices, and monitors performance for analysis and reporting. Over time, you get an idea of your plan’s performance, and can later compare it against different plans from other carriers.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus