Lijit

It’s always a good thing to know what’s happening in your local community and there’s a new blog in our neck of the woods that is providing even more exposure to the Colorado tech scene. RockyRadar is covering Colorado’s emerging businesses and whether it’s Web 2.0, life sciences, clean tech, or software, this blog will write about it. From posting about local tech events to providing a technology calendar to keep them all straight, this blog is doing everything in their power to keep their readers informed.

While RockyRadar is a new blog, we’re hoping that by profiling them here, we’ll be able to help them grow their readership and share their goodness with others. The people behind RockyRadar were kind enough to answer a few questions for us about the method behind their blogging madness and I couldn’t be happier to share them.

• How long have you been blogging and what made you start?

My partner and I graduated from business school in May and planned to launch a startup in San Francisco after spending the summer tweaking the plan in the mountains of Colorado. By July, the market we’d targeted had shifted substantially with the arrival of a well-funded player, so we decided to pull back and reevaluate. We began researching other ideas–primarily using technology blogs–and eventually it occurred to us to look into the business model behind the blogs themselves.

We eventually found dozens of broad-based technology blogs, but they are largely anchored to the coasts. We also discovered a geographical bias underlying their coverage, as they primarily tend to report on what’s going on in their own backyard. Our analysis revealed that in markets like Colorado and Texas, a significant number of smaller companies were being overlooked entirely by the coastal journals. We then spoke to some folks to verify our findings and–knowing two people in Colorado and zero people in Texas–decided to create a blog focusing exclusively on the technology coming out of the Rocky Mountain region. So we drove down the hill, set up in Boulder, and started knocking on doors. I think our first post was in September, but we really started getting after it in October of 2008.

• What has been the greatest thing you’ve gotten from blogging?

The greatest thing we’ve gotten from blogging has been our exposure to the different technology communities and the people working within them. Colorado has these dense pockets of excellence of which we’ve barely scratched the surface, but the people we’ve met so far have overwhelmed us with their intelligence and magnanimity. You’ve got Brad Bernthal and his associates at Silicon Flatirons making enormous strides in transforming CU Boulder into an engine of entrepreneurship; there are the life science professionals working out of Fitzsimmons Park in Aurora dedicated to projects that will change the face of medicine; there is the Clean Energy Cluster in Fort Collins married to some of the most ambitious alternative energy goals in the country; there is the IT community in Boulder which speaks the language of Silicon Valley but with a much cooler accent.

Blogging has allowed us to meet these talented people and provided the opportunity to learn from them and about them.

• Of all the posts you’ve written in your short blogging life, what has been your favorite and why?

At RockyRadar, we have different formats to fit the context of what we’re covering. In reporting events, like a Crash Course or a Renewable Energy Breakfast, we like to keep the writing spare while capturing the main points. The last New Tech Meetup is probably a good example. But we also write longer form profiles, where we try for a deeper dive to explore both the technology and the business model of a company, like our piece on Tensegrity Prosthetics. Finally, if an event we’re covering is steeped in creativity we might err on the side of the impish, as we did in our piece on Ignite Boulder.

• What’s your 2009 forecast for the Colorado tech scene?

Jason Mendelson of the Foundry Group recently opined that a downturn is a great time to start a business, and no matter the climate, an A+ business will always get funded. I think there’s some contrarian wisdom in this view. However, there is a strong likelihood that Colorado startups may suffer the consequences of problems occurring on the financial side, specifically the ability of institutional investors to continue to invest in venture capital funds. A good explanation of the pension pickle was recently offered by Fortune magazine and can be found here.

Given the constraints on university endowments and pension funds, it could be difficult for some venture capital firms to raise new capital. Venerable players like Foundry won’t have difficulty accessing cash, but new players or less respected shops might find themselves boxed out on a dollar basis. This is concerning because very few entrepreneurs are born an A+ player; it’s more likely they become one through trying, failing, and learning from failure. A significant downturn in VC dollars will likely reduce the number of funded companies (and thus eventual failures), meaning fewer entrepreneurs will get a chance to learn from their mistakes, and fewer Colorado companies will obtain critical seed capital.

I should note, however, that Mendelson has disagreed with the pessimism of this assessment, and any reader who is still with me after three paragraphs should embrace some butchered Kafka: In the struggle between yourself and Mendelson, back Jason Mendelson.

• How has Lijit helped you as a blog publisher?

By covering technology in Colorado we’ve had several points of contact with Lijit employees, from covering the CEO and COO at a University event, laughing with and at some of the hilarious Lijit team at Ignite Boulder, or being schooled in the latest and greatest social networking functionality by Lijit’s ubiquitous intern. The one thing abundantly clear through all of these interactions is how much these people love their jobs. It’s to the point where you want to check the company water cooler for traces of Ecstasy.

Where this helps RockyRadar as a blog publisher comes on the customer service side: At every point of contact there’s been a willingness on the part of everyone at the company to go above and beyond the call in getting us up and running. And let’s make no mistake: At the time we installed the search function, our audience was my partner’s Mom and my high school English teacher, who was checking to see if I still made drug references in my professional writing. Lijit is evangelical in its belief that it is bringing something cool and useful to the world, and as such they seem to have a special place in their hearts for the small-but-promising.

We look forward to seeing much more of RockyRadar and to what they’ll be bringing to our local tech community in the upcoming year. Besides, with a mascot like this, how can they not succeed?

(And just for the record…there are no traces of any type of drug in the Lijit water cooler. Perhaps in the Lijit kool-aid, but definitely not in our water supply…)

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