Over the past week, here’s a sampling of news highlights of members of the BizSpark One program, identifying a small number of the best companies in BizSpark, which is now comprised of over 40,000 startups.

Week of September 18-24, 2011

• § Acumatica, a provider of ERP software, announced that it has closed a round of investment led by Nordic-based technology company, Visma. The investment will be used to further expand Acumatica’s sales and marketing efforts and development of its technology platform.

• § Flite, a leader in cloud-based advertising, was featured in Inc’s ’10 Cool New Tech Ideas to Help You Market Your Business’.

• § Glympse, a mobile service that enables simple and safe location sharing, was highlighted in Ad Age’s 10 Startups to Watch. Glympse allows users to share their location dynamically and set their location visibility to expire after a certain time limit, which offers a great way to facilitate location interaction between brands and consumers in a real-time manner.

• § Graphic.ly, a digital comic book platform, launched a new application for Facebook that enables new and casual fans to access a wide selection of comic books. Graphic.ly’s application is currently the only digital comic book platform that gives publishers a way to put their content on Facebook.

• § Kobo, a global leader in eReading with over 4.9 million users worldwide, announced new social eReading features, providing users the ability to engage in conversations with each other while reading, as well as Facebook integration that helps people to share their eReading activity with their friends.

• § Mintigo, delivering marketing intelligence with rich customer profiling, raised $9M in Series B financing led by Sequoia Capital, Giza Venture Capital and private investors. The investment will be used to further the company’s expansion in the US market.

• § News360, a next-generation news personalization and aggregation service, was featured in Mashable, highlighting the company’s multi-platform service that delivers individualized content through semantic analysis of a user’s behavior and interest from Twitter, Facebook and other profiles that the user connects with News360.

• § ParcelGenie, an instant gift messaging service, was named the runner-up of the Vodafone Mobile Clicks Contest, recognizing innovative startups in mobile internet services. ParcelGenie, based in the UK won a €50,000 cash prize.

• § Xtranormal, bringing movie-making magic to the masses, announced that the New York Times will be bringing its line of satirical comics to life via the Xtranormal movie making platform. The New York Times plans to release one new Xtranormally produced satirical short per week, the first one illustrates a conversation between Warren Buffett and Mark Zuckerberg on Groupon’s IPO buzz.

Over the past week, here’s a sampling of news highlights of members of the BizSpark One program, identifying a small number of the best companies in BizSpark, which is now comprised of over 40,000 startups.

Week of September 11-17, 2011

• § Digital Folio, creator of a multi-channel, real-time shopping platform, officially launched its free shopping app that lets users drag and drop a product from a website into the Digital Folio sidebar, showing the prices of that product at major retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Sears, Target, and Walmart, and revealing the best price for the item. Digital Folio showcased their product in the Pavilion at last week’s DEMOFall 2011.

• § Exceedra, focused on commercial and supply chain planning, is shortlisted for the ‘Intellect Innovation Award’ at the 2011 Software Satisfaction Awards, recognizing innovative new products delivering significant benefit for business users or customers. The winners will be announced at the ceremony on October 18^th in London.

• § Will Price, CEO of Flite, a leader in cloud-based advertising, participated in a panel discussion on-stage at DEMOFall focused on how large companies and startups can work effectively with each other. The panel was moderated by Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership and also included our very own Claire Lee, Sharon Delman, Director of Marketing for Intuit’s Partner Platform and Rene Lacerte, Founder and CEO of Bill.com.

• § BizSpark One alum OneRiot was acquired by Walmart, and will be joining @WalmartLabs, Walmart’s hub focused on creation of new technologies and business models integrating social, mobile and retail for the next-generation of e-commerce.

Over the past week, here’s a sampling of news highlights of members of the BizSpark One program, identifying a small number of the best companies in BizSpark, which is now comprised of over 40,000 startups.

Week of September 4-10, 2011

• § Digital Folio, creator of a multi-channel, real-time shopping platform, was reviewed by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, summarizing that “Digital Folio is a good start toward making complicated online buying decisions simpler”. Digital Folio is showcasing their product at the DEMOFall pavilion.

• § Evernote, a cloud-based service that helps you remember everything, was featured in The Next Web discussing the company’s success and view of the future.

• § Exceedra, focused on commercial and supply chain planning, announced that Hozelock, one of Britain’s leading gardening suppliers has implemented Exceedra’s Demand Signal Repository Solution, offering Hozelock faster and more accurate forecasting capabilities and automation of customer stock and sales information to increase on-shelf availability.

• § ParcelGenie, an instant gift messaging service, is the UK finalist for the Vodafone Mobile Clicks Competition, among 6 other country finalists competing for the €225,000 prize. The winners of the competition will be announced on September 16^th.

Greetings from the Startup America HD Lounge at #DEMOcon

Over 2,300 organisations worldwide count themselves as Network Partners, and this community of incubators, investors, accelerators, advisors, government agencies, mentoring groups, hosters - all involved in supporting software-fueled innovation and the next generation of technology entrepreneurs – have helped us reach and support a critical mass of over 42,000 startups in BizSpark in over 100 countries.

Today we are shining a bit of a spotlight on our partnerships that help fuel the success of BizSpark, and of technology entrepreneurs everywhere.

We’re embarking on a really exciting partnership with the Founder Institute supporting their work in the US and farther afield in places in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Find out more about them here.

Startup Weekend to Tuesday at Demo

There’s a huge buzz in the market, and this week hundreds of entrepreneurs with early stage startups pitch their ideas, here at #DEMOcon and up 101 at TC #DisruptSF while Startup America and Startup Weekend folks recover from an incredible 54 hours MEGA weekend of idea generation, creation and build – resulting in:

• More than 300 people meeting up at Microsoft Mountain View 9-11 Sept to create companies
• In the Education Vertical: 30 Ideas Pitched and 14 Final teams – Winning team @classparrot
• In the Gaming Vertical: 29 Ideas Pitched and 9 Final teams – Winning team @Gablinga
• In the Health Vertical: 36 Ideas Pitched and 12 Final teams – Winning team @LiveHomeFree

These 3 winning teams, fresh from creating a brand new business, get to pitch at #DEMOcon tomorrow afternoon. More on those soon.

New startups rely on the help and support from a huge range of organizations and a lot of those are working together to bring more resources and services to help startups:

Gust Investor Relations Platform Powers International Startup Financing

We all know how critical access to capital is for early stage companies.

This morning at #DEMOcon, Angelsoft unveiled their new platform – check out the new, free tools for entrepreneurs at www.gust.com which is a result of more than seven years of market and business development in the investment community under the Angelsoft brand. Gust launched today as the official investor relations platform of over 15 national and international investor associations, 150 venture capital funds, 600 business angel groups and 35,000 accredited angel investors. More than 125,000 entrepreneurs have already used the platform to create detailed profiles to share with potential investment partners.

BizSpark startups can access the Gust platform easily through our program offer here.

Startup America

Scott Case, CEO, said “Startup America Partnership is focused on young companies that have their sights set on serious growth. As one of our partners, Gust provides these job-creators access to capital through angel and VC investment sources, combined with education and collaboration tools.”

On stage at #DEMOcon this morning, both Dan’l Lewin from Microsoft and Adeo Ressi, Founder Institute, were full of praise for what David Rose and his team have built. Check out all the news from Startup America just announced – their platform is open for business so startups can start to avail of all the various partner offers, and they welcome Dell, among others, to the list of partner sponsors.

“Since our launch at the White House in January, we’ve been delighted by how the private sector has stepped up and committed resources that will accelerate the growth of America’s young companies,” said Scott Case, CEO of the Startup America Partnership. “We’re excited to now provide direct access to these amazing offerings that will help maximize the success of startups.”