Vermont 2.0

Fair warning up front, some of the links contained herein are pretty geeky.  However, I wanted to give folks a look inside Burlington start-up Kluster, one of FreshTracks portfolio companies and a prime example of a cutting edge Vermont company. This ain't maple syrup and covered bridges folks.  Kluster was the brainchild of Ben Kaufman and his company mophie, an iPod accessories company he founded (and we funded) in Burlington during 2006.  Ben used the power of crowds at Macworld to design some successful iPod accessories for mophie and became enamored with the idea of using a social networking type platform to bring an analog experience digital. Last fall mophie sold its iPod accessories line, banked the proceeds to develop the software platform it envisioned, changed its name to Kluster and got to work.  Next week at the vaunted Technology Entertainment and Design conference in California, Kluster's product will be officially rolled out.  Supposedly this will coincide with an article in Business Week.  Meanwhile we have to content ourselves with a short piece by Cathy Resmer in her 802 Online blog and this quite geeky piece in Techcrunch (which introduced me to the term "crowdsourcing" - make sure you read the comments which are colorful) and of course the Kluster website itself now running in beta.  To give you an idea of how good Ben is at promotion, our website has a clip of his visit to CNBC's Power Lunch program last year to talk about mophie.   It's never dull working with young companies.