Gauging by the preparation of the startups, we should see similar success for these companies compared to the entertainers listed above. On a side note, Elvis Presley also performed at Webster Hall. Like a couple of the companies in the Spring 2012 class, he’s one of my favorites to grace this stage.

As things get started there is a lot of mingling.  Investors talk about what they’re doing, which startups they are looking at and what they hope to gain from today’s pitches.  Some are like me, here to support these teams and watch greatness happen. At Rackspace, we support these folks, even if they aren’t customers.  The companies of tomorrow are born from tech accelerators all over the world, and today is no exception. It’s exciting to see the technology changes as well as the talent of the folks who are gutsy enough to risk it all for a dream!

As always, TechStars Founder and CEO David Cohen is among the masses this morning at Webster Hall. The TechStars NYC crew is here, including Managing Director David Tisch.  It’s great to see other managing directors show up to support their peers as well.  Katy Rae is here from TechStars Boston, and Jason Seats, managing director of TechStars Cloud in San Antonio has checked in as well.  On the stage screen for everyone to see is a note to learn more about the companies pitching today…demoday.techstars.com. I suggest you check it out.

As the lights go up, David Tisch, with his new, clean, business-like haircut, takes the stage to open the event. He talks about how important a mentor is to a startup, a recurring theme inside the TechStars network. Some mentors in the program have participated in molding startups since TechStars was founded in 2006. And now it’s time to introduce the TSNYC 2012 Spring Class, which boasts five female-founded companies. It’s awesome to see so much excitement in the Big Apple!

What follows is a look at the TechStars NYC Spring 2012 program:

10sheet – a solid mix of automation software and real-life bookkeeping services that gets the job done faster and less expensive than a traditional bookkeeper.

Bondsy – a new social network that simplifies sharing, selling and bartering with your friends.

Classtivity – aggregates all the leisure and fitness classes around you with filters for time, date, place and price.

ConditionOne – a new 180-degree video player for your iPad or iPhone from a professional war photographer turned Academy Award-nominated documentarian.

Karma – introduces social bandwidth with a 4G wireless hotspot for mobile.

Lua – a project management and communication tool for any mobile workforce.

Marquee – a simple web-based authoring tool that allows publishers to build beautiful pages with no coding experience whatsoever.

Moveline – a radically different moving concept, which takes your entire inventory through FaceTime or videos sent via the Internet, and can offer you a moving quote from multiple companies.

Pickie – brings content and social proof to ecommerce on your mobile shopping adventure.

PopTip – offers real-time Twitter poll result tracking, hashtags and auto-corrected spelling.

Rewind.Me – creates a digital history of your life, helping brands to better target and offer loyalty rewards.

SmallKnot – helps you to invest in small local businesses that you both frequent and care about.

Wander – a beautiful new way to share and experience the world.

The Rackspace Startup Program congratulates the TechStars NYC Spring 2012 Class for all the hard work and long hours logged over the last several weeks, culminating with Demo Day at the historic Webster Hall. We look forward to seeing these companies online, making a great impact on the world.

Are you looking for help taking your startup from ideation to implementation? The Space Cowboys look forward to hearing from you and are here to help with a world class cloud computing platform from which to launch!

Thirteen companies assembled for TechStars Boston Demo Day:

• Bison – Platform for alternate investments – CEO Michael Nugent
• docTrackr – Document tracking and metrics – CEO Clement Cazalot
• Gym-Pact – Mobile app that incentivizes regular exercise – CEO Yifan Zhang
• Laveem – The nexus of all food knowledge – CEO Varun Chirravuri
• Libboo  - Home of the next digital bestseller – CEO Chris Howard
• Mortar – Easy Hadoop in the cloud – CEO K. Young
• Murfie – Where your music belongs – CEO Matt Younkle
• Psykosoft – Creative software factory – CEO Mathieu Gosselin
• Shopsy – The retail graph – CEO Lisa Morales-Hellebo
• Simply Good Technologies- Simple mobile couponing – CEO Winston Mark
• Testive – Engaging test prep – CEO Miro Kazakoff
• Ubersense – Helping athletes and amateurs improve anywhere, anytime – CEO Krishna Ramchandran
• Zagster – Think Zipcar for bikes: Bike-as-a-Service – CEO Timothy Ericson

As Katie Rae, managing director of TechStars Boston commented, “The magical part of TechStars is that the companies have each others’ back.” Katie went on to talk about how Boston has the startups’ back : there is a surge of resources being brought about by the city, the schools in the area and VC and angel investors making it happen. Truly this is a big deal, even David Cohen’s (founder and CEO of TechStars) mom showed up for this one.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the TechStars Boston companies:

Zagster is bringing a new as a Service to the market, BaaS: Bike-as-a-Service. It is bringing bike sharing to the market just as Zipcar has for cars.

docTrackr is looking at a hockey stick style go to market. It is able to fulfill what many of us dreamed about while watching Mission Impossible; the ability destroy the document you sent to someone.

Libboo is changing the publishing industry. Listening to the company makes me believe that the industry will really change through the power of the web and the power of influence. If anyone is going to do it, it’s these guys. Go find a new book to fall in love with today.

Psykosoft is bringing art back to the tablet and PC. Being featured on the Google site, Mozilla shortly and being a prime offering with Windows 8 should create some great traction. I have to admit, it’s a lot of fun to play with it. Having just returned from England, I downloaded a ton of pictures and began playing. It’s fun for adults and kids.

Mortar is one tall company. I think the CEO K. Young is at least 7 feet tall. The company is doing something grand as well;  making Hadoop easy. It made me feel like I could do it as a non-programmer! It’s a great tool set for folks that have a need to analyze big data.

Shopsy helps men support the woman in their life by helping them find the perfect match at the clothing store. As a married man, I know I want to avoid the chair outside the fitting room. If they can do that, I’ll pay no matter how much money they want!

Ubersense is improving the way you play sports. I saw CEO Krishna Ramchandran pitch it at a local meet-up at the NERD last year.. With TechStars his pitch is 100 times better and well rounded. It’s amazing to see how TechStars has really helped Krishna and Ubersense improve their business acumen.

Gym-Pact will either make me healthy or broke. It makes you put your money where your mouth is. Pay a dollar if you don’t meet your goal; gain a dollar if you do. As cheap as I am I can’t think of a better motivation than money out of my pocket!

David Cohen ended the day with a great speech in which he made sure to point out the most important thing, today was his mother’s birthday. Spontaneously, we all just started singing “Happy Birthday” to her. It was totally unplanned but well done. Second, he noted how important good help is for the startups within TechStars. It really is about the people in the network and the passion they have. I thought it was great to see the way TechStars had all the startups receive their fans and suitors in sections of the Wilbur Theatre.

I echo David’s thoughts that it truly is great people involved here to help these folks out. I can’t wait to see what next September will bring as they vet out the new class.

Is your startup ready for an accelerator experience? If so, contact the Space Cowboys with the Rackspace Startup Program today.

What is Navicat?

Navicat is a highly rated database tool designed to meet the needs of database administrators and developers who need a fast, reliable and affordable solution to their needs. Its GUI allows users to create, organize and share information in a secure and easy manner.

With its powerful, intuitive and user-friendly GUI users can manipulate data with peace of mind and not have to worry about the long-winded learning process that the other tools out there require you to endure.

Flexibility is also an important characteristic that not many tools have in common. However, Navicat allows for complete flexibility. It is available for several server types including MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Oracle. It supports Windows, Mac OS-X and Linux operating systems. Our flagship product, Navicat Premium, gives users complete flexibility and ease of use by allowing connections to multiple database servers within a single application.

How can Rackspace clients use Navicat for their needs?

Rackspace users frequently use either MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server databases, or sometimes both. Clients can use Navicat to perform complex operations such as batch-job scheduling, generating reports, data synchronization, importing/exporting data, visual query editing and much more. Navicat is a great tool for performing complex tasks related to database design and data manipulation.

Getting Started is so easy too!

To start working with Navicat, the first thing you will need to do is establish a connection to your databases.

Next you would just enter the Rackspace MySQL connection information; such as host IP address, port, username and password. Click Test Connection to check the connection and then click OK to save the connection settings.

From the control panel you can see the databases that sit under the account.  Now, you can start enjoying the great features that Navicat has to offer.  It’s just that easy.

In a recent post,  jackofallclouds.com had a snapshot of the top 500,000 sites hosted by the top cloud providers.  Rackspace Cloud Servers has been gaining on Amazon EC2 for some time and as of this month, it is truly neck-and-neck.  Amazon EC2 is at 3,674 sites and Rackspace is at 3,662 sites.  Third place was more than 50% behind Rackspace and Amazon.  The graph points out a tight run between Rackspace and Amazon to be the top cloud host provider.

Indeed, the article goes on to say,

“Rackspace’s numbers look better than ever – they can be proud to be just a hair away from the top spot. For all intents and purposes, in this survey Amazon EC2 and the Rackspace Cloud are tied at first place.”

While no one likes to be second place, we consider this a big win for Rackspace.  It’s also worth noting that Jack of all Clouds’s numbers do not include Rackspace Cloud Sites or websites hosted on our dedicated servers.

Rackspace is becoming the company to turn to for mission critical cloud hosting, and it shows: more companies are choosing Rackspace Cloud Servers to host their websites . We are proud to be doing so well against Amazon, a great company that we respect.  We’ll keep watching Jack of all Clouds in the coming months to see what happens.

A friend of mine, the CEO of a small ASP software company, hired a consultant to come in and tweak a few things on a MySQL database. The consultant was in and out in a day, database performance was back to normal, and all was well. Until…two days later, when his phone rang. The voice on the other end was his archrival competitor. “John, I just wanted you to know that the consultant who was in your shop last week stole your entire database, and just offered to sell it to me.”

That’s a call you DON’T want to get. My friend had used a MySQL database for his application because it was scalable and cost effective, but he knew security might be a concern. His team had hacked together an encryption solution, but apparently it didn’t offer protection from root access, which he had given to the consultant for the day.

We hear these stories time and time again. There’s always a new twist, but the core challenge remains the same: there is no transparent data encryption (TDE) built in to MySQL. The solutions assembled by most folks don’t include protection from root access administrators, and encryption key management is a nightmare. Add to that the fines and other ramifications of not complying with HIPAA or PCI standards and you’ve got a real challenge on your hands.

Enter… Gazzang ezNcrypt for MySQL.

While our patent-pending product suite spans the cloud, our first focus is on the most insidious inhibitor of full enterprise-wide cloud computing adoption: data security for MySQL. According to an October 2010 report by Forrester Research, security issues are the “most prominent reasons organizations cite for not adopting cloud services.” And our customer research shows that open source applications in particular are among the most vulnerable.

Protecting data at rest, starting with MySQL

The core of the ezNcrypt product suite is transparent data encryption (TDE). Once reserved for expensive and difficult to implement commercial databases, Gazzang brings this critical functionality to software that secures the world’s fastest-growing — and highly vulnerable — open source database: MySQL.

Gazzang ezNcrypt solves the problem of protecting data at rest with encryption at the database, table and table space level for MySQL, and also encrypts databases on both hard drive and backup media regardless of location — cloud, hosted solution, you name it. Companies have the ability to:

The “key” to secure data

Data encryption is one thing, but without an effective key system, it’s essentially useless. The success — and security — of a company’s data encryption operation depends on an impenetrable key, and that’s where Gazzang excels.

Our Key Storage System (KSS), which is exclusively available with Gazzang ezNcrypt Standard and Enterprise versions, is a proprietary, back-end platform for reliable, secure, enterprise-class encryption key management that is specifically designed to meet the most stringent compliance requirements.

It is Gazzang’s transparent data encryption technology, an unparalleled key management system, simple implementation, and “set and forget” design that combines to give companies a comprehensive tool for complete data-at-rest security and preservation of MySQL data.

Visit Gazang’s partner page for more information about Gazzang ezNcrypt.

#10 – Several New OS’s for Cloud Servers

Rackspace® Hosting furthered its commitment to having a diverse cloud by adding more Operating Systems this year than most of our competitors. We’re always striving to have the resources your business needs.