Washington DC based LaunchBox Digital, an early stage investment firm and incubator founded in 2007 by John McKinley, Sean Green, and Julius Genachowski (now the new head of the FCC and divested), just wrapped up its second annual 12-week program. Modeled in the same vein as YCombinator, LaunchBox invests seed capital of around $20,000-$25,000 into teams, and provides them with 12 weeks of education, mentorship and access to a small army of advisors.

Drawn from a pool of over 275 applicants, we chose eight teams were selected to comprise the 2009 class.   Below is a brief description of each, with notes by me, as well as links to screencasts of their products and their websites.

Deadline for “class” at  Launchbox Digital (a DC based venture accelerator) is March 16. Check it out. Thrown in an app and tae a shot. Might as well in this economy? Seriously though, they are dong some cool things.

Also, they just signed a partnership with and took an investment from wireless firm ACTA. More campuses need accelerator programs for students.

[qi:014] Early-stage businesses looking to bring their idea to market — or build a bigger market for their existing products — can now apply for some cash, advice, and practical guidance courtesy of LaunchBox Digital. The Washington, D.C.-based business incubator and investment firm is accepting applications for its Summer 2009 business accelerator program, LaunchBox09. Up to 10 successful applicants to LaunchBox09 will receive seed investment and help in establishing and building their new business. For more information visit www.launchboxdigital.com.

Last year, when we launched the business incubator component of LaunchBox Digital, we weren’t sure what to expect.  How many applicants will our first program get?  What will be the quality of the ideas?  How much support will each company require?  It was a bit of a leap of faith, especially because of our decision to base the program in Washington, DC.

Now, looking back over the last eight months since the first program began, we couldn’t be happier.  We got around 250 applicants, ranging all the way from DC to Norway and China.  The ideas we saw were of good, and sometimes great, quality.  We selected a group of finalists to interview, and from there, we chose the nine companies that were our inaugural participants.  12 weeks later (fueled by lots of sweat equity and passion), each of the nine companies got to pitch their businesses to investors, bloggers and angels on the East and West Coasts, with some great early feedback.

But suddenly, right after the end of the program, the US (and subsequently, the global economy) went into the tank.  Here were entrepreneurs, excited and energized, sitting across from potential investors who were watching the book value of their investments decline day after day.  I don’t think there could have been a more daunting challenge for our companies:  Each company really needed to close on a new round of funding, if they were going to take their business to a new level, and they found themselves competing for attention in an incredibly stressful investment environment.

Angels were seeing 30-40% declines in what they considered their low-to-medium risk index and stock investments, and wondering if they were too far out on the efficient frontier with their private equity investing.  Venture funds, even ones in the top quartile of performance, were watching their own fund raising efforts run into a community of LPs who were collectively reeling from their own hedge fund investing.

Now imagine throwing a bunch of early stage companies into this maelstrom, and you might expect a real train wreck.  What we got, however, was the exact opposite.

In really early stage investing, it is all about investing in the people, and, as a collective group, the LaunchBox teams were as creative and dedicated a group as we had ever run across.  They all kept the faith, used the same aggressive cost management that they had operated with all summer, and pressed on with both their fund raising and product development.

Now, sitting here in January, we have six of the nine companies funded, and all are focused on changing the world in their own unique ways.  As people who played a small part in their journey, we couldn’t be happier.

With that as background, we are happy to announce that we are now open for applications for the 2009 incubator program, LaunchBox09.  We are really excited about the new ideas that we’ll see this year.  We think there are a number of new catalysts and opportunities for startups that have emerged over the last year:

• Government 2.0 – looking at the agenda of the new administration, and seeing interesting spaces to help drive the efficient re-invention of government-funded processes and programs
• Healthcare – taking a fresh look at outside-in innovation around patient care and personal health monitoring and management
• Plays within the new mobile ecosystems, including new ones centered around Palm’s webOS and Android
• Opportunities afforded by powerful netbooks soon hitting the $150-200 price range (and that $20 India netbook we’ll see Feb. 3!;)
• Products riding the infrastructure plays like Twitter and delivering complementary new services.

With the continued support of both our great group of advisors and our first alumni group, we can help first-time entrepreneurs navigate that crucial first year of existence and succeed.  In spite of what we see each day on TV and the web about the macro-economic picture, too many new opportunities exist for people to play defense here – we are looking for bright, bold, and dedicated folk to help lead the way to a brighter tomorrow.  You can learn more about our program (and apply to participate) at www.launchboxdigital.com.

Venturehacks had a very relevant post on ‘High Concept Pitches’.

A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence. It’s the perfect tool for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a high concept pitch, albeit for another startup: Razume, YouTube for Resumes.

I met the founders, Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman, and Clinton Herget, last night, and so far they seem like a great group of guys.

Here’s a higher level description:

Razumé is a resume review community where users anonymously post, rate and review resumes. We support a growing population of students, graduates, career consultants and recruiters. Razumé provides a fast and easy way to collect valuable feedback on your resume – you can even request reviews directly from recruiters. We take a collaborative approach to career services, bringing you better quality feedback for a stronger resume.

So, like I said — Youtube for resumes.

Now I’ve seen something very interesting over the past few weeks, as I’ve scoured the CMU and Penn State Job board …

Most students have crappy resumes. Well most of the students I saw, and most of the bad ones came from Penn State.

Besides one more resource where you can copy/paste a resume style you find of someone else you like, I highly advise Razume as a great tool for students looking to find a job, or just get some feedback on how to improve your resume (all the easier to get that cushy Fortune 500 job ).

Now before you say — well what’s the difference between Razume and say … Scribd?

Users upload resumes, and specify career field, location, school, major, and expected salary.

Well Razume, besides being specifically for Resumes (think of the opportunities for head hunters, etc.), has a lot of cool editing features, giving users a whole pallet of tools to edit and comment on resumes.

Draw arrows, black out, scribble out, color, and comment directly on different areas of the Resume — and users can toggle between “show comments” and “hide comments” if they don’t want to see the feedback.

Besides the editing features, users can leave general comments, and also rate the resumes on seven categories: work experience, education, language, format, potential to be hired, and the salary expectations the user set.

Although search is noticeably missing, browsing resumes is pretty simple — choose between the same fields the user had specified when they uploaded their resumes: Career Fields, Locations, Schools, Majors, Groups, and Salary Range.

One feature that could be a boon to traffic would be a button, akin to LinkedIn, possibly preaching “rate my Razume” or “see my Razume” which could help both potential employees as well as Razume gain traction.

And while it doesnt’ seem like it’s gained much traction yet — the site has listed that there are 338 resumes that have been uploaded — this seems like a must have for college students and others seeking to enter the rat race.

Heck, maybe they’ll throw in reviews for business plans, so unlucky startup founders don’t end up like this guy.

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has named three leaders to a group that will work on the new government’s technology policies. Heading the working group are Julius Genachowski and Blair Levin, two former Federal Communications Commission staff members, and Google.org head Sonal Shah.

From CNET:

The purpose of the policy working group is to “develop the priority policy proposals and plans from the Obama campaign for action during the Obama-Biden administration,” according to the transition team. Obama has promised to put more emphasis on technological issues as president and has even said he will appoint a chief technology officer.

Genachowski is a former IAC executive and the founder of start-up incubator LaunchBox Digital. He served as an adviser to two FCC chairmen during the Clinton administration. Genachowski also chaired the group that helped shape the Obama campaign’s Tech and Innovation Plan, and is considered by some in Washington to be a contender for the position of CTO.

Shah is the head of Google’s philanthropy division and previously served as a vice president at Goldman Sachs. Both Shah and Genachowski are also on the Obama-Biden transition project advisory board.

Levin, a managing director at the firm Stifel Nicolaus, previously served as chief of staff to FCC Chairman Reed Hundt from 1993 to 1997.

JamLegend is easily the coolest still-in-beta game I’ve played in recent weeks, and after some nagging on my part, the developers just sent me a 1,000 beta invites so GigaOM readers can try it out, too. Use this link to create an account.

The three founders recently stopped by Pier 38 to give me an advance look. Backed by LaunchBox Digital, JamLegend combines several disparate game/Web 2.0 elements into a coherent whole that’s instantly appealing: Think Guitar Hero meets Last.fm meets World of Warcraft. That is, a music rhythm game fused to a music social network overlaid with MMORPG-style gameplay.

The gameplay itself is instantly recognizable to fans of Guitar Hero and its many successors, but instead of playing on a plastic musical instrument connected to a console, JamLegend is a Flash-powered game you play on the web, using your keyboard to hit the notes as they fly across the screen. (You can hold your keyboard upside down like a guitar; it’s also compatible with the guitar from the PC version of Guitar Hero 3.)

That would be fun in itself, but you can also compete with other JamLegend users and track your overall player score across the network. (It’s an MMORPG where that acronym stands for “massively multiplayer online rockstar player game.”) And while the developers tell me they’re hoping to feature well-known bands when they launch, JamLegend is also set up for independent musicians to upload their own songs into the game as a way of promoting and selling their music.

The developers haven’t monetized JamLegend yet, but they are considering several options after they’ve launched — sponsored tournaments, MP3 affiliate sales, etc. With music games already generating so much revenue and top bands using them as a major launch platform, that shouldn’t be a problem. As one of JamLegend’s young founders cheekily (and plausibly) informed me, “We definitely see ourselves as part of the future of the music industry.”

Image credit: jamlegend.com

Wow!  What an exciting time for us.  Last fall, I met with Julius and Sean to talk about our views on what we might do next, and we all shared the same passion:  Helping early stage entrepreneurs.  With that goal in mind. there were a number of good models in the market for us to consider:

1.  Early stage venture capitalists like First Round Capital, and

2.  Incubator programs like Y Combinator.

We felt that our biggest value was not just as investors, but as activist coaches to young entrepreneurs, and decided then and there to pursue starting an incubator program in Washington, DC.

We got a lot of questions from folk early on about the choice of location, but each of us had met enough individual talent over the years here that we knew that DC represented a great under-leveraged opportunity – smart people, but ineffectively networked and supported.

Right out of the gate, we got support from an amazing network of people who volunteered to be advisors to the companies – people like Ted Leonsis, the godfather of technology in Washington, Raul Fernandez, a great friend who has built two great businesses (Proxicom and ObjectVideo), Reed Hundt and Michael Powell, two amazing guys who, beyond being former FCC Chairmen, both have a huge passion and talent for helping early stage companies, Jon Miller, my dear friend and wickedly smart mentor from AOL days, and other successful entrepreneurs and executives too numerous to mention (Go to our site to see the full list – an all-star list of generous, talented folk).

This spring, we got close to 250 applications to the program from across the globe, and chose nine companies to join us in DC for the summer.  We liked the teams when we first met them, but grew to love them all – so positive, so talented, so focused!  With a little help and advice from the Founders and Advisors, they all did amazing things, and all in a matter of only 12 weeks.

This week, we present each of the nine companies to the world.  Press, bloggers, angel investors, VCs, and a number of the big technology players will see first-hand the terrific set of businesses and products that have been built.

I have tremendous faith and confidence in the teams – I can’t wait for them to spread their wings.

To help you get a taste of things, I have pulled together brief descriptions of each company, and highlight some of the reasons why we think they can win.

Enjoy!

BuzzHubb: A Better College Social Network

Founders: Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra
www.buzzhubb.com

My Perspective: Most people think the college communications market is saturated, but with 75% of Facebook users dissatisfied with their feed experience, and Twitter only in use by 7% of students in a poll we ran on several campuses, that is hardly the case.

BuzzHubb is best summarized as bringing the utility of next-gen Yahoo Groups to the mobile college student, but done in a creative, lightweight manner. The first fundamental element of BuzzHubb is that it establishes boundaries around the university campus – you can only join a school’s BuzzHubb community if you are part of the school (a great concept that Facebook championed). Once you have joined, you can join existing Hubbs, or quickly establish your own.

College students have complex, sometimes overlapping social group relationships. BuzzHubb makes communicating with those groups simple and engaging. A Hubb is a group of individuals who can share group messages quickly and easily from their phone, the web, or their social network. There are several types of Hubbs: Broadcast Hubbs, where you join, but there is a single author (e.g, the campus sports blog), Invitation-only Hubbs, where an existing member needs to invite you to join (a study group, a team, a special interest group) and all can contribute, and Open Hubbs, where anyone on campus can join and contribute (e.g., Obama 2008).

The UI allows you to quickly navigate all the Hubbs you are part of – a failing of the Facebook feeds metaphor. The mobile experience lets you opt to be alerted to new posts on a Hubb-by-Hubb basis, as well as share thoughts with friends or Hubbs via SMS or BuzzHubb’s WAP experience. The plan is to get it on 7 campuses in the Fall, learn, refine the experience, and then blow it out in the Spring.

Heekya: The Wikipedia For Stories

Founders: David Adewumi, Kwasi Nti, Rasvan Orendovici and Avner Ahmend
www.heekya.com

My Perspective: The current model of story telling on the web is pretty fragmented. There are really good individual repositories out there (YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket are a few), but they focus primarily on a given category (photos, video), and have limited ability to address linear story telling. Blogging is a potential answer, but while there are close to 200 million blogs, only 600,000 posts occur each day – too many blogs die the slow death of neglect.

Heekya wants to encourage social story telling. They do this through several approaches.

First, they have a simple to use multi-media story builder that allows a story author to tap into their existing base of digital assets on Flickr, YouTube, PhotoBucket and Facebook. They also let the author use compelling public/shared content from those same sources. Good commenting and annotation tools help enhance the story, and simple sharing tools allow you to both share the story and post/embed it.

Second, they encourage alternate perspectives, allowing someone to clone a story and add or enhance it to create a linked, but unique story reflecting their own point of view.

Finally, they have a variety of browsing and discovery tools to let people see stories (and their related threads) along a variety of dimensions, including topic, geography, social connection, etc.

JamLegend: Guitar Hero Goes Social

Founders: Andrew Lee, Arjun Lall and Ryan Wilson
www.jamlegend.com

My Perspective: JamLegend is a new online music gaming experience, competing with the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero with a disruptive offering. The experience is fun and engaging. It’s free, involves no client code, and has a very compelling social gaming experience at its core. The problems with the incumbents are:

• High price points. (Several hundred dollars to purchase the game, an instrument, and a library of music tracks)
• “Tethered” experiences – what I mean here is that they are console based games, which means you are effectively tethered to the living room, basement, or dorm room where your console lives
• Limited catalogs – the two incumbents focus on the major labels and English-language rock music. Rock Music is 34% of tracks sold on music sites. Other genres, artists (independents) and language groups are way under-represented
• Limited social gaming experiences, and infrequent releases to get new functionality into user’s hands.

JamLegend attacks these limitations head on. It’s free. It can be played whenever and wherever you are (using a full game guitar if you want, but it’s just as fun on keyboards or laptops)—play it on the road, at work, at a coffee shop. Its catalog will serve the indies, just as MySpace and Bebo have done, and include other genres like Country and Jazz. It also is built to allow artists to upload their work directly to the JamLegend community. And finally, it really has a compelling social experience that is much better than that of the incumbents, through fun head-to-head challenges as well as simulcast tournaments.

Koofers: Crib Notes For Picking College Classes

Founders: Michael Rihani, Glynn LoPresti, Patrick Gartlan and Doug Feit
www.koofers.com

My Perspective: Koofers – where were you when I was in school? Koofers started at Virginia Tech, with a campus rollout in 2007. In that one year, it became the third-most visited site by students, behind Facebook and MySpace. The reason? It allows students to make the relatively opaque process of class and teacher selection fully transparent, by providing grade distributions and teacher feedback to allow a student to shape their individual class schedule, based on their own needs and style (e.g., “I am fine with exams, but I hate teachers who give tons of quizzes”).

Once a student has started the semester, Koofers provides help by offering access to a collective repository of study guides, past exams, etc. This is something schools have had for over a century, but these vaults were only available to small groups of students (e.g., a fraternity). Now, those tools are available to all students. Koofers also supports ongoing communication between students and teachers through its community tools.

The reaction at its alpha deployment at Virginia Tech, coupled with positive feedback this Spring from a quick pilot during the last week of the term at the University of Maryland (where 1000+ users signed up), gives the Koofers team confidence that they have a winner here.

Koofers will deploy to 30+ schools this fall, to provide themselves a bigger test bed, and then look to launch more broadly in the Spring.

Mpowerplayer: Marketing Mobile Games On Facebook

Founder: Michael Powers
www.mpowerplayer.com

My Perspective: Mpowerplayer is targeted to fix the discovery problem in the mobile gaming market today. Unlike ringtones, where the explosive growth and repeat buyer habits of consumers has built a multi-billion dollar market, the mobile gaming market is stalled.

The biggest issues? No way for a consumer to know what they are buying in advance of the purchase, coupled with poor provisioning processes. With ringtones, consumers know the product they are buying—they’ve heard it on the radio, on TV, or own the track. With mobile games, there is no natural discovery process. It is click and pray for the purchaser. Only 5% of people with a games-capable handset have ever played a game on their phone, and less than a third of the people who buy a game ever purchase a second game. It is a huge problem for both carriers and game publishers seeking new sources of revenue.

Mpowerplayer solves this problem in two ways: It provides a PC-based means for consumers to play mobile versions of the games they are interested in (via an emulator), and, if they like a title, simplifies the purchasing experience. Once someone becomes a member of the Mpowerplayer community, the ability of Mpowerplayer to understand their playing preferences and purchases makes it a uniquely effective marketing partner to the publishers.

Mpowerplayer has supported over 15 million demo plays to date, and powers the mobile sites of both EA and Sprint. They have now built a Web-based demo experience, and will use that to accelerate their marketing efforts more broadly.

MyGameMug: Match.com For Gamers

Founders: Raymond Lau and Erik Yao
www.mygamemug.com

My Perspective: MyGameMug is trying to return the fun to online gaming . Take one minute and search “trash talking” on YouTube, and you can sample first-hand how bad is the current model of only matching players by skill level.

MyGameMug was started by a couple of avid gamers who wanted to create the match.com for online gaming. Their goal? To create a fun and engaging way to find the “gaming style” of a person, and use it to hook them up with people who are compatible with them to play with online. The core of the MyGameMug experience is a 36-question test that draws out important information about attitude, competitiveness, gaming interests, etc. The responses are then used to slot you into one of 16 different GameMugs. Think of it as a Meyers-Briggs test for gaming.

As you take the test, MyGameMug starts surfacing potential matches for you—the further you go in the test, the higher the matching accuracy gets. Once you complete the test, you can either see those people who are good matches for you and reach out in real-time to offer immediate game play, or use the scheduling tool to offer a potential future time/day to play.

In its first week of testing, over 12,000 people completed the entire test, reporting an 85% satisfaction of where they were slotted in the 16 different categories.

The goal is to start with getting people to take the test, and then draw people into being an ongoing part of the MyGameMug community with other value-added things like user generated reviews, group contests/tournaments, a reputation system, guild management tools, etc.

Razume: Resume 2.0

Team: Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman (founders), Brian Turnbull, and Ryan Geist
www.razume.com

My Perspective: Razume is addressing the needs of job seekers in the 21-35 year old demographic. While there are lots of businesses out there to help the employer (Job boards, etc.), there is a huge under-served opportunity to focus on the needs of the job seeker, especially ones without the power of a robust LinkedIn network to help them in their job seeking journey.

The opportunity: There are over 20 million job change events happening this year, and the average 18 year old today is expected to make over 10 job changes before they hit 38 years of age.

Razume helps the job seeker along three dimensions. First, it helps a person develop a professional resume, starting with powerful authoring tools and online tips, and then making it simple for a person to reach out and get tips on fine-tuning their resume from friends, associates, and just as importantly, the Razume community itself. Simple annotation and commenting tools allow people to give very specific feedback to turn someone’s resume into a better, more effective marketing tool.

After that, Razume helps get the resume into the market. That’s done through two means: a free one-click posting of the resume to the major job boards (a service that costs $59+ at other sites), and use of the Razume Job Finder to browse and bookmark jobs of interest from over 7 million job listings on the web.

Once a user has a call-back, Razume helps them prepare for that interview with useful tips and techniques, plus tools to help research prospective employers that, ultimately, helps a person get the job and make the right decision.

ShareMeme: Evite Meets Twitter

Founders: Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera
www.sharememe.com

My Perspective: ShareMeme is an easy tool for sending messages, polls, invitations and other things to your friends and associated groups on the channels that they prefer.

ShareMeme is addressing a real problem today – inadvertent “spamming” of friends across all the channels you use to interact with people (SMS, Facebook, IM, email, Twitter, etc.). To reach our friends, we find ourselves broadcasting redundant messages across multiple channels to ensure our bases are covered. ShareMeme takes that problem head-on. It is built upon a powerful, self-learning platform that understands the nature of a given message, its priority, and recipient preferences to send the right message the right way to your targeted audience.

Interacting with ShareMeme is simple – you can use the mini-forms on the web site or its iPhone experience, or use its natural language interface via the web, SMS, Twitter, or Jott to say things like “Invite college friends to see the Opening Ceremonies at my house at 7pm on August 8″, and ShareMeme takes it from there. It understands the group “college friends”, the priority of the message, and users’ explicit or derived preference in interacting with you, and reaches out automatically via the most effective and user-respectful communications channel, be it SMS, Twitter, IM, your social network, or email.

The strategic desire of ShareMeme is to be the root location of recipient preference data on the web, as well as the place to define group relationships one time, in a manner that can then be leveraged by you anywhere you want, be it through mobile communications, email, or your social networks. Think of groups here as subsets of your social graph.

Zadby: Web Video Product Placement

Team: Tim McLaughlin (Founder), Beau Brewer (General Manager)
www.zadby.com

My Perspective: Zadby deals with the intersection of two phenomena: The continued lack of effectiveness of traditional advertising to reach the 18-35 year old demographic, and the poor means that independent web video producers have to monetize the value of the communities that follow them.

Zadby is a market maker for product placement in web video. It allows brand managers, agencies and others to tap into the network of independent web video producers, outline their needs and what they are willing to pay per CPM, and then producers create proposed videos, get them approved by the client, and offer them up to their communities, where they get paid on what traffic they generate.

The challenge is how to bring product placement to web video in a scalable manner. Zadby’s approach works to solve this problem (and we’ve seen it succeed with our trial efforts).

With YouTube only selling ads on 3% of its videos, producers are struggling to find a way to make their passion a real business. Yet, web producers are succeeding in building sizable communities who follow them. They may not be “Desperate Housewives”-sized communities yet, but at several hundreds of thousands of viewers, they rival the audiences of many cable TV shows. Zadby leverages the creativity and reach of these producers to create a useful pay-for-performance advertising option for them to add to their arsenal.

DC-based accelerator Launchbox Digital is hosting another online chat this week. From their email,

LaunchBox Digital will be hosting another online chat tomorrow, Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 7 pm EDT.  Please join moderator Tom Des Jardins, founder and ex-CTO of Lightningcast, as he leads a discussion on start-up company valuations and investor due diligence.

To join the chat at 7 pm EDT tomorrow please visit www.launchboxdigital.com and follow the link, or click here.

At the login page, please enter the username that you would like to use as an identifier for the chat.

Nick O’Neill has recently posted a great interview with Sean Greene of Lauchbox Digital up on his blog Social Times.  Sean talks about how Launchbox Digital is here to help give interactive and digital media companies and entrepreneurs the foundation they need to get ahead of their competition.  This foundation means everything from a chunk of money to advice from the smartest people in the area.

I think what Launchbox Digital is doing for the Washington DC area tech scene is great.  I hope a lot of people will apply for their  Spring/Summer 2008 Program.

Early stage investment firm LaunchBox Digital has opened it’s doors in Washington DC.   They’re looking for new entrepreneurs who’re looking for some help make their dreams a reality.  This includes investment capital, mentoring, and help with access to the right people.  It operates much like Y Combinator.

Being someone who acts from time to time as an advocate for the DC technology community, this makes me very excited.  I can’t wait to see what kind of new ideas come out of the LaunchBox Digital 2008 program.

This has definitely gone a long way towards awakening the  entrepreneurial spirit in a lot of folks, which is exciting.

[qi:115] LaunchBox Digital, an early-stage investment firm founded by three tech industry veterans and with an initial focus on web and mobile businesses, is due to be unveiled Thursday, we’ve learned. The Washington, D.C.-based company will provide between six and 10 entrepreneurs seed investment and help in incorporation through an intensive, 12-week program, during which time they’ll be able to draw on the advice and experiences of the firm’s founders and advisors as they develop a prototype or demo and craft their business plans.

At the end of the program, known as LaunchBox08, the entrepreneurs will be given an opportunity to present their businesses to VCs and other investors, strategic partners and others.

The founders of LaunchBox Digital are Julius Genachowski, formerly chief of business ops at IAC/InterActive (IACI); Sean Greene, founder and ex-CEO of The Away Network; and John McKinley, who served as president of digital services and CTO of AOL (TWX).

The company will begin accepting applications for LaunchBox08 immediately. LaunchBox Digital will also accept proposals from early-stage business for immediate seed or angel investment.

This is the press release that’s hitting the wires Thursday – read some of the initial coverage below

Technology Veterans Establish LaunchBox Digital

Launch Platform For Web and Mobile Entrepreneurs Combines Seed Capital With Guidance From Industry Pros

WASHINGTON, D.C. – November 15, 2007 – With today’s introduction of LaunchBox Digital, start-up businesses now have a new way of gaining critical early financial support, along with advice and practical guidance on how to bring their ideas to market. Founded by three technology industry veterans, and supported by a roster of advisors who have built successful digital businesses, LaunchBox Digital is a new early stage investment firm based in Washington, D.C. and dedicated to helping entrepreneurs overcome obstacles to success.

With an initial focus on web and mobile businesses, LaunchBox Digital offers a competitive application process by which entrepreneurs may be considered for an intensive, accelerator program, “LaunchBox08.” Successful applicants will receive funding, mentoring, and infrastructure support in order to take their big ideas from concept to market.

Between six and 10 successful applicants will receive seed investment and help in incorporation. During 12 intensive weeks in Washington, D.C., they will gain from the advice and experiences offered by the firm’s founders and advisors, as they develop a prototype or demo and craft their business plans. At the end of the program, they will be given an opportunity to present their businesses to venture capital firms and other investors, strategic partners, bloggers, and the media on the East and West Coasts. Applications for “LaunchBox08” are being accepted now. For more information on the application process, see: http://www.launchboxdigital.com/how_it_works.html.

The founders of LaunchBox Digital are Julius Genachowski, who was Chief of Business Operations and a member of the Office of the Chairman at IAC/InterActive Corp; Sean Greene, who was Founder and CEO of The Away Network; and John McKinley, who was President of Digital Services and CTO of AOL, and previously CTO and Head of Global Technology and Operations at Merrill Lynch.

“There’s never been a better time to build a technology company,” said Julius Genachowski. “Costs are decreasing, new revenue models are solidifying, and we’re seeing the proliferation of digital platforms, including Facebook, Google’s Open Social and Open Handset Alliance, the iPhone, and more. Yet entrepreneurs still face obstacles in making their vision a reality. LaunchBox Digital fills a real need at a moment of great opportunity.”

LaunchBox Digital’s advisors include key people behind some of the most successful technology companies of the past decade. It includes founders who started with ideas and turned them into companies sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, key operating executives at multi-billion dollar digital media and commerce companies, and two former chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission. Companies represented on LaunchBox Digital’s advisor group include: Advertising.com, AOL, Daily Candy, Feedburner, Fox Interactive, FreeWebs, glu mobile, Hillcrest Labs, Millenial Media, The Motley Fool, Object Video, Overture, Proxicom, Washington Post-Newsweek Interactive, WildSeed, Xfire and others. The complete roster of advisors is below.

“The advice and counsel of people who’ve helped launch and run businesses can be invaluable,” said Sean Greene. “What we’re trying to do with LaunchBox Digital is not simply provide early stage investments, but enable entrepreneurs to refine their ideas with the help of world-class mentors who are willing to offer the benefit of their experience in a disciplined, collaborative process.”

“Earlier incubators believed the secret to success was offering people cubicles and servers, which in many cases proved to be the wrong focus,” said John McKinley. “Instead, what is really needed is advice and guidance, on everything from the product, to marketing, to technical assistance. That’s our focus at LaunchBox Digital, and with our team of advisors and mentors, we offer first-time entrepreneurs a great chance to fulfill their dreams.”

LaunchBox Digital is also accepting proposals from early stage business for immediate seed or angel investment, on a selective basis.

Some Initial Coverage:

Reuters

Silicon Alley Insider

GigaOM 

CNET

Washington Post

Washington Business Journal

The Register (UK)

Read/Write Web

We’re Ready to Help

We are open for business. If you have an immediate opportunity, contact us at newco@launchboxdigital.com

If you’d like to apply to LaunchBox08, our 12 week summer incubator program, click here to learn more.

Thanks

Here’s a quick thank you to our great investors, our advisors, and other friends of the firm, who helped shape the concept and agreed to help our entrepreneurs navigate that difficult first 12 to 18 months – we owe you!