There's always been a shortage of capital in the region for startups, despite many successes (mergers, acquisitions, IPOs) of companies here--and there continues to be. However, that slowly is changing, as the area grows its reputation for creating big exits and great outcomes for investors. One of the area's local investors, the Kickstart Seed Fund (www.kickstartseedfund.

The enterprise software market isn't as sexy as mobile apps or the latest social-mobile-local internet fad. But, recently, it's been clear the enterprise market has clearly beat out all of those areas in the area of growth and revenues, and become one of the fastest growing part of the high tech industry. One of those companies is Boulder-based Confio (www.confio.com), a maker of database management software.

Patrick Quinlan and his team were behind the rise and success of Rivet Software, and are now applying that to the compliance software market with a new Denver-based startup, Convercent. The firm recently raised $10.2M in a funding round, and we caught up with Patrick to learn about how he's looking to repeat that success with Convercent, and what the company is working on.

What is Convercent?

Patrick Quinlan: Convercent is a new company, launched on January 29th of this year.

How did working on a second round of funding turn into a huge exit for Louisville's LineRate Systems (www.lineratesystems.com)? Steve Georgis, CEO of LineRate, sat down with us today to tell us about the company's rise from the research out of the University of Colorado at Boulder, to its exit and acquisition this morning by networking equipment firm F5.

If you're a bank or large company, security is a never ending chore. And, it seems like there's always a new cyber-threat out there against your company. What kind of solutions are out there to help patch up your security holes, and detect issues in your network? One solution is offered by Boulder-based LogRhythm (www.logrhythm.com) which provides security and log management tools specifically aimed at this market.

If you're an application developer, sending emails through your application can be a chore. It turns out it's not just a quick line of code to send an email -- it's also a hassle to make sure that those emails get delivered, that your email isn't classified as spam, and handling all sorts of delivery issues. How do you offload all those headaches? Sendgrid (www.sendgrid.

Every day, there are massive amounts of social and interaction data being collected by web sites, mobile applications, and more on how consumers and users are using those web sites and applications. How does a company take that vast amount of data, and make sense of it, and not only analyze but use it to drive things like product recommendations and personalization--and ultimately, more revenues and profits? Boulder-based Precog (www.precog.

If you're a e-commerce software developer, how do you connect your systems into credit card and other electronic payment services? Right now, every payment provider provides its own proprietary interfaces and software, and moving between those providers is a huge amount of work and hassle. How do you make that easier? Boulder-based Inspire Commerce (www.inspirecommerce.com) is looking to solve that issue with its services.

How do you convert an online consumer into an offline one, and convince someone playing an online game or surfing the Internet to go visit an offline restaurant or retailer? Peter Vogel, the co-founder of Plink (www.plink.com) tells us how the Denver-based company has created a service that helps drive consumers online to offline stores, by tapping into social games, rewards, and gift cards to consumers who spend their money at offline, retail locations.

As a business in an increasingly connected, social world, how do you tie what's important to you--your customers--into social networking activity and online marketing? What you need is a way to analyze your customer database and correlate that with social networking and online activity--which is exactly what Boulder-based SpotRight (www.spotright.com) has developed.

How does a online, organically certified grocery store gain the attention of Silicon Valley investors? Last month, Boulder-based Mile High Organics (www.milehighorganics.com) , did just that, gaining a seed round from a number of high profile angel investors. We caught up with Michael Joseph, the firm's founder, to understand better what attracted those investors, and how the firm is hoping to change the view of the online grocery store business.

If you're running a department in a big enterprise organization, it's often hard to find the right tools to run things. Your enterprise might have a big huge monster suite of software which doesn't quite do what you want, or it might be a huge production to get your in-house IT guys to help you design an app. What do you do? That's the problem that Denver-based TrackVia is looking to solve, helping those departmental users build their own solution to help run your business better.

As a web publisher, how do you make the most of your affiliate marketing efforts, without spending lots of time developing tools to link into the right products at your partners? Colorado Springs-based Prosperent (www.prosperent.com) is developing tools to help those marketers, by automating much of the work to help tie into brand name, affiliate programs at the product level. We spoke with Brian Lovett, the company's CEO and co-founder, to learn more about the company.

How do you take carbon dioxide, and turn that into something more useful (and less polluting and harmful) to mankind? Boulder-based New Sky Energy (www.newskyenergy.com) thinks it has the solution, using CO2 in the atmosphere to create industrial chemical products. The firm has been recognized for its technology efforts, most recently by Imagine H2O, and the Clean Tech Open, and we thought it would be interesting to hear about the company.

Streaming, internet radio seems to be coming of age, with the recent IPO of streaming music firm Pandora, the popularity of Spotify, along with other services. One company which has seen the benefit of the market is Boulder-based Liquid Compass (www.liquidcompass.net), whose customers--traditional, terrestrial radio stations--are also eager to get online.

How do you take a process which has been essentially unchanged in the last 30 years--hiring--and bring it into the Internet age? Draper, Utah-based HireVue (www.hirevue.com) is trying to do just that, with an Internet-based, video interviewing platform. We spoke with CEO David Bradford, a serial entrepreneur whose last startup, Fusion-io, recently went public with Steve Wozniak on board; Bradford has also been very involved with Omniture.

If you've ever been involved in a community or youth sports team, you know how much of a pain it is to track when games and practices are, where you are supposed to play each week, if practices have moved or have been cancelled, who is handling what and bringing what to the game or practice, and so on. That's what Boulder-based TeamSnap (www.teamsnap.com) is all about.

Yesterday, Boulder-based Gorilla Logic (www.gorillalogic.com) announced a new version of its popular, open source mobile app testing tool, FoneMonkey, for the Android platform. We had the opportunity recently to chat with Stu Stern, President and CEO of the company, to learn more about how consulting firms like Gorilla Logic have been reshaping the software development world with their open source tools.

Usually, we feature interviews with startup entrepreneurs and investors here in our interview section. However, the use of technology is an interesting aspect of the modern political process, so we've decided to reprint an interview our sister site, socalTECH.com, ran today with former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (www.garyjohnson2012.com) the Republican Presidential candidate. Our coverage area for techrockies.com includes the business of technology in New Mexico.

Have you ever wondered, as you're adding that new electronics product into your basket at Amazon.com, if you're getting the best deal for your money? Do you wish you had more time to price check and comparison shop for your online purchases? Well, Denver-based Digital Folio (www.digitalfolio.com) thinks it has the thing for you--a browser add-on which automatically pulls up price comparisons and offers while you are shopping, every time you add something to your online shopping basket.

Ogden, Utah-based Tech Media Network announced a huge, venture funding round a few weeks ago worth $33M--probably one of the biggest fundings in the region in the last year. The firm owns a network of content sites, such as Space.com, NewsArama.com, and TechNewsDaily, and has been growing its network both through its own properties and partnerships with others. To understand better what the company is building, we spoke with Jerry Ropelato, the CEO of the company.

In the debate about energy efficiency, energy independence, and the country's energy future, one of the areas that comes into conversations frequently is how a lot of this country's energy goals could be helped by convincing people to save energy and implement energy efficiency measures.

Last month, Signal Peak Ventures (www.signalpeakvc.com), a new venture capital fund located in Salt Lake City, announced it had acquired the assets of Canopy Ventures. The new fund is led by former Canopy Managing Directors Ron Heinz and Brandon Tidwell. We spoke with Ron Heinz about the firm and its investments, to get some of the story behind the new fund, plus what the venture firm is hoping to do next.

Ron, thanks for the time today.

What do prehistoric petroglyphs have to do with modern data storage? If you're looking to make a permanent copy of your data, everything. Earlier this month, Salt Lake City-based Millenniata (www.millenniata.com) announced it has taken technology developed at Brigham Young University--inspired by those petroglyphs--capable of making the storage of data far more permanent than what exists today, to the market. We spoke with CEO Scott Shumway.

Our interview today is with VacationRoost (www.vacationroost.com), a Salt Lake City-based company focused on vacation rentals. VacationRoost plays in an area which has seen lots of interest lately -- one of its big competitors, HomeAway, just went public.

If you had a software firm, what would make you move your headquarters from Silicon Valley to Boulder? Well, Boulder-based Red Earth Software (www.policypatrol.com) did just that about a year ago. We caught up with Deborah Galea, the firm's COO, to hear about the company, what it does, plus its move to Boulder.

For today's interview and profile, we talked with Robert Schaefer, the CEO of Boulder-based AlsoEnergy (www.alsoenergy.com), a provider of solar power monitoring services and software. Bob told us the story behind the business, how he and co-founder Holden Caine took the firm from idea to fruition, as well as where the firm hopes to go to next.

What does AlsoEnergy do?

Bob Schaefer: AlsoEnergy was founded in 2007. What we do, is provide a service that monitors photovoltaic installations.

For today's interview, we talked with Jerry Nettuno, Founder and CEO of Bozeman, Montana-based Schedulicity (www.schedulicity.com), a fast growing provider of online scheduling software.

What is Schedulicity?

Jerry Netuno: It's very simple. Schedulicity has positioned itself as a leader in the online appointment scheduling market. You can think of it as the OpenTable but for the everyday services people book. We're helping small businesses in the U.S.

Most people are familiar with the trend of outsourcing call centers overseas, and the quality issues that often creates for businesses. Denver-based Alpine Access (www.alpineaccess.com) has, over the past few years, turned to a different model, of using home-based workers here in the U.S. to provide customer support and other call center support to companies.