DreamIt Ventures Demo Day preview (part one)

Edit: added beta code for Adapt.ly

This year, it’s different.

For the past three summers Dreamit Ventures has incubated early-stage startups at the University City Science Center, giving each startup a small bit of seed capital while providing advice from some of the brightest entrepreneurial minds in the city.

Startups like SCVNGR, Seatgeek and Notehall all have roots in the incubator.

This year, DreamIt upped the ante by partnering with Brooklyn-based Startl to incubate more companies than ever and DreamIt is starting to receive national attention as one of the best early stage technology incubators in the country.

“One barometer [for the city] is DreamIt,” says Gil Beyda, founder of an early stage technology-focused venture capital firm Genacast Ventures. “Year after year, I’ve seen better companies and better entrepreneurs coming out of there.”

The first two DreamIt seasons culminated in Demo Day, an all-day event where companies show off their wares in the hopes of attracting attention and investment — see last year’s coverage — and that much will stay the same this year when the companies gather on August 11th.

Technically Philly stopped by the incubator last week to get a sneak peak of what some of the companies are working on, and five of 14 were ready to offer a small preview of what they will be presenting.

In the first of three parts, we look at Yunno, Adapt.ly and Give Loop. Tomorrow we will preview two additional companies and on Friday we’ll round up those who didn’t demo their product for us.

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Startup Roundup: Wharton-backed NearVerse raises $1 million in funding, Viddler developing for HTML5

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

NearVerse, which develops LoKast [iTunes] a proximity-based social network with Wharton talent backing it, has raised $1 million from Meakem Becker Venture Capital, TechCrunch reports. The funds will be used to look beyond wireless 3G and 4G network connectivity.

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