Recently, I heard a board member recount a story about a sale on Gilt that included a certain designer’s shoes. Apparently, Gilt sold 10,000 of these shoes in less than three minutes and the waiting list climbed to 40,000 members. Pretty unbelievable. The site currently runs sales in categories for men, women and children.

For those that are looking for an invitation to join, here is a link with the invitation code included.

Join Gilt Groupe

Yapta is an innovative new site that helps you track fare changes in your airline tickets. If the price of your ticket falls, Yapta, for a small fee, will try to get you a refund or credit for the difference.

Congratulations to friend and longtime client, Neil Roth, for the launch of Xtreme Green Products, a new line of 100% electric eco-vehicles. The line currently includes jetboards, police mobility vehicles and 2-person electric motor scooters. What an innovative concept and important contribution to sustainability.

You can check out the complete product line at XtremeGreenProducts.com.

After months of working on our early beta, I’m pleased to let you know that RareShare is now LIVE!

The Site is free to all and works to connect those affected by rare medical disorders by creating micro-communities for each specific disease.

Currently, there are just over 500 communities (the most common of the rare disorders). We’re planning to add many more over the next several months…

Here’s a sample seat map from SeatGuru 

Congratulations to my friends over at SocialThing! I remember meeting the founder when they first arrived out here in Boulder (from my hometown of St. Louis). Since then they’ve managed to raise over $500k in venture capital and create one of the best aggregators for social feeds (FaceBook, Flickr, etc.) on the Web.

Rob Johnson and Josh Fraser, two of my friends out here in Boulder, have started an exciting new company, EventVue, that works to pre-connect conference goers through social networking.

The Company partners with conference organizers to create micro-conference communities where attendees can create profiles and pre-network with each other months before the conferences take place. Afterwards, users can then go back and re-connect with those they met during the event.

Since founding in May 2007, the Company has raised over $250,000 from angel investors, including Brad Feld (Managing Director at Foundry Group), David Cohen (Executive Director at TechStars), Dave McClure (Entrepreneur), and Wendy Lea (Managing Partner at Chatham Group).

I’m excited to let you all know about my new company, RareShare. We’re working on a platform for patients, families and healthcare professional affected by rare disorders. Our goal is to increase the level of communication by allowing RareShare members to share experiences, explore treatment options and find support among others affected by the same, or similar, disorders.

Our private alpha release is scheduled for mid-March, but in the meantime here’s a link to our website and corporate fact sheet (pdf). Feel free to request an invite from our homepage to join our alpha communities.

Well, the future is here thanks to Space Data Corp. The Company has developed a wireless technology based on launching balloons 20 miles into the Earth’s stratosphere. By doing this, Space Data is providing thousands of square miles of remote and rural areas with wireless access.

The Company is currently providing services to the United States government and commercial enterprises such as long-haul trucking companies. Even better though is the rumor that Google has developed an interest in licensing this technology. It may even be on their radar as a possible acquisition candidate.

With a single click, TubeMogul allows video producers to distribute videos online to a wide variety of video sharing sites. Then, from a single TubeMogul dashboard, these producers can track on which sites their videos are most popular and how many people are watching them. According to the CEO, Brett Wilson, TubeMogul currently has 15,000 video producers using the Site. At DEMO ’08, the Company launched a premium version of the software for $500 per month that offers the ability to deploy more videos each month and additional analytical tools for measuring video performance.

Visible Measures just debuted VisibleSuite, which hosts videos for online distribution and offers producers the ability to measure audience behavior, such as how often the videos are viewed and for how long. Other analytical data available includes geographic location, which segments of the video are replayed the most, and where videos are syndicated across the Web. The Company just closed a $13.5 million Series B round led by Mohr Davidow Ventures and joined by return investor, General Catalyst Partners.