With Smartphone Wars (“Smar Wars”?) the new battleground turf opening up for Windows Phone 7, the reawakening of Microsoft with a “not too little nor too late” lineup of smartly-tiled handsets, controller-free Kinect Xbox winners, and a brand new Bell Square Microsoft retail store opening, Redmond’s many forces are crystallizing just in time for the first snowflakes.
To heat up the holidayfest, none other than Miley Cyrus will be blazing into town for a performance on Saturday, 11/20, at high noon.
And what the blazes? Bellevue’s EZ Grill, a portable barbecue company, has taken a page out of the Blendtec handbook with a video that stacks a HTC Surround Windows Phone 7 against an Android G2 and an iPhone 4 to see which one can take the heat before it rock melts. Tasteless video here.
We vastly prefer the Windows 7 Phone cakes to fried phones. And the icing on this story is that Microsoft may finally be able to have its Smartphone cake, and eat it too!
Techstars Inaugural Event Wrapped (and Ready to Give!)
The first ever TechStars program in Seattle wrapped up with ten new companies presenting in front of about 200 investors in concert with the Open Angel Forum. Many of these companies are still raising money and most have interest in their rounds. If you’re an investor and you’d like an introduction to any of them, drop Techstars a note.
Presenters at the TechStars event were:
Highlighter.com: The startup allow you to highlight, comment, and share on blogs, ebooks and PDFs on any device and manage your highlights.
Deal Co-op: Deal Co-op is a self-serve, white-lable daily deal marketing service for local organizations, publishers, and more. 
The Shared Web: The Shared Web is a web based version of Flipboard, serving as a place to discover and share what matters to you the most.
Cabin Fever Toys: The startup wants to tackle the problem of childhood obesity in the United States with toys that measure, encourage and reward outdoor exercise. Cabin Fever Toys are also coupled with an online experience to help reinforce desired behaviors with game mechanics.
Kinizi: Kinizi is aiming to be the place to go when you’re looking for low cost apartment rentals. They’re essentially applying the daily deal model to apartment search, and enabling landlords to quickly fill vacancies using short term special offers.
RewardsForce: RewardsForce helps casinos manage their loyalty rewards programs. The company allows casinos to use iPads or other portable devices to increase repeat visitors and customer satisfaction.
Thinkfuse: Thinkfuse is building tools for team collaboration, and is hoping to create more effective way for teams to manage and share weekly status reports called This Week Last Week.
World Blender: World Blender is creating social location-based first person shooter games such as GPS Assassin.
GoMiles: GoMiles helps consumers track their airline miles and helps educate users on the best ways to protect, earn more, or redeem reward miles.
Giant Thinkwell: Giant Thinkwell is an imaginative social gaming platform featuring celebrity-based games. Their first game is called Raising Uncle Jesse, where players hilariously give birth to a baby John Stamos, and then raise him over time.
The Seattle funding group includes Bezos Expeditions, Buerk Dale Victor, DFJ, Founder’s Co-op, Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Maveron, OVP, Second Avenue Partners, Trilogy Partners, WRF Capital, Voyager Capital, Vulcan Capital and many prominent angel investors.
Read More of What’s Brewing Here >>>
