Cambridge start-up socializes television

Making TV viewing more social. Ajay Kulkarni argues that talking with friends about your favorite TV shows has never been tougher.

“Aside from sports, no one watches things live,’’ he says. “By the time I’ve seen the latest ‘30 Rock,’ it might be a week or more old.’’

And Facebook, he says, is too vast and too public to be conducive to small groups of friends sharing the best lines from “Modern Family’’ or dissecting the plot of “Lost.’’

“With your close friends, you don’t want to just see what they’re watching on their Facebook status updates,’’ Kulkarni says. “You want to hang out with them. And to do that, you need an excuse, and you need a place.’’

Kulkarni’s start-up, Cambridge-based KickFour, believes TV is the perfect excuse to connect with friends, and that they’re building the ideal place. On KickFour, friends can get credit for having seen particular episodes of a show, post comments about it, and earn badges indicating that they are a “groupie,’’ a “VIP,’’ a “junkie,’’ or a “superstar.’’

Meanwhile, KickFour will be collecting data (perhaps valuable to networks and marketers) about which TV shows have the most fervent fans, which episodes have been most popular, and how people are viewing shows on Hulu, via TiVo, on an iPad, and so on.

The company is currently operating a small private beta test, which will be expanded this week when KickFour participates in the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. (KickFour missed out on an on-stage demo slot, but instead got a free demo table in the conference’s “Start-Up Alley,’’ where they’ll be showing off the site, alongside another Boston start-up, Jason Jacobs’s RunKeeper.)

A new site for big fans. Blending celebrity worship, social networking, and multilevel marketing is Fantourage, a Boston start-up coming out of beta this month.

The site allows fans to create online fan clubs for their favorite bands, actors, or sports stars and gives celebs who opt to work with Fantourage an opportunity to reward their most fervent fans with prizes.

For example, for the recent MGM release “Hot Tub Time Machine,’’ Fantourage worked with the studio to aggregate fans of the movie online, with the top fan winning a hot tub. (The fact that “Hot Tub’’ co-star Rob Corddry tweeted about the promotion didn’t hurt.)

How do you prove you’re a devoted fan? Founder John Davie explains that you earn points by posting messages, taking quizzes, creating videos, or interacting with other fans on the site. But the ways to accumulate really big points? By recruiting other fans into a Fantourage fan club, or by purchasing tickets or merchandise through the site.

“This is no different from an airline giving away frequent-flier miles or first-class upgrades,’’ explains Davie, also the founder of Dining Alliance, a group-purchasing network for restaurants.

The site has been working with “The Soup’’ on Comedy Central to give away passes to be on the set when the show is taped, and with Donald Trump to give away a trip to New York City and a meet-and-greet with The Donald.

Davie says he started developing the idea for Fantourage after studying the way fans of Dane Cook interacted on the comic’s Facebook page; that got him thinking about how celebrities might benefit from a way to find out who their most loyal fans are, and reward them with incentives and discounts. He also started thinking about how to ban haters from an online social network; on Fantourage, the top 10 percent of a celebrity’s fans become moderators with the power to hide negative posts (though they can nuke only one per day.)

Access to angel investors, fee-free. Peeved about events that charge entrepreneurs an entry fee to present their businesses to angel investors, Jason Calacanis decided to create Open Angel Forum. The series of events, held so far in places like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, is “dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with free and open access to the angel investors that they need,’’ according to the website. (Calacanis is founder of the curated question-and-answer site Mahalo and an angel investor himself, in start-ups like Gowalla and Blippy.)

At each event, Calacanis and his colleagues round up a roomful of angel investors and select six start-ups to present their plans. The first local Open Angel Forum will take place June 18 at the Polaris-run Dogpatch Labs start-up space in East Cambridge.

Info about the Cambridge event isn’t yet up on the Open Angel Forum site (openangeforum.com) but will be soon, I’m told.

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