It was a busy week for local technology news.

—Two teams from San Diego and a third from Northern California demonstrated their development of advanced chemical sensor prototypes that are tiny enough to be found inside ordinary cell phones. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding the Cell-All program, with a goal of basically creating an anti-terrorism app for cell phones that would enable authorities to crowd-source chemical detection.

—MaxLinear has filed for its initial public stock offering. The Carlsbad, CA-based fabless chipmaker, which specializes in designing semiconductor-based television receivers, intends to raise about $100 million through its IPO. The market may be de-frosting a bit, with 47 IPOs so far in 2009, compared with 45 last year, and 272 in 2007.

—ProQuo, a San Diego-based Web 2.0 company that was founded in 2007, was quietly shut down after taking in a total of $15 million in venture capital from Menlo Park, CA-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Diego-based Mission Ventures. ProQuo was never able to validate its business model; its website offered consumers a way to remove their names from mass-mailing lists for free, and the company planned to sell its optimized lists back to mass marketing companies.

—San Diego’s wireless industry group, CommNexus, celebrated the opening of EvoNexus, its free high-tech incubator, by announcing the selection of three more startup companies: EcoATM, MicroPower Technologies, and TetraVue. CommNexus CEO Rory Moore says EvoNexus is believed to be the first incubator that is completely free for startups—that is, it doesn’t even require an equity stake in participating companies, as most incubuators do.

—Jitterbug, the San Diego wireless provider that puts an emphasis on simplicity, has acquired MobiWatch, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing mobile personal emergency response services. A regulatory filing shows that Jitterbug’s parent, GreatCall, provided 630,000 shares of common stock to MobiWatch and its shareholders in a deal valued at $107,100.

—San Diego-based Networkfleet is using its technology to help companies that operate fleets of vehicles go green by monitoring engine emissions and ensuring that vehicles are operating efficiently. Co-founder Diego Borrego told me the company also expects to be a player as consolidations sweep through the fleet tracking industry.

—EcoDog, a Vista, CA, cleantech startup that has developed a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill, was named best of show at GadgetFest, the annual fall competition sponsored by CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group. EcoDog founding CEO Ron Pitt won over the crowd when he declared, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

—San Diego-based cleantech startup EESG is looking to raise $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and ramp up public relations and marketing. The company’s founders told me they have raised about half so far, including $300,000 from Longboard Capital Advisors, a green investment firm based in Santa Monica, CA.

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EvoNexus, San Diego’s free high-tech incubator, announced that it has enrolled three more startup companies during ceremonies yesterday that officially marked the opening of its new facility.

CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group, announced five months ago that it was leading the creation of the free and “no strings attached” startup incubator, to be headed by wireless industry executive Cathy Pucher. EvoNexus, which is structured as a nonprofit organization, plans to eventually house 10 to 12 technology startups; it named its first three startups less than two months ago.

CommNexus and EvoNexus have both moved their offices into part of a 25,000-square-foot commercial office building that was previously occupied by San Diego-based Leap Wireless, (NASDAQ: LEAP), which sells prepaid discount mobile phone service through its Cricket Communications subsidiary. By providing the office space to EvoNexus for one year at no cost, Leap made the largest single contribution of more than three dozen companies and individuals that donated in-kind services and cash to the incubator, according to Pucher.

“San Diego is an innovation economy,” Leap CEO S. Douglas Hutcheson told the crowd. “We’ve spawned more new companies in San Diego than I think anyone would have believed, and it’s vital that we support that.”

For the startups that are lucky enough to get selected, the incubator provides free office space, including utilities, Internet service, office equipment, and volunteer business mentoring for up to two years.

“Other cities don’t recognize the collaboration that we have here,” San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders told a lunchtime crowd of roughly 150 people who attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the incubator. The mayor was joined by other local dignitaries and industry officials, including CommNexus board chairman John Major, the former chairman and CEO of two San Diego wireless companies, Novatel Wireless and Wireless Knowledge. “As we entered into the recession of recessions, a lot of non-profits hunkered down, and frankly that would have been the easy thing for us as well,” Major said. “But that’s not the way we operate.”

Pucher, the incubator’s executive director, told me …Next Page »

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The smell of startup incubators is in the air. Adeo Ressi from TheFunded recently announced that his Founder Institute training program for entrepreneurs is coming to Seattle this winter. And next week, TechStars, the seed-stage investment fund with operations in Boulder, CO, and Boston, is holding its annual reunion event in Seattle amid increasing buzz around the potential for similar programs in the Northwest.

While those incubators seek to launch mostly new tech companies, I’ve also been hearing quite a bit from entrepreneurs and investors about the cleantech and green-energy startup incubator announced last week by McKinstry, the Seattle-based construction, consulting, and energy-efficiency firm. The new innovation center will be housed at McKinstry headquarters in Georgetown, and is slated to be complete next spring.

“We are on the forefront of creating some of the most innovative solutions to eliminate energy waste in the built environment,” said Dean Allen, CEO of McKinstry, in a statement. “Now with the Innovation Center we will have the opportunity to quickly advance new technologies that are working toward that goal, as well as partnering with innovative entrepreneurs to bring new technologies to market.”

I haven’t had a chance to sit down with McKinstry yet, but I’ve already heard some strong reactions from the local cleantech community. Here are a few:

Michael Butler, CEO of Seattle-based investment bank Cascadia Capital and a strong supporter of Northwest energy companies, says the new incubator is a “big deal, I think and hope.” He adds, “The Puget Sound marketplace is not creating a critical mass of clean tech companies. We don’t have the ecosystem in place. I am really hopeful that the McKinstry effort can fill some of the void. We are falling further behind other regions, and the window will start closing if we can’t get the ecosystem built.”

Rick LeFaivre, managing director at Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners, says the incubator “could be very interesting” but that “it’s still early,” and details are still being worked out. “I’ve talked several times to the McKinstry folks about what they want to do and I think it could be very helpful to kick-start cleantech companies in the region,” he says. “A truly effective incubator needs more than access to space. It needs access to capital and business acumen to help the startups develop and get ready for venture financing (if necessary and appropriate). This, of course, is what Accelerator does in the biotech space. I have offered to work with the McKinstry team to help develop this concept, and I’m excited about what it could become. I think back to the two years I spent working with the EnerG2 team [energy storage startup in Seattle] to get them ready for venture funding, and they would have been a good candidate to go into an incubator while fleshing things out.”

Burt Hamner, entrepreneur and founder of Hydrovolts, a Seattle-based water-energy startup, stresses the importance of communication between the people running the new innovation center and local entrepreneurs and financiers. “Incubators can be great things,” Hamner says. But it “depends on how they are set up and their connections.” He says he “must wait and see,” and that in the meantime, it’s important for McKinstry to “inform the clean tech community what they are doing.”

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There’s a new tech startup incubator in town. The Founder Institute is accepting applications for its four-month training program, which begins in Seattle on December 7. The program is designed to mentor very early-stage entrepreneurs, with the goal of creating new companies across a wide variety of tech sectors including software, social media, consumer electronics, e-commerce, medical devices, and cleantech.

The program fits with a trend of increasing resources for entrepreneurs in the Seattle area. The Founder Institute was started by Adeo Ressi, the founder of the venture capitalist rating site TheFunded. The incubator recently completed its first session in Silicon Valley, graduating 54 companies (three of which have since rustled up outside funding), and has also announced expansions to San Diego and Washington DC.

Chris Early is leading the Seattle program. He’s a game industry veteran who was most recently general manager of Windows Gaming Technology at Microsoft. He left the company earlier this year, and caught up with Ressi around a month ago over drinks. (The two had known each other for years from the game industry.) Early suggested that Ressi should expand his program to Seattle, and it sounds like it didn’t take much convincing. “It’s been a whirlwind month putting it together here,” Early says.

As he explains, the concept behind the Founder Institute arose from what Ressi was seeing with TheFunded. “A large number of people were coming through at a pre-company stage,” and they were looking for mentorship and money to get started, Early says. So the Founder Institute provides classes on every step of the startup process, led by experienced mentors, including Derrick Morton, the CEO of FlowPlay, and Bryan Starbuck, the CEO of TalentSpring. About a third of the mentors will come from out of town, including David Kidder of Clickable.com and Bryan Thatcher of Empressr (both from New York). The ideal students are entrepreneurs with new companies—less than two years old—or just promising ideas. The goal is for every student to have a business plan and a polished pitch for their company by the end of four months.

OK, so everyone knows entrepreneurs, especially first-timers, need a lot of mentorship. But what’s different about the Founder Institute compared with incubators like Y Combinator …Next Page »

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North Shore Innoventures, a Beverly, MA-based network of technology incubators, announced today that it has opened a new “Cleantech Innoventure Center” in Lynn, MA. Established with funding from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and sponsorship from the Lynn Economic Development and Industrial Corporation, the new incubator space is located at 20 Wheeler Street in Lynn, and is already home to one company, building-management software startup Magniture Systems. North Shore Innoventures said it also plans to open a Biotech Innoventure Center at the Cummings Center in Beverly, MA, later this year.

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One of the worst things that happened in the Boston entrepreneurial community this year was that Y Combinator decamped to do all its incubating of new tech companies in Silicon Valley. One of the best things that happened was that a few months later, TechStars moved right in to fill the void. The incubator camp run out of Boulder, CO, announced it was coming to town in February, and fielded its first class of Boston entrepreneurs this summer. And if you’d been to its Investor Evening last month, when the first Boston grads made their pitches at Microsoft’s NERD (New England R&D Center), you’d have seen first-hand from the packed house and all the energy and excitement just how welcome TechStars has become.

But despite that spectacular debut, TechStars was out on the streets and unsure of whether it would return. The group had taken up a suite of former Kaplan test-prep classrooms in an office building in Cambridge’s Central Square. But, it turns out, that was only a short-term lease—and it has ended. At the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s unconference on October 1, the executive director of TechStars Boston, Shawn Broderick, told Wade that TechStars had not determined whether it would return to the area for a second year. It depended on how investors felt, and whether enough of the firms in its first class found funding.

Broderick told me yesterday that he has just gotten the green light. “We are definitely planning to do TechStars Boston 2010,” he confirmed in an e-mail. “The investors met on Friday in fact to sort that out. So we’re on!”

He’s not sure where TechStars will set up shop. “We’re homeless until the 2010 program starts up,” Broderick wrote. But the TechStars Boston leader is not. He has moved into Dogpatch Labs, the incubator and entrepreneurial workspace operated by Polaris Venture Partners.

Dogpatch just had its grand opening last Thursday. Broderick says he knows Polaris general partner Dave Barrett, who is one of the point people for Dogpatch in Cambridge. “I asked Dave for a desk and he said ‘sure!’”

As for TechStars, Broderick says the planning for 2010 is underway. “We’ll have the details sorted out in the next few weeks.”

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Before I came to Xconomy, I didn’t know much about the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation beyond what I heard on the radio. If you’re an NPR listener like me, you’ve probably heard their underwriting plug that says it’s the “Foundation of Entrepreneurship.”

But then I started covering stories like the foundation’s annual New Economy Index, in which Massachusetts and Washington nabbed the top two spots last year, and its sponsorship of projects like Ed Roberts’ study last February showing that companies founded by MIT graduates have an annual economic output of more than $2 trillion. I began to see that the Kauffman Foundation, to a far greater extent than any of the 116,000 other private foundations in the U.S., is focused on the relationship between company formation and general economic growth—and not just in a theoretical or academic way, but on a very practical level.

It’s a focus that happens to overlap quite a bit with our own obsessions here at Xconomy. In fact, we’re now partnering directly with the foundation, which has become one of the underwriters of our new Startups Channel, a gathering place for startup-related stories from all of the cities in Xconomy’s network. And last week I had an opportunity to visit the foundation’s campus near the University of Missouri, Kansas City, to attend a reception and dinner honoring the inaugural class of Kauffman Entrepreneur Postdoctoral Fellows. The fellows are a group of 13 scientific researchers singled out for their ambitions to commercialize their laboratory discoveries. (Full disclosure: the foundation picked up the costs of my trip.)

The foundation was established in 1966 by Ewing Kauffman, an entrepreneurial pharmaceutical salesman who founded Marion Laboratories in 1950 and built it into a multi-billion dollar company. It’s now one of the 30 largest foundations in the U.S., with roughly $2 billion in assets.

Under the leadership of Carl Schramm, its president and CEO since 2002, the Kauffman Foundation has been aggressively searching for new ways to help entrepreneurs build high-growth companies. In remarks at last week’s dinner, Schramm noted that roughly one-third of the nation’s gross domestic product comes from companies that are less than 30 years old. Research by the foundation, he said, has shown that just 300 to 1,000 new startups each year account for most of that one-third. So the question the foundation has set out to answer, through a new initiative called the Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation, is “how can we create another 300 to 1,000 high growth firms per year,” Schramm said.

The postdoctoral fellowship program is part of the Kauffman Labs project. Sandra Miller, a senior fellow at the foundation who was brought in from Stanford to run the fellowship program, says one premise is that the existing structure of American graduate and postgraduate training means that technical founders for new science- and technology-driven companies are always in short supply. “You have these people who are so incredibly trained, and are at the forefront of pioneering research, and yet …Next Page »

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Boston entrepreneurs, start your yipping. Polaris Venture Partners is announcing today that it is opening a counterpart to its fast-growing San Francisco-based Dog Patch Labs startup incubator near Kendall Square here in Cambridge, MA. Dog Patch Labs Cambridge, as it’s aptly called, will officially open for business next week and will be housed in the American Twine Building on Third Street, just across the street from Xconomy’s headquarters.

Unlike the original Dog Patch Lab (Polaris has now added an “s” to the end of the name) at Pier 38 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, which I profiled in May and is mostly focused on consumer and Internet companies, the new lab will be home to entrepreneurs and innovators across a wide variety of disciplines, from software-as-a-service and cloud computing to biotech and energy. Initially, the lab will have space for about 10 entrepreneurs, typically in one- and two-person teams. The first five or six “pups” will move in next week—but are not being announced at this time.

A bevy of Polaris partners I spoke with—David Barrett, Alan Crane, Mike Hirshland, Bob Metcalfe, and Amir Nashat, each representing different areas of specialization—say the lab’s multi-disciplinary focus reflects the breadth of the innovation community here and the strength of great universities like Harvard and MIT, the latter of which is literally only a few blocks away. “What we’re trying to do is key off some of the things that are working in San Francisco, but recognize that this is a different market,” says Barrett, who focuses chiefly on Internet software and other tech businesses. Crane, who specializes in life sciences investments, says he has five portfolio companies within two blocks of the new Dog Patch location. The lab itself is housed in cool, high-ceilinged space peeled off from online shopping backbone company Allurent, itself a Polaris investment.

Cross-pollinating ideas and practices from companies and people in different disciplines is a key tenet of Dog Patch Cambridge—and shows how Polaris is evolving the incubator concept into something potentially much more powerful than its original idea. Not only do the partners I spoke with say entrepreneurs in one field will benefit from close proximity to their counterparts from another field, but Polaris is also introducing another new idea with the Cambridge operation—that of Dog Patch Fellows, experts or proven entrepreneurs who will share their expertise through visits to the lab.

“A Dog Patch Fellow is either somebody…from a portfolio company, or somebody who we’ve worked closely with, that we all think is a kind of master of his or her trade,” says Barrett. Whether it’s in Web marketing, new sales models, or some other field, he says, “we have our hands around a number of really interesting folks that we think people here would love to get to know and love to get to learn from.”

Some fellows will come from around Boston. However, Polaris says, others will hail from places like the Bay Area that might have expertise harder to find here. Hirshland points to the …Next Page »

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Brown University student Walker Williams is leading the launch of a new online job service for college students, Jobzle.com, through a marketing campaign that began this week in Providence and is expected to spread to other universities in Rhode Island in the days and weeks ahead.

Jobzle is initially focusing on serving students in the Ocean State for the 2009-10 school year, particularly at Brown, where Jobzle founder Williams has been developing the site since late 2007, during his freshman year, he said. His cofounders are Brown students Kevin Durfee and Ben Mathews.

It’s early days at Jobzle—about 100 Brown students have signed up for the free job service, and there are now some 30 job postings on site—yet Williams sounded serious about scaling up the startup’s operations next year and spreading to college campuses in other parts of the country. While the startup faces huge competitors in the online jobs service market, such as Monster and CareerBuilder, Williams says he is confident that the firm’s exclusive focus on the college-student market and the needs of employers to tap this talented labor pool will help differentiate Jobzle from the rest of the field. To make money, Jobzle charges employers a fee to list jobs; it gets revenue from advertisers such as resume services as well, Williams said.

Jobzle has seen a significant jump in traffic since its Sept. 7 launch, with about 1,300 unique visitors so far this week compared to just a trickle of traffic in prior weeks, according to Williams. “We know we’re getting people interested and the word is getting out,” he wrote in an e-mail this morning. “Now we have to focus… on converting those hits to users and kick-starting the Jobzle ecosystem.”

Jobzle is designed to be accessible only to college students and employers. Similar to social networking venues such as Facebook and MySpace, Jobzle provides users with their own profile page. Yet Jobzle profiles also include the user’s qualifications, a list of their business contacts, as well as their work schedule and job applications. Though Williams is a history major at Brown, he is also a freelance website developer and graphic designer who spent the last two summers as an intern at Sling Media, where he says he worked on the firm’s …Next Page »

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EvoNexus, the non-profit incubator launched in San Diego three months ago, has selected its inaugural group of new technology companies to be hatched.

Cathy Pucher, the incubator’s executive director, tells me the first clutch of startups getting support from EvoNexus were culled from about 45 applicants. The contenders came from a surprisingly diverse number of industries, including software, cleantech, wireless health, semiconductor, communications, and other technologies. “We really didn’t know how many applications or what kind of applications we would get,” Pucher says. Most of the applications came from “brand new” startups, she adds, including several started by individuals who had taken early retirement offers or had been laid off in the recession.

EvoNexus, which plans to move by the end of this month into commercial office space recently vacated by San Diego-based Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP), also has begun reviewing its second round of applications. (More on that below). Pucher says the three startups are:

—San Diego-based Medipacs is commercializing non-mechanical intravenous infusion technology that uses polymer pumps instead of electric motors and pump mechanisms. The company is initially targeting delivery of pain medications and already has developed wearable, programmable, and disposable infusion technology. It is looking for wireless industry expertise to add remote monitoring capabilities (and expand into the wireless health market).

CEO Mark McWilliams has extensive experience in the medical devices industry and in early stage companies. He has worked previously at Beckman Coulter, Q3DM, and Baxter Healthcare.

—IO Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor startup that is focused on applying new technologies to RF (radio frequency) devices for the cellular industry. “They don’t give out a lot of detail about what they’re doing because …Next Page »

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Kai-Fu Lee, the charismatic former Microsoft VP and founding director of the company’s research lab in Beijing who reported last week that he was quitting as head of Google’s China arm, has announced that he has raised $115 million to create a new incubator for high-tech startups in China.

The new organization, Innovation Works, will mentor and prepare entrepreneurs to launch new businesses, chiefly in the Internet, mobile Internet, and cloud computing spaces, according to its website. A particular area of focus inside these sectors is e-commerce targeting the financial, medical services, and educational markets.

Innovation Works will be based in Beijing, apparently near the famous Tsinghua University, China’s most prestigious science and technology university. It is funded by a high-powered group of investors and VCs that includes Steve Chen, a co-founder of YouTube, Foxconn Technology Group, the Legend Group, and the New Oriental Education & Technology Group. The lead venture investor is WI Harper Group. Lee is named as founder, chairman, and CEO.

The goal is to target “the Greater China market, and build ‘dream teams’ to collect, analyze, prioritize and execute on the most promising ideas,” according to the Innovation Works website. “Innovation Works will accelerate an entrepreneur’s ability to prove ideas, obtain additional external funding, and then spin-off into an independent company.”

“The Chinese entrepreneurial environment is still in its formative stage, with significant barriers for the early-stage entrepreneur: the lack of management experience and coaching, the reluctance of venture capitalists to invest in companies in the formation stage, and the lack of networking and …Next Page »

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Ji Kim was able to raise $100,000 in seed financing for his ad software startup Dijipop this summer through connections he gained in a new program called Betaspring, which was launched this year to support young entrepreneurs in Providence, RI, in their quest to form technology- and design-oriented startups.

Dijipop was one of the seven startup teams that presented its business plans at Betaspring Investor Demo Day yesterday at the RI Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Providence’s Jewelry District. It was their big day to shine in front of angel investors, venture guys and gals, and other business types. Many of the team members wore suits, and some even wore ties. (My gosh, I don’t usually see ties at techie events unless something big is at stake, and even then…) Indeed, these groups represented the future businesses that could lift Rhode Island’s ailing economy and deliver jobs in high-growth sectors.

Owen Johnson, a Providence Web and real estate entrepreneur, gave me some insights into why he and colleagues Jack Templin and Allan Tear formed Betaspring. “The thinking behind it was to provide acceleration for teams thinking about going into business,” he said. He noted the teams presenting Thursday received help from nearly 50 mentors with experience in their respective fields during the 12-week program. And while this first class of teams received no seed funding from Betaspring, he said, the plan for next year is to have a micro-seed investment fund that provides somewhere around $5,000 for each group that gets accepted into the program. That would put Betaspring more on par with earlier startup acceleration programs with investing capabilities such as Y Combinator in Mountain View, CA, and TechStars in Boston and Boulder, CO.

Providence is certainly not a hotbed of startup activity like Boston or Silicon Valley, but Johnson and Templin pointed to some recent startup successes in the city to inspire more young innovators to follow in those companies’ footsteps. Zeo, a developer of headbands that detect sleeping patterns, was formed by a group of Brown University students in 2003 as Axon Labs and has since gone one to close a $8.3 million Series C round of financing. (However, like many attractive Providence startups, Zeo has moved its headquarters to the Boston area.) Another promising startup with roots at Brown is Shape Up The Nation, a Providence-based corporate wellness firm that helps offices organize teams to try to outdo each other in losing weight, quitting smoking, and other health-minded challenges.

“The momentum is building,” Johnson said. “Every day I meet people who have moved to Providence and are, in one way or another, involved in the tech scene.”

Here’s a look at the seven startup teams that were part of Betaspring first 12-week program:

—Accelereach, led by Brown graduate and CEO Adam Emrich, has developed Web-based software that supports communication between health workers and patients through a combination of interactive voice responses, e-mails, and cell-phone text messages. The idea is to …Next Page »

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Technology entrepreneurship can be a lonely road. Not only do you have to convince a few friends or colleagues to work hundred-hour weeks for the next several years in support of your wild idea, but you’ve got to make it past the elevator pitch with at least one funder, and then prove that your idea can gain a toehold in the marketplace.

But in the last few years, the process of launching a tech startup has become, if not easier, at least more social. That’s thanks to the flowering of a new class of startup schools that admit budding entrepreneurs, or teams of entrepreneurs, for a “semester” or more

To purchase a much expanded version of this guide, in PDF format, click the “Add to Cart” button. For $60 you’ll get information on each program’s focus, application deadlines and procedures, stipend and equity policies, notable graduates, and more. Click here to see a sample entry.

of intense product development, collaboration, and business mentorship. Y Combinator, a Mountain View, CA, venture firm founded by software entrepreneur Paul Graham, is usually cited as running the first such operation, but groups imitating or adapting the model have sprung up in cities across the country—and they’re graduating a growing pool of successful startups.

SCVNGR, a Boston-based startup developing mobile software that lets organizations build customized scavenger-hunt events, got its start in a Philadelphia startup school called DreamIt Ventures, founded by Philadelphia entrepreneurs David Bookspan, Michael Levinson, and Steve Welch. Michael Hagan, SCVNGR’s chief operating officer, says DreamIt was the perfect setting for the company’s founding team—initially, just him and 20-year-old CEO Seth Priebatsch—to get the scavenger-hunt idea off the ground.

“The camaraderie of the teams was fantastic,” Hagan says. “We were all working really long hours, grabbing lunch, socializing, sympathizing with each other and sharing in the challenges and successes. With some of the tough decisions or the things I couldn’t figure out with Seth, I’d walk over to another team and say ‘What do you think of this, how would you approach this?’ David and Mike and Steve are all really mentor-oriented individuals, and that was a really strong, positive experience from the whole program.”

At most startup schools, participants are accepted for a limited time—typically 3 months to 2 years—and the team members receive mentorship and/or a small amount of seed funding. Often, the schools provide temporary work space as well as Internet access, office support, and legal and accounting advice, along with access to outside angel or venture investors. Some programs provide these benefits at no cost to the teams. Others require that teams sign over a small amount of equity in their companies (usually less than 15 percent).

The programs go by various names, such as “venture incubators,” “startup boot camps,” “seed programs,” and “growth accelerators.” The confusing terminology, plus the fact that most of the organizations were founded in 2008 or 2009, can make it hard to track down all the various programs accepting startups these days—hence this Xconomy Guide.

For this list, we have deliberately omitted the hundreds of “business incubators” around the country, such as the Cambridge Innovation Center in Cambridge, MA, that exist primarily to provide rental space and infrastructure for young companies. (For a list of business incubators by state, visit the National Business Incubators Association at www.nbia.org.) To meet the criteria for Xconomy’s venture incubator, startup programs have to provide their accepted entrepreneurs or teams with some benefit beyond office space and infrastructure support, and they must charge (if they charge at all) in the form of equity, not cash—the two exceptions on our list being Better Labs, which structures its deals in equity and cash, and TheFunded’s Founder Institute, which has a $450 course fee.

And speaking of fees, a much expanded version of this list, in PDF format, is available for a modest one. For $60, you’ll get information on each program’s focus, application deadlines and procedures, stipend and equity policies, notable graduates, and more. Click here to see what a full entry looks like, or click the “Add to Cart” button below to buy the PDF now using PayPal or your credit card. (If you choose to pay by credit card, first click the yellow PayPal checkout button, then look for “Don’t have a PayPal account?” on the next page and click the “continue” link beneath that.)

We intend to expand and update this list over time. Additions and corrections are welcome at editors@xconomy.com.

The Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators: The List

Betaspring
Location: Providence, RI
Founded: 2009

Better Labs
Location: San Jose, CA
Founded: 2008

Bizdom U
Location: Detroit, MI
Founded: 2007
…Next Page »

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If you want to build a program to nurture early-stage startups in New York City through regular meetings with investors, legal and financial advisors, and experienced CEOs, where do you turn for mentors and sponsors? To Boston, naturally.

Of the 11 founding members of the new First Growth Venture Network, five—Battery Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners—hail from the Bay State.

The network, unveiled today, will admit a handful of New York-based startups each year—the exact number has yet to be determined—and connect them with mentors, and potential investors, through a series of social and team-building events. Each startup will also be matched with a team of industry-veteran advisors that includes at least one venture capitalist, one angel investor or successful senior executive, and one legal/financial advisor, according to the group’s chair, Edward Zimmerman.

The big Boston contingent in First Growth is a reflection of the fact that so many Boston-based venture partners already consider New York an important fishing grounds, says Zimmerman, who created the Tech Group at New York-based law firm Lowenstein Sandler and is an active angel investor. (He’s the founder of both AngelVineVC, a consortium of East Coast venture funds and angel investors, and GrapeArborVC, a New York-based team of 12 angel investors.)

Over the last 18 months, Boston-based venture partners have been “spending more time in New York looking for backable companies,” Zimmerman says. That’s partly because of the digital media explosion—traditionally one of New York’s strengths—and partly because the economic crisis has stimulated young businesspeople who might otherwise have pursued careers on Wall Street to try entrepreneurship instead, he says.

“The golden handcuffs have come off,” says Zimmerman. That’s led more Boston-area VCs to swoop in looking for talented startup executives—so in a sense the new mentoring program is “just a way to help what’s already happening,” he says.

But there are also other interpretations. Jeff Bussgang, a general partner at Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners who is also a founding member of First Growth, puts it this way: “The deals we see in Boston typically center around MIT or Harvard, which have created this really nice ecosystem and mentorship network, between all the business plan competitions and things like the Deshpande Center. So we’ve seen the formula in Boston work really well, and we want to recreate it in New York.”

Also, there’s simply more capital in Massachusetts, chasing a finite set of backable entrepreneurs. (In fact, venture firms put $10,257 per worker into infotech-related companies in the Bay State in 2007, according to the University of Massachusetts’ Donahue Institute; only California attracted more investment on a per-capita basis, with $11,361 per worker, compared to a national average of $2,780 per worker.) New York is “not as crowded at the early stage,” Bussgang says. “So a lot of people have been taking the Acela back and forth.”

The First Growth network is already accepting applications for the program’s first year, which will begin in September and will consist of two semesters, September to December and January to June. According to Zimmerman, the group will meet four times per semester for roundtables, networking, and cocktails. Participating startups will also be in frequent touch with their advisory teams outside of these formal meetings.

For startups, there’s no cost to apply or participate in the program, and the network’s sponsors won’t require startups to hand over an equity stake in the companies, as is common among venture incubator programs such as Y Combinator in Mountain View, CA, TechStars in Boston and Boulder, CO, and Dreamit Ventures in Philadelphia. “This is not so that [startups] will get funded by someone in the network; it’s not about …Next Page »

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Yesterday social networking giant Facebook unveiled the winners of its first fbFund Rev competition, a contest to pick 20 organizations building Facebook-related social media applications for a 10-week company-building incubator program at the company’s Palo Alto, CA, offices. Among the winners was RunMyErrand, a Charlestown, MA-based startup we profiled in February.

RunMyErrand.com is a “service networking” website where people in local communities can post odd jobs that they need done—walking the dog, picking up a package—and “runners” can sign up to do them, with payments handled electronically. Founder and CEO Leah Busque says the service appeals to people like busy parents or professionals who are willing to pay someone else a few dollars to take care of a simple tasks if it frees them up to do something more important or more lucrative.

Busque’s startup built connecting software that allows Facebook users to log into RunMyErrand.com from their Facebook accounts, and see which of their errands have been picked up by runners. Their friends can also see this activity, which helps RunMyErrand by spreading viral awareness of the service.

The companies selected for fbFund Rev summer session will receive investments of up to $100,000 from Facebook, although they aren’t allowed to say how much they’ll get. I caught up with Busque by e-mail this morning; here’s our brief interview:

Xconomy: Congratulations on your selection! When will you be going to Palo Alto?

Leah Busque: Thanks so much!! [We're] not sure yet. I think the program starts June 15, so we are looking forward to heading out sometime in June.

X: What do you hope or expect to get out of your time there?

LB: We are really excited to be working side by side with the Facebook experts and engineers, and are hoping to learn as much as possible about the Facebook platform, and new ways we can utilize the social graph to enhance RuyMyErrand.

X: What does the RunMyErrand Facebook app actually do? How does it draw on the power of the Facebook social graph—which is obviously something they look for when they’re handing out these awards?

LB: Currently we have a soft implementation of Facebook Connect integrated into RunMyErrand. If you are a RunMyErrand user, you can use your Facebook credentials to login to runmyerrand.com. Whenever you post or run errands, they can be aggregated to your Facebook profile, and to your Facebook news feed. If you post an errand to Facebook, all your friends can see not only that you are using the service, but they can also see which Runner picked up your errand and all their ratings and reviews. Your friends will be more likely to trust that same Runner as well. This is one way we are building trust between people in the service network that we are building. We know there are many other use cases for the Facebook platform to strengthen trust between users on RunMyErrand, and we are looking forward to brainstorming and specing out some new features with the experts this summer.

X: How much money do you expect RunMyErrand will receive? FB said the final 20 winners will get $500,000 altogether; have they explained how it’s going to be divided?

LB: As part of the deal, we are not able to disclose the amount of funding we will receive from FB.

X: How are things going with the company? Any success metrics you can share?

LB: Things are going really great! We’ve brought on a second full time employee, Rylan Hamilton, who will graduate from Harvard Business School next week. With my strong technical and engineering background, and his business savvy, we make a great team! We are also incubating at Zipcar full time now. They have been nice enough to give us a few desks to use, and it is so nice to be surrounded by all the very smart and wonderful people over there. We will also have a couple of interns this summer from Boston College working with us, so we have major plans to continue our growth here in Boston.

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Two Seattle-based companies were awarded part of a $500,000 grant by Facebook today. The companies, Sortuv and Vittana, are two of the 20 startups and nonprofits receiving money through fbFund, a new program designed to help startups that make social websites and software.  Sortuv is a search engine designed around plain questions rather than keywords, while Vittana is a nonprofit facilitating direct microloans to people in developing countries.  As part of their award, each company will spend 10 weeks at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, learning about how to grow and improve their business from investors, entrepreneurs, and Facebook developers.

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Ceiling fans lolling high overhead, starfish in trawler nettings slung on one wall, funked-out wood floors, bar stools, round tables, comfy couches, a big bowl laden with fruit, huge windows overlooking the pier. No cubicles, just work areas with signs indicating where one company ends and another begins—and sometimes no signs at all. The whole place oozes creativity, hipness, young turks inventing the future.

This is the home of Dog Patch Lab, a startup incubator run by Polaris Venture Partners (Dog Patch occupies only a piece of the space I just described—more on that in a minute). Which itself is surprising, since it’s almost the antithesis of Polaris’s mainstream, East Coast image. If you’ve ever visited Polaris headquarters in Waltham, MA, the best you can say is that it’s just like all the other venture firms in the Bay Colony Corporate Center—modern, spacious, business-like.

You would not call it cool in any way.

But this is a side of Polaris we don’t see in Boston, for the simple reason that it’s in San Francisco—along the famous Embarcadero. I mentioned it briefly in my column about Boston VCs investing in social media. But, as your intrepid reporter out to bring to light new aspects of Boston’s innovation community, I stopped by on a recent West Coast trip to find out more about Dog Patch, how it works, and what its inhabitants are doing.

Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland and executive-in-residence Brian Grey set up my visit—although neither could be present for my tour. My host was Ken Thom, VP of operations for Social Media, which runs an ad network for companies making social applications. Social Media refitted the space on Pier 38, just south of the Bay Bridge, in late 2007—and now controls some 10,000-12,000 square feet. It sublets parts to other companies, mostly startups working on Facebook apps. And to Polaris.

Dog Patch, which got going about a year ago, started with four or six desks, says Thom, and then expanded to 10 desks. “Now Polaris has both of those rooms,” he says, pointing to one wing of the space that looks over the waterfront.

Click on image to see it bigger--and better.

All told, some 70 people occupy Social Media’s space. I’m guessing about 15-20 of them are Dog Patch denizens. Hirshland says Dog Patch currently houses four startups, plus a group run by Ariel Poler, previously of StumbleUpon and other companies, and co-founder of LOLapps, a former Dog Patch puppy (more on LOLapps below, although Poler was out during my visit and so I never connected with him).

I looked in on Threadsy, which seeks to unite consumers’ s e-mail, social networks, and other online messaging services. It occupies its own little room, up a half-level from Dog Patch. It turned out Threadsy was once part of the “kennel,” but had moved to its own space. I wondered if it had been funded by Polaris (that is not a requisite—read on). “Are you guys a Polaris company?” Thom relayed. “Not yet,” was the answering shout.

Next, I stopped by a mannequin wearing an AppJet t-shirt. AppJet, you might recall, was a Y Combinator company a couple of summers ago; it offers an easy-to-use online platform for programming Web applications. Those guys seemed very busy, so I didn’t interrupt, and the mannequin would not reveal other details.

AppJet mannequin

Mr. Tweet was a bit more chatty. CEO Ming Yeow Ng and chief engineer Yu-Shan Fung were out—so I spoke with Hamilton Ulmer, who claimed his title was village idiot. Mr. Tweet, he explained, is a people recommendation engine for Twitter. “We analyze who you follow and talk to, and from that we make recommendations about other people that you might be interested in following, people with your interests,” he says.

Across the aisle from Ulmer was Vikas Gupta, CEO of Jambool and former head of Amazon’s payments platform and flexible payments web service. He and three colleagues were all berthed at one table, two on each side. Five other employees work in Seattle. Jambool is best-known for its product, Social Gold, a currency/payment platform for social communities such as online games, virtual worlds, and social media sites. “Payments for the next generation of users online,” sums up Gupta.

He says Social Gold is already one of largest payment providers on Facebook and MySpace, but he declined to give any numbers. The company launched two years ago, but only raised its Series A round—roughly $1 million—about eight months ago, Gupta says. Polaris was not part of that round, which included Hit Forge, Charles River Ventures, and Bay Partners.

The last company I spoke with also had Seattle ties. I’d tell you the name, but …Next Page »

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[Updated with interview material from Spark Capital general partner Bijan Sabet, see below.]

It’s almost the equivalent of the “microloans” phenomenon for the venture world: the profusion of startup schools, bootcamps, incubators, and seed funds that give teams small amounts of money—from a few thousand dollars to a few hundred thousand—to get their ideas up to speed and test them in the market before they need more serious capital. Boston’s Spark Capital, whose portfolio focuses on social media, entertainment, and network infrastructure companies, is the latest to join this trend.

Spark announced this morning that it’s launching Start@Spark, a program that will offer seed-stage investments of up to $250,000 to promising early-stage startups in the New York and Boston areas. And by mid-afternoon it had already received a “slew of e-mails” with proposals, according to Spark’s Bijan Sabet.

“In this economic environment, continued innovation and entrepreneurship are as important as ever,” Spark founder and general partner Todd Dagres said in this morning’s announcement. “Looking back at previous recessions, some of the greatest technology companies were created and achieved market success during turbulent times. We view Start@Spark as an opportunity to not only buck the trend of investors retreating from new early stage funding but also to capitalize on what may be a perfect storm for the next great technology company to take root.” (We’re working on contacting Dagres directly.)

Spark said the seed investments will be available to companies working on technologies at all stages of the “media and technology value chain”—content, applications, platforms, and infrastructure. In that respect, Spark seems to be looking to help create more hot startups along the lines of its current portfolio companies Eqal (the multimedia studio behind the “lonelygirl15″ Web series), Twitter (the famous microblogging service), Tumblr (a simplified blogging platform), Kickapps (a builder of white-label social networks), and Verivue (a broadband video delivery company).

Spark is already a supporter of the incubator model: it provides support for TechStars, a Boulder, CO-based startup bootcamp that will operate a parallel Boston session starting this summer. But while Start@Spark doesn’t sound like a full-scale incubator on the TechStars or Y Combinator model, the firm says companies that win seed funding will have access to Spark partners and legal counsel. Spark hasn’t said what the terms of the seed investments will be—for example, whether the funded startups will somehow be obliged to offer Spark equity.

Startup builders can apply for the Spark program online at www.sparkcapital.com/start. The firm says applicants will be judged on “creativity, thought-leadership, wide-reaching but focused ideas and the qualifications of the founding team.”

Update, 3:30 p.m. March 25, 2009: I just spoke with Spark general partner Bijan Sabet about Start@Spark. Here are the key quotes.

On why Spark is doing this:

“By and large, we mostly do early-stage investing. We’ve done later-stage investing as well, but typically we are part of the first institutional round for our companies. The investments range from the $350,000 we put into Tumblr to get it going, to something close to that for Oneriot and Admeld, to other Series As that are larger—we did $1 million with OMGPOP a year ago. So we’ve done a bunch of early-stage investing. And in this market we continue to see a few trends that are clear to us. Many funds are getting bigger and bigger, and in the Northeast in particular, there is nothing like this that we’ve seen. On the West Coast they have some of these programs, but we don’t see them done here. A very active angel and seed investing community is an important part of the ecosystem. So we felt it was the right time to do this…This is very much focused on New York and Boston, at least for now.”

On Spark’s larger efforts to reach out to early-stage startups:

“One thing that we’re trying to promote is that this is one component of a larger initiative that we’ve termed Start@Spark. The seed part is the newest part of that offering, but we include in this thing the Alliance for Open Competition, which is our effort to get rid of non-compete agreements, and our investment in TechStars, and some community things that we’re trying to do that really focus on entrepreneurs.”

On the response to the seed investing program so far:

“It’s amazing. Just today, I’ve gotten two public comments on my blog with proposals, and a slew of e-mails that have come in just since this morning. We are going to have a lot of evening reading. I haven’t gone through them, so I can’t tell you whether any of the day-one applicatnts are going to get capital from Spark. But I just feel that angel and seed-stage investments play a very important role. Even before the economic collapse, the Northeast didn’t have the strength of the angel network that the West Coast has. We have some very good angel investors, but they aren’t nearly as active and comprehensive as the angel network on the West Coast.”

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Many of my friends and neighbors may have noticed that I haven’t been in town as much lately, and that I’m spending more and more of my time in Kansas City. So why would a hardened MIT denizen who used to think that distant travel meant going to Porter Square now be flying back and forth to Missouri every week?

It’s because the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is headquartered in Kansas City, is pioneering new ways to advance our entrepreneurial economy. Kauffman’s president Carl Schramm inspired me the other day when he noted in a CNBC interview that all net job creation over the past thirty years has come from companies less than five years old. So what can we do to keep startups flourishing? I am delighted to be joining the Kauffman Foundation team as a senior fellow as we look out over the economic future and embark on a new approach for increasing both the number of new companies formed and the chances of success for these ventures.

This new initiative is called Kauffman Laboratories for Enterprise Creation. The mission of Kauffman Labs is to create more large-scale, high-growth firms. As someone with a combination of practical experience building companies, and academic experience teaching innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT—not to mention a passion for helping people build great companies—I’m very pleased to be a part of this initiative. It’s a perfect way to continue the work I started at MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.

Bad times are when good people spring into action. Today, more than ever, it’s important to catalyze and accelerate the tremendous inventive spirit of the American entrepreneur. As many have said before, we’ve got what it takes to innovate our way out of the current crisis.

Many budding entrepreneurs today face an unfortunate choice between going to school, or going to the school of hard knocks. In one circle, entrepreneurs can join MBA programs, fellowship programs, or business bootcamps. In another circle, they can dive in and get their hands dirty by starting a company, trying to raise venture capital or angel funding, or moving into an incubator. For the most part, these circles have not overlapped.

The idea behind Kauffman Labs is to create a new hybrid model. In the 2009 Kauffman Thoughtbook, the Foundation’s vice president of entrepreneurship, Bo Fishback, talks about the model of a conservatory, where students not only learn music theory but also play music. This is emphatically not the model most business schools follow today, as the New York Times noted in a well-reported March 15 article. B-schools are still trying to shake their legacy DNA of training the future CEOs of General Motors or the next generation of bankers and consultants. No self-respecting entrepreneur would think that he or she can learn how to run a startup by getting an MBA. Schools of Engineering are still struggling to understand their approach to teaching innovation, a discipline that runs contrary to traditional funding and tenure models.

Academic institutions, to be blunt about it, are the stodgy old incumbents in today’s innovation economy—and I say this as a faculty member at a school that is a hotbed of entrepreneurship. Don’t get me wrong—there are plenty of wonderful things that will always happen at MIT and could only happen at MIT. I am thrilled to continue my role at MIT in parallel with my Kauffman work. But there are many things that cannot happen within the walls of MIT, nor should they. I want to help make those boundaries easier to understand and navigate. It’s time for a disruptive new model, a hybrid between education and company creation.

Entities like Puretech Ventures, led by Daphne Zohar (an Xconomist like myself), are perfect examples of what we at the Kauffman Foundation would like to see more of. Puretech is not trying to be a classic life sciences venture capital firm, but is in the business of creating companies. That may include sprinkling in a little money, but it’s also about validating the science, identifying market needs, and building great leadership and advisory teams. Xconomy has already written about a new Kauffman program that will place “Entrepreneur Fellows” at Puretech and other organizations, and Lesa Mitchell, Kauffman’s vice president for advancing innovation, has spoken prolifically on this topic.

If you take the best of what entrepreneurs might get out of Puretech, the best they might get out of an MBA, and turbo-charge it by adding the best they might get out of accelerators and incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars, DreamIt Ventures, The Foundry, Bizdom U, or the Cambridge Innovation Center, that’s where we’re trying to go. If you connect all of these things through a coordinated mother ship, you get a new level of scale, quality, institutional memory, patience, and also a certain silo-busting neutrality. The Kauffman Foundation is in a unique position to make this happen.

There’s a movement in the philanthropic world to touch the people you’re trying to help directly, rather than giving money to others and hoping they will do it. By creating a new entity to focus on high-growth companies, the Kauffman Foundation will be going directly to the customer, and doing it with its talented people and its quality control. But we’ll also be practicing what we preach; we will be figuring out how to grow and create a high-scale model for fostering entrepreneurship as we go. As my mentor Desh Deshpande likes to say, this is a contact sport. Rather than developing a stagnant formal curriculum for an aspiring entrepreneur to be on the receiving end of, we want entrepreneurs to have a setting in which they can live the messy process and be able to draw on vital resources and kindred spirits. This involves getting in there and living the process with the entrepreneurs. It is real-time, iterative, and immerses us all in action-learning.

With the economy crippled, venture capitalists running from risk, and startup exit opportunities nonexistent (at least for the foreseeable future), somebody needs to create a new world order for high-growth companies. By weaving together many of the initiatives that the Kauffman Foundation already has underway—and building a few new ones from scratch—we will be following a natural progression. In short, we will create the sorts of companies that Mr. Kauffman wanted his foundation to spawn.

And that’s why I’m developing an appreciation for Kansas City, and why my wife is the one out walking our dog these days.

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With the departure of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator startup school, Boston-area entrepreneurs have one less local source for seed funding and mentorship. With the advent of a Boston clone of Boulder, CO-based TechStars, they have one more—so things have evened out. But Highland Capital Partners‘ “Summer@Highland” program has been a constant in the area throughout those transitions. And the venture firm said this week it’s accepting applications for the third iteration of the program, which matches university-affiliated entrepreneurs with access to stipend money, partners at Highland, and work space in Lexington, MA or Menlo Park, CA.

According to Michael Gaiss, a senior vice president at Highland, the company is looking for student entrepreneurs (or small teams of them) with business ideas in the areas of advanced materials and semiconductors, cleantech, digital media, information and communication technology, and life sciences. The program is open to undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and recent graduates. As usual, Highland will lean toward applicants whose ideas address big markets with disruptive products or services. But this year, more than in past years, the firm will be looking for applicants who have already achieved some momentum in their industries or markets, Gaiss says.

Highland provides the individual entrepreneurs it selects with stipends of $7,500; teams can receive up to $15,000. Unlike TechStars or Y Combinator, Highland doesn’t require that participating teams hand over equity in their companies in return for the stipend. But if Highland likes what it sees, there might just be some capital available for outstanding teams. To quote from a notice Gaiss sent out today: “Advanced initiatives/companies may qualify for seed financing and/or additional involvement by the Highland team to help accelerate company growth.”

Applications for the Summer@Highland program are due April 9. Details and application materials are online at www.hcp.com/summer.

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