At the risk of sounding like a naysayer, I admit coming away from Thursday’s 500 Startups Demo Day feeling as if a similar scene unfolded a decade ago against the backdrop of a Pets.com sock and a Webvan delivery van. The crowd was eager, the startups engaging and the investors from firms such as Sequoia [...]

Incubators are all the rage. Y Combinator, TechStars and 500 Startups Accelerator, among others, are reshaping the seed company landscape and projections are that more than 100 new incubators will soon take root.

Just last month, five firms. including Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners, came together to form CriticalMass, an incubator that will exist inside the Cambridge Innovation Center incubator in Boston.

In the white-hot incubator space, social activist Halle Tecco, who’s graduating from Harvard Business School in the spring, is preparing to launch a San Francisco-based incubator focused on developing industrial strength applications in mobile healthcare. Tecco (pictured) said her incubator, Rock Health, would be loosely modeled on Y Combinator, which a couple of weeks ago [...]

The early stage/seed game is changing, and Silicon Valley’s venture firms need to start playing by the new rules. New-generation incubators are taking root, and the valley’s traditional firms aren’t participating, despite the relatively small amount of investment. First it was Y Combinator. Yuri Milner and Ron Conway’s SV Angel last month decided to give [...]