TechStars, the popular accelerator program, is now accepting applications for its spring 2013 program in New York City; the program will be headed for now by Interim Managing Director Nicole Glaros, who has run five TechStars programs since 2009. In Glaros’s absence, the organization has promoted Luke Beatty, a mentor to its Boulder-based TechStars program, to managing director. Beatty was formerly VP of Communities and Local at Yahoo after his company, Associated Content, was acquired by Yahoo in 2010.

ThinkNear has been acquired by Telenav. ThinkNear is a hyperlocal mobile ad startup set up by New York TechStars graduate Eli Portnoy.

Dallas-based online travel info aggregation and tools company Traxo is acquiring the Seattle-based frequent flyer miles tracker GoMiles for an undisclosed amount of money. GoMiles had raised a nominal amount of funding through the TechStars accelerator program. PRESS RELEASE: Traxo (www.traxo.com), the leading website combining online travel organization and social travel tools, today announces the [...]

Listen to 160 seed companies at eight startup accelerators and what do you learn? Christina Cacioppo tried to answer this question in a Union Square Ventures blog post this morning. What she discovered is that incubators, such as Y Combinator or TechStars, function as useful barometers of the opportunities Internet entrepreneurs find exciting. Here are [...]

Right Side Capital Management is pushing ahead with a pioneering plan for no-pitch, high-volume angel and seed investing. The San Francisco firm intends to begin investing as early as the end of this year and late last month joined a syndicate of firms providing $24 million in funding to TechStars startups. The plan is to [...]

Mobile investing is exploding. And as Mark Boslet reported in the latest issue of Venture Capital Journal, funding in the mobile sector through the first 7 1/2 months of the year already exceeds all of last year as investors bet on startups combining mobile, social media and location-based technologies to create services that few can imagine [...]

Interest in seed stage incubators, accelerators and entrepreneurial funds continues at full bore, with companies, firms and universities all getting into the act. Vodafone early this month opened the doors of its Silicon Valley research center to startups with the hope of encouraging faster innovation on its network. Carnegie Mellon University, not to be left [...]

Last month, entrepreneur Matt Mireles (pictured) published a tweet, asking: “Why is TechStars NYC run by a non-entrepreneur?”

The “non-entrepreneur” in question is 29-year-old David Tisch, whose grandfather built Loews into a Fortune 100 company that operates hotel chains, and whose family’s largess has helped bankroll numerous institutions, including the Tisch Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Since 2007, the young Tisch has been seed-funding startups with his brothers. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has also started two Internet companies, both of which were shuttered in less than a year’s time.

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.

I’ve lived in Boulder for 15 years after living in Boston for a dozen. While I’ve spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley — both as an angel and venture capital investor — I’ve never lived there. While the firm I’m a partner in — Foundry Group — invests all over the United States, [...]