Tonight in downtown St. Louis the second group of companies to be funded by Capital Innovators will be announced. These will receive $50k in seed funding, free office space and credits toward other useful services as part of their acceleration program. We wrote about their innovative program last fall.

Some of the first companies have launched products or services or are in the process of getting there, according to their entrepreneurs. Most have felt the program worthwhile and given them a jumpstart on their operations.

"We can gamble in Vegas. We can donate on Kiva or Kickstarter. But it's illegal to purchase $100 of stock in a job-creating business? That makes no sense."

That is the tagline to a new project called WeFunder from three TechStars Boston alum who are trying to garner support for the "Democratizing Access to Capital Act" (S.1791) that would allow entrepreneurs to crowdfund startups. Launched yesterday with the hopes of getting $100,000 from 100 pledges, the guys behind WeFunder have already seen near $3 million in promised funds from more than a 1000 supporters if the Senate passes the bill.

There comes a time in the life of any startup where the founders look at each other, let out a sigh of relief and say, "we're going to make it." Startup founders and their first employees work countless hours making sure the product is functioning, helping clients and customers and responding to mini-catastrophes that crop up all over the place like wild fires during the Santa Ana winds.

The founders of Boston-based startup Promoboxx must be breathing that sigh of relief. Promoboxx has landed a deal with Chevy to power its Super Bowl commercials from local dealers. Yes, that Super Bowl. The one where Madonna is playing the halftime show this year. How did a little startup out of TechStars Boston make it to the biggest stage in the world?

Growing up on the coast of Maine we would do all sorts of things to pass the time. In back of our house was a small stream with steep banks surrounded by a forest that ran from the tidal sections of the Royal River to the Cousins River. We called it The Creek. By the time we were about 10 years old or so, The Creek had become an epic battle ground for the neighborhood kids, would-be commandos yielding sophisticated weapons chasing each other through the mud and sticks. It would be my introduction to the Great Nerf Wars.

I had mostly forgotten about the simple joys of Nerf guns. That was until I started covering technology and spending time at the offices of local startups. There is a theme that permeates the startup ecosystem from coast-to-coast - the Nerf gun is king. We decided to take a deep look into this phenomenon to answer the basic question: Why are startups obsessed with Nerf? So, we went to go pick a fight.

A new program that began earlier this year is looking for five IT-centric entrepreneurs to receive seed funds along with a series of services. Located in an underused mixed-use office building in downtown St. Louis, the program is run by two venture capitalists - Judy Sindecuse and Hal Gentry - who have formed a new entity called Capital Innovators. And yes, each of the five selected will receive $50k, along with free Internet hosting services, accounting and legal services, and intensive hands-on mentoring for 12 weeks.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't wish to ever become one (on TV or in real life), much to the disappointment of my mother who once wished that would become my chosen profession. I was reminded of this recently when I reviewed an article that Scott Fulton wrote last month for ReadWriteEnterprise here about the recent changes in our patent law system. It seems we are headed down the wrong path, making it harder for entrepreneurs to obtain and contest patents.

I've found myself thinking a lot about the research being conducted by the Startup Genome Project these days. The data is an absolute goldmine and provides quantitative benchmarks for issues I've thought about for years. One of the findings from their first report was:

"Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money."

This certainly maps to my experience as a founder and also working with other entrepreneurs. However, in most cases it's a little more complex than that, as I find a number of goals typically intertwine to get people to jump in and start a business.

Driving from Nairobi Airport into Kenya's capital of Nairobi the evening of my arrival left me with this image: A four-lane highway that ends in a big pile of metal, street vendors and thousands of people sharing the street with all the other traffic, dented Disco Matatus, predominantly Asian sedans and pickups for the middle classes, construction workers joking around on the loading area of the huge grime-spewing rack-body truck that takes them home from work, and some rare sprinkles of brand new German limousines.

30 minutes later I'm crossing a floor-mat welcoming me with "there's no place like 127.0.0.1." It's this side of East Africa this brief report is about and which brought me here, to the mobile revolution I had only read about, and to the IPO48 event with its great bunch of start-ups:

While certainly not every business needs to raise venture financing, it is the path for many high-growth technology startups. Therefore, going down the fundraising path is something many technology entrepreneurs will need to do and is a critical step in the development of their business. This can be an intimidating experience so I've put together a list of five tips for raising a venture round. This is by no means an exhaustive list so I'd love to hear other suggestions from you in the comments of this post.

Both ReadWriteWeb COO Sean Ammirati and I are active in our respective communities' entrepreneur mentoring programs, and we always enjoy seeing how other localities help nurture their budding startups. Probably nowhere else in the world is the idea of a startup happy place more entrenched than in Silicon Valley, where one electrical engineering professor, Frederick Terman, spawned an entire culture of new ventures back in the 1950s.