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Less than a year after the launch of the investment fund, Dave McClure's 500 Startups is going full throttle. That's the image that you should take away from the fund's press release today with a headline that invokes The Fast and the Furious at least. Speed, risk, victory - you get the picture.

500 Startups makes a couple of important announcements today, including some staffing changes (the promotion of Christine Tsai to partner and the addition of Paul Singh as principal) and the recipients of two of its microfunds, the d.fund (its designer-oriented microfund) and Twilio fund (for startups utilizing the VOIP API). Those winners are StoryTree, Culture Kitchen, and Volta.

Six months after the launch of its early-stage investment fund, 500 Startups is announcing its accelerator program, a three to six month program that will give early-stage startups funding, a workspace, and access to a vast network of mentors.

That network is thanks, no doubt, to its founder, angel investor Dave McClure. Coverage of today's announcement by 500 Startups is bound to use a variety of descriptors for McClure, but I'll settle with this one: huge cheerleader for startups. And the network of over 120 mentors for 500 Startups Accelerator is a testament to that.

Last night 500 Startups co-hosted an event called Inbox Love on the Google campus that brought together a number of entrepreneurs and companies who are working in the email space. The night featured several ignite talks, starting with Google's Stephanie Hannon who gave a post-mortem on Google Wave's attempts to revolutionize email and ending with Facebook developer Joel Seligstein who spoke about Monday's launch of its new messaging system. Being in company like Facebook and Google may be a little daunting for startups who too are attempting to address some of the problems surrounding email.

But if you need still more reasons why launching an email startup may be an uphill battle, Bijan Marashi can list them for you. Marashi is the co-founder and former CEO of Xoopit, an email indexing service that was acquired by Yahoo last year.

When it comes to saving money at an early-stage startup, labor is one of the most difficult areas to penny pinch. If you care deeply about your product and your idea, it's hard to not want to go out and hire the very best employees and contractors, but this isn't always in the budget of a new venture.

CrowdFlower is one way startups can save some dough by leveraging labor-on-demand services for things like data entry and content moderation. As of Monday, startups using the platform can not only save cash, but can now also apply to receive as much as $10,000 of investment from Dave McClure's 500 Startups seed fund.