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"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.

Early this year famous Silicon Valley web tech incubator YCombinator announced that it had something new to offer participants in its program: $150,000 in venture financing for each company, from two of tech's most famous new investors, Yuri Milner (Digital Sky Technologies in Russia, huge investors in Facebook, Zynga and others) and Ron Conway. The deal was sweet - if you got into the program, you'd get the investment under great terms: no cap and no discount. That means startups could keep raising debt funding without having a valuation limit imposed by their first investors and without having to offer those first backers extra milage for their money when an equity round was raised later. As venture financing expert Michael Arrington wrote in August, "other than gifting someone money, this is the most favorable [way] a startup can raise money."

What could other incubators offer to compete with that? Leading competitor TechStars had its sprawling network of mentors, more locations around the country and greater reported satisfaction by some past participants. They didn't have the same kind of money to offer, though. Today, TechStars made an announcement that went a long way towards closing that gap.

One of the longstanding laments about our move to digital literature is how difficult and cumbersome this makes marginalia, those notes and annotations we make in the margins of printed text. A story in The New York Times earlier this year went so far as to call the future of marginalia "dim," not only due to our inability to write comments in the margins but because there's not been any good system by which to track and preserve our notes.

TechStars alum Highlighter believe it has cracked this nut, with one line of JavaScript (inserted into site's footer) that lets publishers enable marginalia on their websites and in turn allows visitors to highlight, annotate, save, and share passages and comments.

A number of new startup accelerator and incubator programs have popped up lately, a response no doubt to the success of the Y Combinator and TechStars programs and the success of the programs' participants. At some level, many of these programs offer similar features: networking, mentoring, office space, and funding.

Many of these new programs are modelled on YC or TechStars, but that doesn't really guarantee their success. So in order to help entrepreneurs have a better understanding of which programs were really worth the time and effort, Aziz Gilani from DFJ Mercury, working in conjunction with Tech Cocktail and the Kellogg School of Management, undertook a research project to actually rank the accelerator programs in the U.S.

Although we talk a lot about preparing students to face the needs of the global economy, it's not clear we're doing enough to teach kids about entrepreneurship and to expose them to careers that involve building a company - not just working for one. When we do talk about entrepreneurship and education, it's often in terms of college-age, not younger students.

If you need convincing that it's never too soon to start exposing students to entrepreneurship, then I recommend you meet the MicroInterns.

They're a group of middle-schoolers from Sts. Philip and James School in St. James, New York. With their technology teacher George Haines, the MicroInterns took a trip to the Big Apple two weeks ago for the first of what will hopefully be a series of hands-on learning experiences about entrepreneurship and startup life. There, they spent the day at TechStars' newly-opened New York City office.

March means March Madness, of course - the time of year when eyes turn to the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, one of the most watched sports events of the year.

The startup accelerator TechStars is getting in on the action with its own "bracket-style" tournament to find the next big startup. It's picking 64 startups to face off in Startup Madness.

TechStars is joining forces with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to help simplify access to the growing number of accelerator programs. As part of the partnership, the Kauffman Foundation will provide TechStars with $200,000 funding to build software that can be utilized by accelerator programs.

Specifically, these funds will be used to help build an application system that can be used across industries, not just within the TechStars Network. The aim of the system will be to ease the application process, allowing entrepreneurs to fill out one form to apply to multiple participating programs, rather than have to repeat the process for each organization they apply to.

Y Combinator, the seed investing and startup incubating powerhouse, announced this morning that it has added its first two new investment partners since launching five years ago.

They are: Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, the prototype for Adsense and the Google slogan "don't be evil" and Harj Taggar, a Y Combinator employee who previously built and sold an eBay auction automation software company. Buchheit will reportedly leave Facebook to join the incubator. Y Combinator helps build small startups, runs the widely-appreciated Startup School and owns the startup-focused social news site Hacker News, among other projects.