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.

TechStars emphasizes that their fund's diversity of investors should be a key consideration for startups looking at the money that these two competing incubators can offer them.

According to today's announcement:

"This additional funding will allow TechStars companies to stay focused on making progress during the three-month program instead of spending that valuable time on early fundraising in order to make ends meet. It's also enough funding to entice a broader spectrum of would-be entrepreneurs to consider TechStars. This funding comes from a wide swath of the venture community nationally which means that TechStars companies will now enjoy tremendously broad support from a large number of investors that are each vested in their ultimate success, while avoiding the signaling problems associated with taking money from a single venture fund or investor."

This seems consistent with the general contrast between YCombinator's concentrated star power and classic hero's tale of young, hungry shoot-for the stars startups vs. TechStars' older, outside-the-Valley diversity of experience.

Which approach is better? Time will tell and both appear to be working well. It's nice for startups to have options though and it's fascinating to see how competitive the world of helping grow startups is becoming.

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.

Annotations & Academics

That exercise in annotation is something most scholars and students are very familiar with, and no surprise Highlighter says it plans to market to this group specifically. By installing Highlighter on a class blog, for example, teachers will be able to enable commenting and highlighting by individual students and will also have a means to track students' level of engagement with the text. Part of what publishers (and let's use that word loosely here, after all, with blogs and Tumblr and the like, we're almost all publishers now) get with Highlighter is analytics - the ability to see who's reading, who's highlighting and who's sharing.

Visitors needn't sign up for a Highlighter account in order to write marginalia and share highlights and comments. They do, however, need an account if they want to track and store their own annotations. With an account you can also choose to make your highlights and comments public, semi-public or private, meaning that you can share your notes openly or just with those in a particular group, or keep everything to yourself.

This sharing of notes and annotations is important, but it isn't something that's widely available or supported. Take Amazon Kindle highlights. There's no way to share your notes with others. There's no way to follow other readers (or authors) and see what interests them, what they've highlighted, and what notes they've jotted down. Highlighter solves that problem

Encouraging Engaged Readers --Something Teachers, Authors, and Publishers Alike Want

This social component is important in classroom reading, but it's also great in general for building an engaged audience. Highlighter co-founder Josh Mullineaux says that authors, many of whom are increasingly turning to self-publishing efforts, will be able to take advantage of turning over sample chapters and the like to their fans, not just their editors, eliciting feedback not just on a whole piece, but on a word, a phrase, a paragraph.

Much like blog comments, publishers will be able to monitor comments and have a number of administrative controls so that comments and highlights must be pre-approved, for example, or that commenters are forced to give their name and email address before leaving or sharing notes.

Highlighter's official launch today will bring it into competition with a number of other startups that are trying to tackle the problem of digital marginalia, including OpenMargin and Readum.

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.

Lessons Learned at TechStars

I had the opportunity to Skype with six of the kids who went on the field trip and to hear their thoughts on the experience. They told me about their day: hearing from David Cohen, meeting the companies currently in the accelerator program, and then working alongside one of those companies for the day. They all performed different tasks for the startups: proofreading websites, building content, brainstorming names, testing interfaces.

Having spent just one day with the TechStars' startups, the students were able to give pretty convincing elevator speeches about what these companies were working on. They were also able to talk about the importance of not having just good ideas, but of building strong teams of smart people. The overall assessment from the MicroInterns: launching a startup would be fun, and it's something they said they'd consider doing in the future.

"To be an entrepreneur," says seventh-grader Mike DeStefano, "it's a lot of hard work but you get to build your ideas along the way, little by little, and make something that people want."

"The middle schoolers were a complete delight," Jason Baptiste, co-founder of OnSwipe, told me. "They were brilliant and at one point, we almost thought they might concoct a plan to takeover OnSwipe itself. Having them come by and better understand entrepreneurship is a true testament to TechStars' impact on the world."

Encouraging Future Entrepreneurs

That impact on potential future entrepreneurs is important. "Most kids go through middle school, high school, and even college without ever really being exposed to entrepreneurship. That's a huge disservice to our country and to these kids," says David Cohen. "If we can help fix that one kid at a time, we're happy to try. Hopefully this will inspire others to do the same. It's now my goal to try to institutionalize this across our programs in Boulder, Seattle, New York, and Boston, as well as to suggest it to the 20 other seed accelerator programs in the TechStars Network."

Haines says he plans to expand the MicroInterns program too. The group's next field trip will be to work with Yodle, and Haines is on the lookout for other New York companies interested in hosting an outing. Having had a chance to chat with the MicroInterns, I'd definitely encourage any company to open their doors.

Photo credits: George Haines

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.

Liz Gannes wrote an in-depth profile of Y Combinator this Summer at Gigaom. The organization has experienced remarkable success with startups and exercises significant influence over the startup ecosystem. It's a model for many other seed investment organizations, but its strongest competition for mindshare is Colorado-based TechStars.

Buchheit Leaving Facebook

The LA Times says Buchheit's joining Y Combinator means he's leaving Facebook today, as well. That's interesting, because the man made wealthy by his work at Google said this Fall that he believed Facebook has the potential to be worth more than Google. Buchheit has been at Facebook since his startup FriendFeed was acquired by the giant social network. FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor has since become Facebook's Chief Technology Officer.

There's a saying that says some people like to help make big companies great and others prefer to help make great companies big. Joining Y Combinator may be Buchheit's best opportunity for the latter.

Control of RedLaser SDK/API

Occipital already offered an SDK which allowed third-party apps to embed the technology into their branded experiences, so if a barcode scanner is all they wanted, eBay could have simply licensed the technology. eBay apparently wants to control that network of third-party applications, which includes other major retailers like Target.

With eBay's past history of questionable acquisitions, one would hope the company has larger plans for RedLaser than to simply integrate it into their line of applications. eBay is providing the resources and man power to take RedLaser to the next level that Occipital didn't have.

In a phone interview with Robert Scoble today, eBay's VP of mobile Steve Yankovich said the company plans to expand the application beyond the iPhone in order to attain the largest footprint possible. An Android version is coming "in the short term," he said, and he hopes to provide it to other mobile operating systems as well. He also added that the company would not be commenting about its plans for the future of the SDK and API, but said they would be increasing support for developers.

What This Means for Occipital

The purchase is interesting because instead of just gobbling up the entire Occipital company, eBay chose to just purchase this one app and its related technology. Occipital co-founder Jeff Powers told ReadWriteWeb that the company wanted to remain independent to continue with its other projects, which means it is likely eBay originally wanted to buy the entire company.

"Frankly, we didn't start this company to scan barcodes," said Powers. "Our vision for Occipital, and the groundwork we've laid over the past year expands beyond barcodes. We felt we absolutely needed to remain a freestanding company to pursue this vision."

As for Occipital, the company, which has been heads down on new projects for several months, is continuing full-speed-ahead toward their next front: augmented reality and computer vision. Powers mentioned today on Occipital's blog that their next major release "begins our steps down the path of creating a human-computer interface that blends seamlessly with human vision, which will be Occipital's primary focus for the foreseeable future."

"The next application we're releasing next makes heavy use of new raw-video access on the iPhone, and dramatically improves the way people capture 360 degree panoramas," said Powers. "From there, we'll be continually increasing the ability of our interface to understand the world visually. We don't call our stuff AR because AR has been associated with a watered-down experience that doesn't make use of the most powerful mobile sensor -- the camera. Instead, we prefer to call our work augmented vision. Kind of like what Iron Man had for his helmet."

Today, the company introduced a few new members of the team that will be leading these efforts into augmented vision and computer vision. The team has recently added two computer vision engineers and an augmented vision engineer, including one with a PhD in computer vision. The company is taking these efforts very seriously, and should have some interesting releases in the near future.

Over the last year, we decided to make a few videos spotlighting some unique, unexpected locations where startups thrive, where tech scenes are vibrant, where cooperation outstrips competition, and where creativity runs rampant. One of the first cities we'd like to introduce you to is home to between 150 and 170 startups as well as a thriving entrepreneurial and creative community. Welcome to Boulder, Colorado.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

With the startup accelerator program at TechStars acting as a lightning rod, this area has grown from an earthy university town to a true hotbed of innovation. In certain parts of downtown, you can't throw a rock without hitting some startup's offices, and I could barely walk three blocks without bumping into at least one entrepreneur, developer, or designer working at a company such as Threadless or AOL.

We interviewed a couple of local startup advisors and one startup team about the culture and community in Boulder. Watch and listen to what they have to say; there are more than a few reasons tech-minded residents love this gorgeous mountain town.

Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books

We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.

Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.

While it did take a bit of training before the application fully recognized our preferences and before it returned really good results, the overall results were very impressive.

So how does it work? When you first sign up, my6sense can import your RSS feeds (from Google Reader, Netvibes, MyYahoo, or from a standard OPML file). After that, all you have to do is read your feeds through the web app and my6sense will automatically learn from your reading behavior (my6sense calls this "digital intuition"). You can also explicitly give a 'thumbs up' or 'thumbs down' on any post.

My6sense is also a very capable RSS reader in its own right, with the built-in ability to share items on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn, as well as by email. One very nice feature of the app is that it also allows you to see comments on posts from supported blogging platforms.

Currently, my6sense is only available as a web app, but the company expects to have a native iPhone application in the App Store by the time the service launches its public beta early next year.

Training

On a mobile device, good recommendations can be quite a time saver. Having to scroll through numerous feeds can quickly become frustratingly slow. In our tests, it took a day or two of regular usage before my6sense started to come back with really good recommendations. As Kristie Wells, my6sense's VP of Marketing and Community Relations told us, the company is working on providing a better out-of-the-box experience that will learn faster, but given our positive experience, training the software off and on for a day or two is well worth it.

Attention

We also talked to the two co-founders of my6sense, Barak Hachamov and Avinoam Rubinstain, earlier last month and we asked them if they were going to support any of the open attention profiles like the APML, which would make it possible for users to take their attention profile and transfer it to other news readers. For now, however, the company says that it is focused on providing a good user experience for its alpha testers, though they didn't rule out support for the APML in the future.

Invites

Our experience with my6sense has been very positive, but you don't have to take our word for it. While the service is still in private alpha, they have provided us with 500 invites for our readers. Just click here to claim yours and let us know if it worked as well for you as it did for us.

Name: Y Combinator
Location: Cambridge, MA and Bay Area, CA
Investment: $5,000 + $5,000 per founder (i.e., $15,000 for two founders, $20,000 for three)
Stake Taken: 2-10% (usually about 6%)
Companies funded: Too many to list (about 58), but many you've heard of, like Reddit, Scribd, and Xobni (Wikipedia has a full list)
Next application deadline: April 2

Name: TechStars
Location: Boulder, CO
Investment: $5,000 per founder, up to $15,000 (3 founders)
Stake Taken: 5%
Companies funded: 9 so far, including Villij, and Intense Debate
Next application deadline: March 31

Name: SeedCamp
Location: London, UK
Investment: 50,000€ (about US$74,000)
Stake Taken: 10%
Companies funded: 6 so far, including Tablefinder
Next application deadline: August 12

Name: YEurope
Location: Vienna, Austria
Investment: 5,000€ per founder, up to 15,000€ (3 founders)
Stake Taken: 2-10%
Companies funded: Soup.io
Next application deadline: None

Name: Summer@Highland
Location: Lexington, MA
Investment: $7,500 for individuals or $15,000 for teams (split evenly)
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: 8
Next application deadline: Not yet announced

Name: LaunchBox
Location: Washington, DC
Investment: Between $15,000 and $30,000
Stake Taken: 4-8%
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: March 14

Name: DreamIt Ventures
Location: Philadelphia, PA
Investment: Between $10,000 and $30,000
Stake Taken: 4-8%
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: March 12

Name: Bootup Labs
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada
Investment: ?
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: None yet
Next application deadline: None / not yet launched

Name: Bootphase
Location: Atlanta, GA
Investment: ?
Stake Taken: ?
Companies funded: None
Next application deadline: None / Not yet launched

See also: Charles River Ventures' QuickStart loan program, in which seed round startups receive a loan of up to $250,000 against a future Series A venture round (which CRV has the option to participate in). And see the annual Google Summer of Code program, in which stipends are awarded to students working on open source projects.