ReadWriteWeb

"It's not lost on me that the future of innovation is in the minds of the people sitting in this room," said angel investor Ron Conway, addressing a crowd full of entrepreneurs at Startup School today. One of the 11 speakers at today's event, co-sponsored by Y Combinator and Stanford University's BASES.

Known as the premier angel investor, Conway admitted that he had fretted about what the content for today's lecture should be, but with some urging from YC's Paul Graham, Conway opted to simply tell a few stories of how he had met a number of today's strongest tech companies: Napster, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Techcrunch has obtained a copy of SV Angel's list of "Tech Megatrends." The document lists the 7 trends that SV Angel, led by investor Ron Conway, is eyeing.

Having your service on this trend list doesn't guarantee funding; nor does being absent from the list mean you necessarily have a bad or out-dated idea. But the trends list is likely to be taken into consideration by SV Angel, at the least, when assessing "what's hot."

Five years ago, Steve Huffman was another young entrepreneurial mind chomping at the bit to launch his very own startup. After taking a train from Virginia to Boston to see Paul Graham speak at Harvard in 2005, Huffman and his partner Alexis Ohanian eventually joined the very first class of Y Combinator. Later that summer, Reddit was born. Now, in 2010, Huffman is taking a stab at his second startup, Hipmunk, and today I had the chance to chat with him about what he has learned from the last five years and why launching his latest project "terrified" him.

News broke yesterday that popular online Q&A startup Formspring.me had raised some $2.5 million in venture funding and would be relocating to Silicon Valley from Indianapolis. As a user and fan of the service, I am happy to see the company rewarded for its success, and I am excited to see how they can improve their already great product. However, as a follower of the national and global startup culture, it is a little disappointing to see the company leave their home and head west to the Valley.

Because today's startup generally requires significantly less seed capital to function, the legal contracts once required for large-scale deals are no longer appropriate. Rather than forcing startups to draft lengthy legal documents, one attorney is offering an invaluable resource to entrepreneurs. Best known as the Fenwick and West attorney responsible for Twitter, Ted Wang recently released a series of templates to help startup companies navigate the difficult task of investment financing.

On Wednesday, BusinessWeek released their list of the top 25 angel investors in the tech industry, naming Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon ahead of veteran angels Ron Conway and Reid Hoffman. Conway and Hoffman are two of the most influential angels in tech, and have invested in some of the largest Internet companies known today, including Google, Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Dixon, a younger, less experienced investor than Conway and Hoffman, snagged the top spot due to both his diverse investment portfolio and the superior financial performance of his investments.

In the old days, somebody running a business had a cadre of middle managers who aggregated data about the performance of different parts of the business. They would typically write monthly reports highlighting trends, issues, and exceptions. In a modern, web-enabled, web-centric business, this role is served by the online dashboards provided by various services. The challenge today is aggregating and integrating those services. I see this challenge in the real world from running ReadWriteWeb's business operations. This gap seems like a good start-up opportunity. Perhaps somebody is already filling it?

Today, the white label application builder called LOLapps emerged from stealth mode to announce that they now have 44 million unique visitors using their tools. The company has been operating since early 2008, allowing users to create both quizzes and gifts on social networking platforms like Bebo, Facebook, and others. A user-generated content builder like this may seem like no big deal, but for LOLapps, it's big business.

Dave McClure has fingerprints all over the social media map, so you have probably seen him on his blog, his Twitter account (which has 15,880 followers as of this writing), or Facebook. Dave is an angel investor who recently joined a VC fund (the Founders Fund).The accepted wisdom today is that angels have buried their wallets and run for the hills. So it seemed like a good time to interview an investor who is very active at the seed level.

Dave McClure has fingerprints all over the social media map, so you have probably seen him on his blog, his Twitter account (which has 15,880 followers as of this writing), or Facebook. Dave is an angel investor who recently joined a VC fund (the Founders Fund).The accepted wisdom today is that angels have buried their wallets and run for the hills. So it seemed like a good time to interview an investor who is very active at the seed level.