Why hop a plane to SXSW this year when you can get on a bus? Okay, let's rephrase that - why hop a plane when you can get on a bus with 20-something other folks, drive across country, and try to formulate a viable startup idea along the way?

At least that's the idea behind the Startup Bus, the brainchild of Elias Bizannes, which is now in its second, vastly expanded incarnation.

"Successful startups come from good people. And good people build rapport by collaborating together," said Bizannes. "While I don't doubt some real businesses will come out of this, the real value is the fact these strangers work together and get to know each other"

This year's competition is ramping up to include up to six buses, with six teams per bus and more than 150 people total. Right now, Bizannes says buses are definitely leaving from San Francisco, New York and Cleveland, with Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles all penciled in as possible departure points.

The basic idea then is that all of these people hop on a bus, self-organize into teams, and build a functional website or prototype to present to a panel of judges when they arrive in Austin two days later. Waiting at the finish line will be Josh Baer, from Austin's startup incubator Capital Factory, looking for potential opportunities.

"Last year, people actually launched with products that would be considered real web services had you not known," said Bizannes. "I think everyone was shocked how much coding you can do on a bus in 48 hours."

Bizannes says that Xero has signed on as a sponsor, so the plan is full steam ahead, but some details, such as the exact departure cities, still need to be ironed out.

So how do you get in on the road-tripping, brainstorming, startup-forming fun? Sign in on the Startup Bus website using your Facebook login and hope someone in your community has an invite. If you're not connected to the right community, says Bizannes, then helping to spread the word about it through Twitter could help get an invite. Getting on the bus, as it were, isn't only about the competition - it's about the community that can form afterward.

"I want to turn this into a community, where the initiation rite is being on the bus and you tap into this rich alumni community of founders, startup enthusiasts, and talent," said Bizannes. "So, we have plans of creating a private community website after that would have things like a job board."

Last week Put This On ("a Web series about dressing like a grownup") interviewed Feig, and his answer to the question "Why a suit?" is applicable to anyone who's sitting down for a job interview: It's about projecting competence and a sense of power.

Feig was a T-shirt-and-jeans guy up until he created the acclaimed Freaks and Geeks. It was around that time that he realized that in meetings with studio executives, the casually dressed people were being pigeonholed.

"I always hated the feeling of being identifiable as the creative type in the room. They would always sit you on a couch that was lower than everybody else," he said. "I didn't like the power dynamic of it."

The show's host, Jesse Thorn, acknowledges that a suit isn't always the best option for an interview.

You're not necessarily dressing to be the best dressed guy in the room, you're dressing to project competence, he says. And that can take various forms: "If you're interviewing to be an ad creative, it's not the time to wear your funniest T-shirt, it's probably the day to wear your simplest."

But there's no denying that when you dress in a suit, you're going to project confidence.

"Somehow getting ready this way and being dressed up makes you feel... It's like when I look at the president, I think, 'The president looks like he's in charge - he's wearing a suit and tie,'" Feig says.

Photo by Martin Boulanger

"We're growing very quickly and we're very happy with the uptake," Trada founder and CEO Neil Robertson told ReadWriteWeb. "Google Ventures looked at our businesses and the assessment was that our growth was interesting to them."

New Cash, New Goals

The $5.75 million C round brings Trada's total fundraising to just under $8 million. Robertson says the company has been extremely tight budgeted thus far, spending just $2 million over the last two years. The sudden influx of cash will give the company breathing room to expand and try some new things, he says.

First, the company plans to help provide improved and tailored services to both its large agency customers and its smaller business customers. Secondly, it will expand internationally to run campaigns in more countries. Currently, Trada accepts international customers and experts in the U.K., Australia and Canada, but has yet to brand out to non-English speaking countries.

Lastly, as part of the company's long-term goals, Trada is looking to extend its crowdsourced PPC ad model to other forms of online advertisements. Robertson says the company started with PPC ads because of the obvious crowdsourcing benefits to keyword campaigns. Now the company realizes that other ad styles - including display, banner, mobile and video ads - can also work on this model. The company also expects to allow for campaigns on newer ad platforms, like Facebook and Twitter in the near future.

The Google Bump

Google piece of the funding comes from Google Ventures, the company's investment arm. Rich Miner, one of the original co-founders of Android, has been on boards with Robertson in the past and now manages the Google Ventures fund. Miner joins Robertson and Foundry Group's Seth Levine as members of Trada's board.

While the connection between Google and Trada is an easy one to make, Robertson says that not preferential treatment is given to any of the search giant's investments. As Robertson added, Google likes to make sure that "all boats rise with the tide" when it comes to its investments. The relationship will also not affect or limit the services which Trada offers to its customers, said Robertson.

The fresh cash certainly puts a smile on the faces at Trada, but out of everything, Robertson is most excited for the crowdsourcing community at large.

"We're really happy to have another significant venture firm taking a position in the crowdsourcing ecosystem," said Robertson, who heads an information group of similar companies known as the Crowdsortium. "It's a good sign to see larger tech companies in the evolution of this industry."

Photo by Flickr user horiavalan.

Stamatiou is joining the San Francisco-based start-up as a co-founder with fellow Georgia Tech alumnus Chad Etzel. The now two-man shop is, like the early days of Hewlett-Packard and Google, actually in a garage in Menlo Park.

Notifo is operating at a confluence of two increasingly-strong trends, both of which we've written about extensively, mobile and real-time, which is the element that attracted Stamatiou.

"For me the draw was about a super early stage start-up really grasping on to a nice market. I've never done mobile before and wanted to dive into something that was intriguing. Notifo offers the best of mobile and real-time."

Notifo works on the assumption that most companies not devoted to the mobile space are not gladly going to go off-road and develop their own notification service when they can grab one off the rack. Boxcar's iPhone app is one of the few current competitors in the field. (RWW coverage here.)

So far, Ycombinator's Hacker News, push.ly, PopularNewReleases, Femtoo and Listia.com all use Notifo.

After introducing Notifo 2.0 for the iPhone, the two partners will jump into Android and Blackberry dev, said Etzel.

"We'll be going headlong into both Android and Blackberry apps. We've struck up partnerships with both the Android and RIM development teams to get going on those apps."

Let me explain: Most of the time, when a startup goes after venture capital, they're still in the process of building a product and bringing it to market. They need things like servers, developers, marketing tools and sometimes office space. Do they need money per se? Or is capital an increasingly arbitrary and unnecessary step in building a tech startup?

We are all familiar with the idea of trading equity for funds through angel financing and venture capital; we're also familiar with the TechStars and Y Combinator programs that help to incubate and accelerate startups through minuscule amounts of capital and significant amounts of mentorship.

But most of us are less familiar with models such as Mike Trotzke's SproutBox or Marcus Whitney's Remarkable Wit. These firms provide services (and sometimes keeping-Ramen-on-the-table amounts of cash) to early-stage startups in exchange for equity. They provide development, marketing and other services that most tech startups need without delving into the complicated issues of valuation and funding rounds. These guys are focused on the absolute bottom line of technology, which has nothing to do with money: Making a great product and finding people to use it.

So, we're interested to know from our friends in startups who aren't taking the bootstrapping route, given the choice between pure capital or business-building services, which would you choose? Take the poll, and let us know the reason behind your decision in the comments. We'll be following up soon based on the results.

The youngster, be he lucky or brilliant, has indicated he might want to transition to the American scene at some time in the near future.

But what's much more interesting to many is the mechanics of the site itself. "It's video 4chan. Unbeatable formula," said Muhammad Saleem, considered by many to be an excellent authority on engineering virality. Others have called it "brilliant," "the purest form" of the Internet and its userbase, and "a great way to kill time," one of the most common uses of the social web.

I've frequently described it as a box of game pieces with no rules. Users are invited to create any kind of experience they choose given a simple set of constraints. It's inherently viral, addictive, imaginative and essentially human.

Here's the rub: The site is currently unfinanced and non-commercial. The site's creator, a teenaged school kid, has been placed at the crux of nationalistic, capitalistic and technological debates by being asked to choose between Russian financing and a yellow brick road to Silicon Valley. According to one site, the Russian investors involved are seeking to "break the American hegemony in cyberspace - an ambitious plan, particularly as the United States is home to many of the market leaders in the Internet economy.

"The combined value of Google, Microsoft and Facebook amounts to roughly $500 billion, or about a third of the Russian economy's annual output. So if Russia - which has more than 50 million Internet users and boasts one of the fastest-growing markets - hopes to catch up, then it will need to keep talents like Ternovskiy at home."

The Russian investors who have contacted Ternovskiy also invest in Facebook and Zynga; clearly, they have an eye for social virality and profit and see a great deal of potential in Chatroulette. But Ternovskiy, a longtime hacker, dreams of founding a Silicon Valley startup of his own.

Will this young man reinforce the American idiom of Silicon Valley by relocating his seemingly overnight success to the Bay Area? Or will he prove that the startup economy is truly becoming global by accepting Russian financing and remaining in north Moscow?

A more interesting question: Can Ternovskiy sustain this wild success? Or has he simply become lucky with Chatroulette? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

I'm now forced to eat my words as my hetero life mate and I prepare to move into a Burlingame apartment conveniently located a few blocks away from the startup he's now working at;

Still, if I were starting a company, would I move from Omaha or Nashville or Boulder to come to the Valley? Would you?

Back when I started the Never Mind the Valley series, I was fascinated by communities such as Boulder and Los Angeles. The tech scenes are smaller and more easily navigable, and most people are willing and excited to collaborate. When contrasting these areas with the SF Bay Area, NorCal seemed vast, cold, inflated and self-important by comparison.

For months, I railed, "You don't have to be in the Valley to have a successful startup!" Examples of this abound, from Austin's Gowalla to L.A.'s Mahalo to the dozens of incubated and accelerated teams in cities all over the country.

However, on moving to San Francisco, I quickly learned a few of the benefits of being a startup in the Valley. Everything moves much faster. You have more access to more capital. The depth, breadth and strength of the developer pool is unparalleled. Everyone has a fairly public track record. Yes, it can be an insular and self-aggrandizing little echo chamber of Mutual Admiration Society nitwits at times, but I'm no longer saying that the benefits don't outweigh the cost.

Ah, yes - the cost. Living in the Bay Area is, to employ a common NorCalism, hella expensive. Salaries are higher, real estate is more scarce and more spendy, the overall cost of living borders on obscene unless you're used to, say, Tokyo. But again, perhaps for many startups situated here, the benefits outweigh the financial costs, as well.

So, I'm left wondering exactly what alchemy makes the benefits worth all the costs for a startup. I've been asked by a few companies about transitioning from other states and even other countries to the Valley, and my advice has tended to be a mixed bag lately.

I'm interested to hear from startups living in and outside of Silicon Valley: When do you think being in SF is worth it, and when is it wiser to stay put? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

They haven't learned that the sky is not, in fact, the limit - and for god's sake, don't tell them. And, as we likely felt at their age, they feel that adults are the slowest, dumbest, IE-using, fax-sending nerds imaginable. Check out this video of these great kids and the adults who admire and are inspired by them - including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who stopped by the conference to mingle with the youth and sign a few MacBooks.

Be sure to check out our Facebook album of pics from the Teens In Tech Conference, held yesterday at the Google offices in San Francisco. You'll get to see Robert Scoble in action and Steve "The Woz" Wozinak in a giant space helmet. And if you haven't done so yet, please connect with us on Facebook while you're there!

While making this video, we were privileged to chat with Teens In Tech founder Daniel Brusilovsky, Tobias of Nimbuzz, John Ramey of isocket, Adam Helweh, the talented youngsters of SimFlecks and Alex Nichols.

Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.

The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.

The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.

Other winning applications include:

• Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
• NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor's Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
• PushpinWeb, a platform for public data;
• Trees Near You, an iPhone app that shows data about trees around New York City;
• UpNext 3D NYC, an interactive 3D map for exploring and discovering the city;
• Overview New York City Parks and Recreation Online, a web app for finding New York City parks; and
• Bookzee, a location-based library book search.

"We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed," said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. "The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn't considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we'll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset - New Yorkers - to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners."

The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.

If you want to strike while the iron is hot, we've found mySomeday, a new tool for solidifying, planning and executing your dreams into realities. The site's a little bit like Dorthy.com and a little like LetSimonDecide, but it's also got simple project management tools and interesting social features. Could mySomeday actually help us stick to our resolutions?

Calling itself a "goal achievement platform," mySomeday combines planning tools, social
networking features and a support community. It makes sense that publicly sharing goals with one's network has a positive impact on one's chances of reaching those goals. Also, hacking a dream into a plan with a series of steps and measurable outcomes can help transform a cloud-castle into a reality.

The site also reminded us of LetSimonDecide, a decision-making platform that helps users analyze their dreams or wishes to determine if they're optimal, practical and advisable. Once the decision-making process is complete, users can share their conclusions with other site members and make an action plan to implement the decision.

On mySomeday, users are prompted to set deadlines and receive email reminders, but one of the most interesting features is the option to add multimedia inspirational content, including pictures and videos. Visual reminders have powerful effects - much more than mere words on a glowing screen would, we suspect.

As part of their business model, mySomeday is offering branded "Expert Plans" for common or niche goals. Currently, Expert Plans are being offered by Seeds of Peace, Flirtexting, BK Farmyards and Nuru International.

What methods or tools are you using now to keep your resolutions - whether they were made for 2010 or whether they're just longstanding but dormant goals? Do you think mySomeday is a site you could use? Would the imagery, reminders and community help you achieve your goals?

And what do you think of the company's rather unique Expert Plans model? Let us know your opinions in the comments.

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.

Awsm.fm is a digital multimedia scrapbooking app that regards copyright issues with a gleeful abandon, allowing users to pick images and group them with text, tags and uploaded songs. But, licensing aside, the app does allow users to display their lovely and deeply sensitive tastes in pop music and evocative photography.

Although there is an attempt to attribute the uploaded songs by incorporating existing track information and letting users edit the artist and track title, there is no standardized way to link back to the music creator or ensure any work on the site is licensed for this kind of sharing. Images do link back to their original source, which may but will not always satisfy the copyright holder.

Here's an example of an Awsm.fm post, featuring an image, some text, a few tags, a comment box and a song I uploaded:

You can check out this profile page to see more Awsm.fm posts we created.

As I've written in the past, users have been given more and more tools for grabbing, spreading and remixing content over the past 10 years since Napster's birth. Most of those tools have been free or nearly so, and many of them border on piracy or explicitly enable it.

The founder of Awsm.fm, who introduced himself to us as "Wan," wrote that he is "sad by the lost of imeem, muxtape" and "frustrated at not being able to listen to lala.com." A self-proclaimed indie music fan and programmer, Wan has created a tool that does something to help distribute independent music to listeners but nothing to help independent musicians track and profit from their music.

However, as legendary rock music producer Steve Albini wrote in a comment on the above-linked post, "Internet file sharing is profoundly beneficial to bands in that it serves to promote them to a worldwide audience at no cost... I saw it in action myself last year when my band conducted hugely profitable tours of both South America and Eastern Europe, including places like Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Turkey, where our music has virtually no formal distribution. People came to our shows, knew our music and bought anything we had to sell them. They were familiar with us because the Internet allowed them to hear our music for free, and they developed a taste for it."

While independent musicians may receive some ancillary benefit from users' getting to hear and distribute their music free of charge, other copyright-holding songwriters hold opinions very different from Albini's. We read about lawsuits over this kind of issue every year, and as a musician myself, I certainly wouldn't want a stranger scattering my songs to the four winds without my being able to track and monetize those listens, likes, shares and web traffic. There is, after all, something to be said for putting Ramen on the table of every starving artist.

Note: For demo purposes, I've uploaded images that belong to me and close friends and music from bands I support and/or went to college with. Because I'm using their content and they deserve the plug, check out Chris Merritt if you're into indie-type pop rock and Year Long Disaster if you're of a more head-banging persuasion.

For revenue, the site seems to plan on sponsored posts and advertising. If Wan has any idea about the cost of hosting and playing copyrighted music, he might consult imeem (sold at a huge loss because licensing fees were overwhelming the company) or Pandora (just now beginning to see profitability as a possibility), he must have some radically profitable alternatives up his sleeve.

What do our musician/music startup friends have to say about Awsm.fm? Is it, as the name would imply, simply and clearly awesome - both for users and for the musicians they want to promote or share? Or is it just more 2.0 content theft? Let us know what you think in the comments.

That's the question startup YouTego attempts to answer with its Web-based app that asks users to spend a few minutes in navel-gazing self-definition to create a snappy page of terms and related images. It's simple, social and actually quite fun once you get the hang of it.

In YouTego, the UI isn't quite as intuitive yet, but the results are pretty slick. Users have the option of telling the app a little bit about themselves. Then they can identify "tegos" (tags for the ego, according to the site) to show what they can do, where they work, where they go/went to school, what they love and more.

For the visual component, the user is asked to select a thumbnail for each tego. These images are found through a lightbox-type feature in the app, and can come from any number of sources, including Google search or a specific Flickr account.

Once tegos are created and elaborated upon through expressions and impressions, the user can be matched to others on YouTego or other users' content, and then can star other users' tegos and add TegoMates or friends.

It would be cool to see the service integrated with Facebook and Twitter, which it doesn't appear to do currently. And the app is very young and has its bugs. For example, it doesn't play well with Chrome at all.

Still, it's gathering a lot of good data about related tags, tags related to images and how people connect over expressions of their own personalities.

For the quarter ending this past June, we compared the findings of three research firms that reported on the money invested in Q2:

• July 21, MoneyTree (PricewaterhouseCoopers, with data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters): $3.7 billion, with 612 deals,
• July 18, VentureSource (DowJones): $5.27 billion, with 595 deals,
• July 14, ChubbyBrain (a New York City-based startup partnering with ReadWriteWeb): $5.329 billion, with 613 deals.

VentureSource and ChubbyBrain seem to agree on the top line number. But MoneyTree's number is what most people report, and that is about $1.5 billion different.

As the old saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up."

Disclosure: Our VC Funding Report

ReadWriteWeb has an interest in this. We sell a report for $299 that has details on the 240 deals done this quarter in the Internet, mobile, and SaaS space (not clean tech or bio tech), and this is powered by data from ChubbyBrain. So we are biased. But it also means that we are engaged and have been looking at this fairly deeply.

Who Cares?

We also think that accuracy matters, and we are trying to figure whom accuracy matters to. We see three main types of participants in the industry:

1. VCs. They need accurate data for their own fund-raising. They have to be able to benchmark their own funds relative to the broader market.
2. Entrepreneurs. Data on what funding deals are being made, and why, helps them figure out how much to raise, when, and from which VC.
3. The startup "community." This is a catch-all for everyone else, who tend to align to either VCs or entrepreneurs. Journalists, the non-aligned fourth estate, want reliable data to key off interesting stories.

Why does this matter? The startup community matters to the health of the overall economy. As the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA, the trade association of VCs) likes to point out:

"Originally, venture-backed companies have created companies that accounted for 10.4 million jobs and over $2.3 trillion in revenue (based on 2006 data)."

So a headline like "VC Investments Falling Off Cliff in the US" really impacts a lot of people. That is the kind of headline that most journalists/bloggers wrote in April 2009, based on data reported by those trusted sources.

We wrote a really boring headline:

"VC Investment in Internet Deals Did Not Fall Off a Cliff."

That's a lousy headline for generating page views. It's a story about "the dog that did not bark."

The point is that headlines drive business behavior to wild excesses on both the down-cycle bust and the up-cycle boom.

Just good reliable data would help.

Innovation Is Global, But It Keys Off US Data

At ReadWriteWeb, we love to track innovation from far-flung corners of the world, and we see the globalization of innovation as a critical trend.

So we want to be able to report on financing trends for early-stage Web technology startups across Europe and Asia, in addition to the US. And we expect any research process to be able to scale to that challenge.

But the reality today is that, globally, entrepreneurs and VCs key off US data. If they were to key off bad data, that would matter to everyone.

Why This Matters

Driving with one's eyes in the rear-view mirror is dangerous. We take action based on what authoritative sources tell us is happening today, and we base our assumptions on what that means will happen next and plan accordingly.

In reality, these sources tell us what has happened in the past, and they may not even tell us that accurately.

When we at ReadWriteWeb look at the macro picture, we favor a contrarian view simply because the reality we see today is often not what the headlines trumpet. When the markets were in the late stage of a boom, we were sounding the warning signals.

When the markets were melting, we began to see surprising signs of life in the early-stage Web technology world we live in.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or an investor, knowing what the crowd is thinking -- and what the headlines are trumpeting -- is valuable. Even more valuable are the underlying facts and trends that may be missing from those headlines. In the disconnect between the two often lies a lot of opportunity.

We hope to ignite a debate that leads to greater accuracy and transparency of these numbers.