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The Wall St. Journal's report today that Facebook will make an initial public offering on the stock market next year has been met with plenty of press comment on the expected size of the offering ($100B, huge) but seems to have left many other people unmoved.

It's easy to feel cynical about Facebook, a lot of people do. The news may be important for more than just holders of the stock, though. It could prove very big for the whole tech startup world and for those who enjoy the innovation that startups create. Why? Because the Facebook IPO could mean more and bigger startup acquisitions, more support for more startups and an infusion of smart money and experience into radically new tech experiments.

Some large technology companies frown upon developers hacking and reworking their products. On the far opposite side of the spectrum, lies an unexpected organization called Microsoft. After some initial hesitation, the tech giant is now actively encouraging developers to tinker with its Kinect hands-free user interface accessory for the XBox 360.

Until now, those hacks have been encouraged for non-commercial purposes only. But the company took things to the next level this week when it announced the Kinect Accelerator, a program for startups who want to build creative uses for the Kinect into their businesses.

Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.

Over several days, I visited three incubators in Nairobi devoted to startups in the social space. Given the emphasis in Kenya on mobile - as many as 60% of Kenyans pack mobile phones but as few as 5% have Internet connectivity via laptop or desktop computers - the development also focused on mobile, though not exclusively.

If in the United States and other more conspicuously developed countries nerds are considered rather ridiculous - right up until they're worth $10 billion - they are possibly even less well regarded in Kenya, where both government officials and the representatives of large companies largely downplayed their importance in the country's, and Africa's, future.

Ethernet inventor and generally accomplished tech super-guy Bob Metcalfe gave a great opening keynote talk at this morning's Capital Factory Demo Day in Austin, Texas. The event has been good so far and is live streaming online for free.

Metcalfe offered a wide ranging talk to open the day but included some tasty tidbits in the form of two lists: five personal skills that entrepreneurs need to develop in order to succeed in building tech companies that scale and six types of people a startup ecosystem needs to include in order to foster success.

Wieden+Kennedy, the advertising agency that made the absurdly popular Old Spice campaign on TV and the web called "Smell Like a Man" announced today that it is now accepting applications from brand-friendly tech startups for admission to its incubator program, the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). The Portland, Oregon company has partnered with Nike, Target and Coca Cola to create a shared office space, mentorship plan, partnership considerations and a small funding opportunity. The project hopes to draw startups from a national pool of applicants.

Previous iterations of PIE have housed some strong technology startups, including Urban Airship, PHP Fog and BankSimple. Collaboration between PIE and some of these big brands has been technically interesting as well. Nike worked with PIE this Spring to hold a data hackathon that brought developers together to create mashups and analysis of newly opened data about the company's sprawling manufacturing and supply chain network.

Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves.

Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow tothe head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?

I'll admit I haven't been on Quora as much recently, in large part due to being unceremoniously blocked by the company for subscribing to an excessive amount of RSS feeds (but that's another story). However, today, I stumbled across a great Quora thread started by tech insider Robert Scoble. The question: "Which tech startups currently (June 2011) need and deserve angel funding?"

Of course, the resulting list is a lot of self-serving posts from startups hoping to cash in on Scoble's influence, but frankly, I don't care. I'm obsessed with this thread and the startups that keep appearing there, minute by minute. It's startup Disneyland! And if you're an early adopter itching to try new services, you should check it out, too.

A new webpage annotation service launched this week name Scrible that aims to make the online research, note taking and organization easier and more intuitive.

Scrible is a toolbar that Web users can install on their bookmark bar that gives a variety of options to annotation of the Internet. It can highlight text, take notes, bold, underline and italicize text on a Web page and then save the page with the notations to a personal library. As far as the ability to manipulate words on a page and save those notes, the Web has not seen anything quite like Scrible.

eXo offers an open source Java framework for enterprise social software tools. It includes reusable components for building content management systems, user management tools, activity streams, e-mail integrations, mashups and more.

This week it announced Cloud IDE, a Web-based development environment for cloud applications.