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.

The best thing that came out of Web 1.0 for the next generation of startups was either the Google IPO or the PayPal Mafia. Hopefully a lot of the money that early Facebook employees take from that company's IPO will be pushed back into the web to fuel the next generation of startups. In theory at least, it should be very smart money - not dumb money at all. Not even just smart money, but experience and connections.

There's a good thread on Quora (ironically, itself a great little startup spun out by very early Facebook employees) on the "PayPal Mafia" type experience.

Venture Capitalist John Greathouse says there that there are a number of conditions that a company's early employees need in order to spawn the creation of a meaningful wave of startups after they get a big win.

"Capital from past venture successes. Pertinent experience - folks who have helped drive the bus, not gotten a ride in the back. Operators who are still hungry enough to 'do it again.' A desire to work together again.

"The people who fit the bill for spawning new startups are usually the Entrepreneurial Lieutenants, who make good money in a past venture, but not huge money."

Greathouse says there are a "fairly predictable list" of companies today that could fit the bill, including Twitter, Zynga, Google and Facebook.

Greathouse goes into more detail in a blog post he wrote on the joy of getting the band back together again. It's a good read.

"Entrepreneurs are pathological," he concludes. "Most of them simply cannot help themselves and are thus repeatedly drawn back to the startup world. They often temporarily 'check out' from the startup treadmill but many of them 'never leave'. Savvy investors and young entrepreneurs take advantage of this phenomenon by joining Serial Teams and helping them leverage their past successes to achieve new startup victories."

That's likely to be an important part of the story of the Facebook IPO.

2. Facebook Will Probably Acquire More and Bigger Startups

Facebook said last December that it would acquire 15 companies in 2011. That would be double the pace at which it acquired startups in 2010.

I've only been able to count 8 companies Facebook has acquired so far this year: WhoGlue, Friend.ly, Push Pop Press, Sofa, Daytum, Snaptu, Beluga and Rel8tion. Cool companies, but no medium sized or big ones.

Flush with cash from an IPO - perhaps Facebook will pick up the pace and the size of its acquisitions. That's good news for startups, both those acquired and others throughout the supply chain that are emboldened by the market validation of the acquisitions.

Facebook's IPO documents will detail what it plans to use the money raised for and if the company signals then that more and bigger acquisitions are an important part of its strategy, that alone will be good news for startups.

3. An Improved Economic Scenario for Startups Will Lead to More Support for All of them

"Are you going to be the next Facebook?" grandparents around the world will ask for the next several years, whenever the young people in their lives start companies at all related to computers.

Since in much of the world people assume you'd only start your own company if no one else would give you a job at theirs, a burst of enthusiasm for commonly understood tech entrepreneurialism could honestly be a good thing.

More importantly, the whole startup ecosystem will feel vindicated if the Facebook IPO is a sustained success. Apple may have surpassed Exxon "The Death Star" Mobil as the world's wealthiest company, but you're probably not going to build an Apple. You might build a Facebook, or so many boldly and thankfully naive people believe every day.

Smart money should follow pies that are getting higher, too. A lot of people will say that first Groupon's stupid business model and now Facebook's wildly overblown valuation prove that there's "a bubble."

Facebook is reportedly set to claim something like $4 billion in revenue this year though, so the decoupling of asset prices (valuations) from their underlying economic fundamentals that characterizes a bubble doesn't seem to be happening, at least not drastically, in this case.

Besides, as several observers have noted, the time to get scared is not when lots of people are cautioning that there's a bubble - it's when the money is piling up fast and no one thinks there's a bubble.

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.

So what sort of things will developers build with the Kinect SDK? Sky's the limit, says Microsoft, but it has to have a valid business idea behind it. We've already seen quite a few creative hacks, from medical uses such as helping stroke patients to interactive art installations to educational applications that put today's "smart" classrooms to shame.

The finished product must be an application of some kind that runs on either Windows or Xbox, even if it's an alternate view of an app that also exists in the browser or on mobile devices. It can be for use in education, medicine, industry, entertainment, art or just about any use case developers can dream up.

Given what's already been done with the Kinect just for fun, it should be interesting to see what kinds of things get built with the support of a startup incubator and Microsoft's ample resources.

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.

That is hardly to say that government interest in such a top-heavy country as Kenya is unimportant to these groups, it just seems they have little hope of great support anytime soon. And, instead of despairing, they have all created different ways of reaching out to, and beyond, Kenyan society. In fact, one of my primary impressions was how these developers, as focused as they are on their own markets and the needs of their own society, are nonetheless well versed in global development issues and best practices and are in constant contact not just with each other, but with their peers and with corporations as far flung as Finland and the Silicon Valley.

iLab Africa

My driver Johnson looked around the parking lot of the iLab on the built-out campus of Strathmore and shook his head.

"I never even knew this part of the campus had been built," he said. "You know this university? If you're smart, you can get into the University of Nairobi. But this place is for the elite."

It certainly had its share of Biffs and Betties. No one was wearing old jeans and cast-off t-shirts, that was certain. The iLab building itself was so new that it would be two more weeks before the rest of the furniture was in, according to Dr. Kerretts. The cube-shaped, multistory building had the openness and clean lines of a Scandinavian furniture store. There was none of the rotting brick and peeling paint you saw at the U of N. In fact, the whole cost of the building had been furnished by Safaricom and is full-on fiber-equipped. Samsung and other international high-tech firms have donated money, materials and expertise to the lab. But any fear that the iLab was a function of a new high-tech colonialism was quickly put in the ground.

"They have come to ask us to explain African markets and consumers to them," said Kerretts. "The I.P. of any product or application developed here is retained by the student or faculty member." The sponsoring companies can offer to license an app created at the lab, at favorable terms to the developer, but control is retained, she said, by the developers themselves. There is no liberty without owning the fruit of you own mind.

I sat down with three students at iLab - all of whom must be Masters candidates - to review some of their projects. All the projects were mobile apps, three focusing on medicine and one on housing. I asked why there was such an emphasis on social good, instead of, say, entertainment.

"Our teachers tell us, 'focus on the needs of your society,'" said David Owino, a well-turned out grad student clad in a pressed purple dress shirt and loafers. Quick to smile but very focused, David was the de facto spokesman for the trio, which consisted, in addition, of John Kulova and Sammy Onkoba. "But it's also about the market."

You want to make cash, I suggested.

"We want to make money, too, for sure."

It's a significant step toward parity for African developers to be solicited for their own intelligence and intellectual property and for they themselves to set up a situation in which they retain the I.P. they produce.

Owino is currently shopping his app, a mobile-based pharmaceutical sales tool, to investors. The sales proposition is easy.

"We'll sell it to large pharmaceutical companies," he said. The tool avoids fraud by GPS tracking the sales staff and sending all orders immediately to the company's database. No one can pocket cash or claim expenses for a trip to Mombasa they never took. Customers can be assured of reference to their orders with a phone call.

Next page: iHub

iHub & m.lab

If a Western geek knows anything about East African developers, it is probably in terms of iHub. Set up in March of last year by Erik Hersman and others involved in the creation of Ushahidi, it takes up most of two floors in the pleasant multiuse Bishop Magua Center on Ngong Road in Nairobi. The space is light with tall windows, balconies that let out over a sea of feathery acacias and open working space. The space was secured and renovated with funding from the Omidyar Network and Hivos, the lease is covered by Ushahidi and the Internet connection provided by local company Zuku.

Memberships are offered in color. White is virtual, green is resident and red requires a fee of $100, securing the member a reserved work space. Members are offered business mentoring, Internet access, the cross-pollinating presence of their fellow nerds and access to events and speakers. The events include barcamps (one of which ended while I was on the plane to Nairobi, unfortunately) and hackathons. The latest was focused on water resource issues. iHub speakers have included Google's Marissa Mayer and Vint Cerf.

Perhaps the most important ingredient in the iHub recipe is Pete's café located inside the space itself. Pete's coffee, which he roasts himself, is sick.

On a separate floor sits m.lab east africa, the go-to-market side of iHub. Graduates of iHub whose developments seem the most marketable are offered residence there, for at least six and no more than 24 months. One of these is the Kuyu Project, which we've written about before. Simeon Oriko of Kuyu and John Kieti, manager of m.lab, said m.lab gives developed projects a chance at financial viability. The University of Nairobi, the World Wide Web Foundation and eMobilis work with iHub to sustain the World Bank-funded lab and its fellows.

m.lab provides subsidized office space, access to otherwise expensive market intelligence, business advising services and application testing services.

Nailab

Nailab, led by Sam Gichuru, is just across the hall from iHub. Built on the Y Combinator model, Sam invites startups to compete three times a year and the winners are given space, connectivity and mentoring as they try to build their apps and find their markets.

"We can't offer our residents money," said Gichuru, "so we offer them space and access to excellent business knowledge." Some of the residents have used that to make their own money. One group of animators was practicing world-class motion capture but Gichuru advised them to create more basic, but still stylish, animations for corporate clients. In the last six months they sold ten animations at $2,000 each.

"We are very concentrated on markets," Gichuru said.

Another resident, Nyatha Githinji, had designed an app, SchoolsSMS Premium, that allows parents and school administrators to communicate with one another. The app covers school fees, attendance, sick days and more. So far he's sold it to half a dozen school districts around the country and has amassed enough data from those trials to provide any potential user with proof of concept.

He also won a $2,500 prize from a development contest, ipo48.

"Here in Nairobi, that means he, as a single guy, can afford to pay rent and eat and do nothing but work on his product for three months!"

Nailab also offers more advanced-stage developers and startups with space and connectivity.

DIY

I can't speak for the nerds I met and the nerdatoria I visited in Nairobi. But I can tell you what I saw and you can take it from there.

In a country with a disproportionate government sector, where a legacy of colonial control has made that government slower and less responsive than it could be, startup-minded propellerheads have no choice but to act. Well, they could wait around for government help, or, if they're well connected, they might be able to mine those connections. But even if they're plugged in, most nerds don't want to yoke their wagon to an ox that slow, regardless of the power he brings to the plough. So they are seeking alternatives. And they are finding them.

Lone-wolfing it, creating and joining incubators, exploring alternative funding sources, both international and domestic, connecting directly with a global market, and setting up public-private partnerships are all things I've seen the Nairobi nerdoisie do, all while focusing on their own needs and their own markets. This urge to seek new avenues to success is part of the reason, along with a culturally entrepreneurial mindset, that there are so many of them and why they are going to be a big deal in time.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a region with 1 billion people, over 60% of whom are under 30 years old. High tech has been a primary driver of East Africa's 40% growth over the last decade and small and medium-sized enterprises are poised to take over a great deal more of that growth going forward, according to a recent study, anyone who is not paying attention to the continent, and paying attention to it as a forge, not just as a market, is going to swell the ranks of the "if I had invested $100 in Apple in 1981 I'd be a billionaire" crowd. I fear that the government itself, as well as the large tech companies so avid for the continent's growing purchasing power, may be among them. But that won't matter to the Afro Nerd Superstars. They've got things to do.

Update: Kresten Buch, the founder of IPO48, wrote to say that Tusqee had received a 25,000 Euro investment from Buch's company, 88mph.co.ke

Photos by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the reporter's airfare and hotel were paid by the Republic of Kenya

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?

That sounds familiar - taking data and mapping it to suit your mission and illuminate theories or facts. Essentially, anybody can do that now with GIS software and an .xml data set. The Centers for Disease Control use mapping to determine outbreaks and recently Google released its Google Flu Trends that accumulates flu data throughout the season. Yet, it was not Snow's own genius that came up with the solution to the cholera outbreak (disputed at the time) but rather a set of groups in various sectors using their collective intelligence to solve a problem.

The Hive Mind & Collective Intelligence

"It is just this idea that if you diversify and have an electric range of interests and you are constantly getting interesting stories about things that you do not know that much about or are adjacent to your particular field of expertise you are much more likely to come up with innovative ideas," Johnson told ReadWriteWeb.

The same approach would work well for developers and innovators working on the next technology breakthrough. Startup founders should take step back from their project and ask what type of similar projects have been undertaken in a completely different field and see if those lessons can be applied to their project.

"The trick is to look at something different and borrow ideas. It is like saying 'this worked for that field, if we put it here what would it do in this new context?'" Johnson said.

In today's world, the ability to branch out of your field of expertise has been made much easier through social media. You can follow what is happening in your niche through a specifically created Twitter list, but it is also beneficial to create lists of people working in different sectors as well.

"The important thing is that this is not some kind of hive-mind wisdom of the crowds, collective intelligence network smarts," Johnson said. "The unit is still the individual or the small group. There are some examples of group intelligence. This is an example instead of taking individuals in small groups and making them smarter by connecting them to a wider range of influences."

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.

"Last year when I had lunch with him he invested in Flipboard, which went onto be Apple's favorite iPad app of the year. Got something you want to get in front of him? This is your shot. Stealth startups preferred."

Well, that's one way to unveil the stealthy startups in hiding!

At present, the answer summary includes the following:

• Appysnap! - www.appysnap.com
• CollabraCam - world's first multi-camera video production iPhone app with live editing and director-to-camera communication, www.collabracam.com
• Cursor - www.ThinkCursor.com (and the first Cursor community, www.RedLemona.de)
• Filmaster - the ultimate video recommendation engine for new releases (local theatres, TV, VOD), www.filmaster.com
• PlayMySong - iPod app, www.playmysong.net
• Semiautomatic Semiotics - 3-d immersive bicycling, http://semiautomatic3d.com
• Spot for iPhone - Instapaper for Places, www.spot-app.com
• turntable.fm
• Virlnet - Virlnet allows businesses to reward the grassroots efforts of social network users for promoting their brand, www.virlnet.com
• Wanderfly - www.wanderfly.com - travel recommendation engine
• Zaarly
• Zferral - www.zferral.com
• Zipongo - diet and exercise tracking, www.zipongo.com

But this summary is incomplete. There are now 42 answers on this post and counting. I want to try them all! And if you're also dying to test out (or at least sign up for) some new services, stealthy and otherwise, this is one thread you should follow. Be warned, though: Quora is often labelled a "time sucking" service, and this thread is a prime example as to why. Be sure to have a few minutes to spare before clicking through!

Also, Quora? Please unblock my IP.

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.

There are a fair amount of note taking and page savers out there. Evernote is one of the most popular and will allow users to take notes within the app or save an entire article to the cloud to be accessible anywhere. It also does audio and pictures and is available on the desktop, Android and iOS. Scrible is not to that point, at least not yet. Your notes are available in your digital locker through a browser. CEO and founder Victor Karkar told tech blogger Robert Scoble that eventually there is iPad functionality in the works.

Say you are a student working on your thesis. During one of my (several) thesis, I remember having stacks of 30 page reports that I had printed out entirely just because I wanted one quote on a single page. With Scrible I could save the page with the highlighted information and give the bibliographical annotation within my personal library. Save some trees, eliminate the clutter on my desk and in my computer.

Humble Beginnings

Karkar came up with the idea while in college and has bootstrapped the company. He started working on it while backpacking in India and moved home into his parents while starting development. When he got married, his wife moved in as well.

Karkar is now out of the basement and Scrible has launched to public beta and has secured $500,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation.

"We wanted a service that came everywhere you go on the Internet," Karkar said. "We wanted to set a high bar because if we don't people won't use it and go back to what they were using like copying and pasting into a word document or printing documents and annotating them with an actual physical hi-liter."

The goal of Scrible has been from the start to make a more intuitive annotation system in a market sphere that many had forgotten or given up on.

"We try to focus on the user experience so it will be easy to use so it won't be in the way," Karkar said.

The idea of Scrible is to improve upon annotation services of past that have moved on to other areas of the Internet. Kakar said it would have been a great tool for him in grad school while he was trying to use services like Diigo and WebNotes but found them to be inadequate and harder to use. Karkar pointed out that he does not want to come out as overtly negative about the tools that have come in this space before since the ability to function everywhere on the Internet is an extremely hard thing to do and getting the user experience right is the difficult part.

Diigo also does a personal library with highlight and note functions and, unlike Scrible, is available on iOS and Android. WebNotes has the ability to digitally highlight PDFs, something that Scrible cannot yet do. One aspect that Scrible has an advantage over those tools though is the ability to have the toolbar anywhere and everywhere.

"Of all the people who have tried this before there were ways that the manipulated the physical workflow," Karkar said. "We saw a lot of low hanging fruit in this space between when you finish a Google search to when you finish your publishable material."

Scrible is actively pursuing comments and feedback while in public beta. Take a cruise on over to see what you think of the toolbar and let us know what you think of the service in the comments.

In pulling together our list of the Top 10 Startups of 2010 for ReadWriteWeb's "Best of" series, we've decided to look beyond some of those big names and "established" startups (the term gets applied so broadly). Rather than lumping together new companies no matter their age or size, no matter whether they have an acquisition offer by Google or have a Hollywood biopic about their founder, we've decided to restrict our list to those startups who were founded or who launched in 2010.

In no particular order...

Instagram: Photo Sharing Goes Viral

I can't look at my Twitter or Facebook stream without seeing a flurry of shared links from Instagram. And I even confessed in October, the app has made me an iPhone photo addict. The free app allows users to snap photos, apply one of 11 filters, and then quickly and easily publish them to a variety of social networks, as well as follow, comment, and like within the app itself. The new camera that came with the iPhone 4 this summer spawned a lot of great mobile phone apps, and Instagram is hardly alone in the photo-sharing space. But it has had incredibly viral adoption - growing by about a 100,000 users a week after its release in October according to a thread on Quora, with rumors of 1 million users to date.

Quora: High Quality Q&A

Did you notice that reference in the Instagram entry above? "According to a thread on Quora." It's something we heard a lot this year as the Q&A site, founded by former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo, became an important new communication and knowledge-sharing tool for the tech industry. Quora launched in private beta in January and opened to the public in June. As with Instagram, Quora is a startup in a crowded space; there are no shortage of Q&A sites. But Quora has attracted a very high caliber of respondents during its beta, particularly those "in the know" in Silicon Valley, and the site has become a real treasure trove of news and advice. Quora allows you to subscribe to topics, users, and questions, and the ability to vote up good answers, along with the ability to offer edits on questions and answers, have helped to build a smart network on the site.

Flipboard: Curated Reading, Built for the iPad

We already recognized the startup as one of this year's Top Semantic Web Products, but Flipboard - along with the iPad - helped usher in a change in the way in which we consume Web content. The free app lets you curate various feeds - RSS, Twitter, Facebook - and presents them to you via a beautiful, touchscreen UI. Rather than scrolling through the Web as we have been trained perhaps to do, Flipboard allows us to more easily browse and read. Having acquired the semantic technology startup Ellerdale, Flipboard's technology delivers a more personalized reading experience.

Chatroulette: Spontaneity, Chat... and Dicks

Flash in the pan? Maybe. Launched in late 2009 (too late and too obscure for the "Best of" lists for that year), Chatroulette took off in early 2010, and at the peak of its popularity this year, Chatroulette boasted a million-plus users. Chatroulette connects you randomly with another person via your webcam, so you can chat via text, audio, and video with a stranger. If you don't like the conversation, the "Next" button places you with someone else. A post on Techcrunch surmised that the site was "89% male, 47% American, and 13% perverts," the latter figure seeming a tad low based on my experience. Despite - or maybe because of - the dicks, the site gained a lot of buzz, spawning a number of memes as well being a topic on South Park - high honors. Chatroulette also spawned a number of clones as the idea of random, spontaneous encounters became popular.

Rapportive: The Gmail Plug-in I Am Thankful for Every Day

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote this headline back in March: "Stop What You Are Doing & Install This Plug-in: Rapportive. And honestly, I'd issue the same command today. Rapportive replaces the ads in your Gmail side bar - which is cool enough right there - but then, it fills that space with a wealth of info - a picture of the person who sent you an email, their job title from LinkedIn, recent Twitter messages they've sent and more. It's become an indispensable tool for me, giving me background information right within my browser for the people with whom I communicate via email. Rapportive demonstrates some of the useful tools that can be built with our social data.

Next page: Top Startups of 2010, 6-10

Diaspora: The Anti-Facebook, Crowdfunded

When ReadWriteWeb first covered Diaspora in May, the group of 4 NYU students were raising money via Kickstarter to fund their idea for an alternative to Facebook. Diaspora sought to build an open-source, decentralized social network, one that respected users' privacy. Continued dust-ups this year over Facebook and privacy, along with the fact that Diaspora's challenge to Facebook simply made for a compelling story, gave the group a lot of press.

Within days of ReadWriteWeb's first story, the funds raised via Kickstarter skyrocketed from $8000, just shy of its $10,000 to almost $200,000 from over 6000 backers. Diaspora released the first version of the developer code in September, and launched in private alpha in late November. The expectations for Diaspora were set quite high, with all the buzz and funding it received, and while those may be difficult to meet, Diaspora certainly represents the power of crowd funding, as well as an interest in making sure the social Web is not centralized in one company.

Hipmunk: The Power of a Good User Experience

Oftentimes we put up with painful experiences as consumers simply because there are no good alternatives, and we can lull ourselves into thinking that those unsatisfactory ways of doing things are just "how things are done." So when I first heard about Hipmunk, an airline flight search engine, I wondered "Why?" There are already many ways to search online, ways to bid for your tickets - albeit none of them great. But it's better, I suppose, than dealing with an airline directly.

But one look at Hipmunk - even better, one search via Hipmunk - and you can see how smart entrepreneurs can enter an already-crowded space and disrupt it with a great user interface and a great user experience. Rather than forcing you to click through pages of results to find the right flight, Hipmunk gives you the results on one page and allows you to have a pretty granular level of control over exactly the things that make a flight feasible for you - price, time of day, number of stops, for example.

LearnBoost: Bringing the Teacher Gradebook to the Web with Open Source

Like Hipmunk, LearnBoost is tackling a space that may not be particularly sexy - Web-based classroom administration tools. But tracking grades and attendance is an important, if not cumbersome, responsibility of teachers, many of whom still use the paper-and-pencil gradebook for record-keeping. In fact, LearnBoost co-founder and CEO Rafael Corrales sees that paper gradebook as the startup's main competitor, and so LearnBoost has built a product that is not just beautiful but incredibly easy to use. LearnBoost seems to really understand educators' needs, something that is incredibly important in education technology. LearnBoost is free, it supports data portability, and it integrates with Google Apps, for example, and the company has been very responsive since launching in August to update the product to suit the needs of those using it.

But LearnBoost doesn't just receive kudos for its work in education technology. The company has been a leader in developing a variety of open-source tools, including Mongoose for storage, Soda for acceptance testing, and Socket.io for real-time communication. For a new company, LearnBoost has an impressive following on GitHub.

Square: The Future of Money is Mobile

We may be slightly cheating to squeeze this one into a 2010 list, as Square, the brainchild of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, allows you to accept and pay via physical credit cards using a card swiper that plugs into the headphone jack of your mobile device. The hardware and app are free, but Square takes a small cut of each transaction.

Square spent most of 2010 in private beta and had its share of hardware and security problems, but the addition to the team in August of Paypal veteran Keith Rabois marked a big win for the company. Square now says it's processing millions of dollars of mobile transactions per week, and boasts some avid users - small businesses and independent merchants who are looking for an easy and mobile way to manage credit card transactions.

InDinero: The Mint.com of Young Entrepreneurs

Describing a startup as the "Mint.com" of something felt like one of the most overused phrases in pitches in 2010. But in the case of InDinero, the description actually works, as the company really does aim to provide a similar sort of real-time financial dashboard to small businesses. Unlike traditional accounting software, InDinero is easy to set-up and use, and the analytics it offers provides small businesses with a wealth of important data.

But a nod to InDinero isn't simply recognition that the company addresses an important business need or that it has gathered impressive traction - and funding - since launching this summer. It's a nod to co-founder Jessica Mah, who founded her first Internet startup at age 13, entered the University of California, Berkeley at age 15 to study computer science, and now at age 20, is the CEO and architect of a profitable Internet company. Yes, of course, all the startups in this list were founded by incredibly smart and talented entrepreneurs, but Mah is particularly inspiring.

Selecting 10 top startups for 2010 was not an easy task. Do you agree with our assessments? Did we miss anyone? Let us know in the comments who you think should - or shouldn't - make the list.

Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.

According to news posted on Accentuate in mid-September, and more recently on blog sites Pulse2 and The Next Web, the potential Mahalo lawsuit involves disputes surrounding a change to the site's terms, which now give the company ownership of the content published on Mahalo.com. Prior to the change, the writers also owned the content. This change angered some of the site's users, who are now attempting to sue the company.

The law firm of Green Welling, LLP is currently gathering information from affected writers and attempting to get a class-certified suit underway.

Mahalo employees and contractors interested in participating in the suit are being asked for any "information, documentation, screen captures, emails, other communications or experiences with Mahalo.com," notes Accentuate Services, a blog dedicated to freelancing and fiction writing. The site is maintained by Michelle L. Devon, one of the injured parties, and now the plaintiff in the suit. Those joining her can remain anonymous through attorney-client privilege, she says.

The details of the case itself are not currently being discussed, but it involves revenue sharing disputes and intellectual property law from our understanding of the matter. Devon was previously seen commenting on this thread on Mahalo Answers, the Q&A sub-section of the search site. Additional discussion is also available online in dedicated forum sites both here and here.

Note: Mahalo has not yet responded to our request for comment regarding the suit. We will update this post if we hear back.Update: Mahalo's official comment: "We're not going to speculate on rumors of lawsuits. However, our terms of service have been and continue to be clear. We've always operated under Creative Commons. Under the prior terms of service, the writers owned the content and provided Mahalo with a license to use it. Now that we compensate writers with bi-weekly cash payments, we amended the terms so that we own the content and provide the writers a creative commons license to use elsewhere if they choose. Bottom line is that Mahalo is pro-writer, as evidenced by our substantial and ever-growing investment in quality content. Our Mahalo Guides and Gurus are talented, passionate, creative contributors who are the lifeblood of the site. Writers interested in sharing their passions with a huge audience of readers should not hesitate to apply."

Calacanis Working on TechCrunch Competitor Called "Launch"

As the different parties investigate a potential suit against Mahalo, it seems Calacanis has a new project. According to an article in today's Guardian, the entrepreneur is now investing in an editorial startup called Launch.

Launch will take on TechCrunch, says Calacanis, but with more of a focus on "quality and insight," he says. "When I started with [Engadget founder, and Joystiq, Gizmodo and Hackaday co-founder] Peter Rojas, blogging was a new format that was faster but still had quality and insight," he said. "Now it's even faster but it has lost that quality and insight. You have a bunch of people writing short stuff with no research and knowledge base. They have no credibility."

Launch won't offer news via blog posts, as TechCrunch does, though. It will be provided as an email newsletter - the same format where Calacanis's own deeper insights disappeared to back in 2008.

"If you get people to commit to an email relationship, it's the deepest, most intimate relationship you can have online. Much deeper than Facebook and certainly more intimate than a blog," he told the Guardian.

Do Bloggers Lack Credibility?

As bloggers ourselves, it's hard to not be stung by words like his. Bloggers lack credibility? Ouch.

But blogging, let's remember, is just a format for publishing content. Anyone can blog, from mainstream journalists to uninformed amateurs. That's the power and the beauty of the platform, in fact. Who exactly is Calacanis speaking about when he makes comments like these?

Besides, today's blog readers are now savvier than ever, often interacting with writers through comment forms and on the social networks Twitter and Facebook, which he summarily dismissed. Commenters add their thoughts to posted stories, expressing their support or agreement, pointing out mistakes or offering different opinions or opposing points of views.

While an email newsletter will arguably have a highly engaged audience, as Calacanis says, it's hardly positioned as a direct competitor to TechCrunch, or any other top-tier news site, blog or otherwise.

But that's just my opinion, as a lowly blogger.

In the comments (or elsewhere), you can share yours. That's how this works, folks. And we like it.

Photo by Joi Ito.

In recent weeks, I've been experimenting with some newly released curation platforms. The first, Curated.by, lets you capture tweets around a specific topic using a plug-in that's installed on your Twitter.com profile. You can then easily tag and sort tweets into "bundles," which can then be embedded in a blog post for some additional context to whatever you're reporting on.

This week, I discovered startup Storify while watching the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. While Curated.by and Storify share the same core theme of curating social content, Storify goes beyond tweets by letting you insert content from YouTube, Flickr, Google search and more into "stories" which can be embedded into a Web page. I'm a sucker for experiments, so today I created something using Storify's platform. It all got kicked off with a single tweet.

From there, I took to Storify and began adding responses from the community. (Note to Storify: include Twitter mentions in addition to search in your next update).

Based on the responses, I added additional contextual information that included recent ReadWriteWeb articles and content from the various sources Storify supports. Here is the end result:

For a brand new service still in private beta, Storify is impressive. The ease of inserting tweets and additional content from across the Web was a generally pleasing experience. I did have some issues, though. After I had initially saved and embedded my story in this post, the tweets and contextual content I added randomly re-arranged. Considering the length of the story, it was a pain to have to go back and work on it for an additional 30 minutes. In terms of the presentation quality of the embed, it's good, but could use a little more beautification.

Storify lets you notify the Twitter users that were part of your story.

My biggest wish is that Storify make their stories "live." By that, I mean that I want anyone to be able to leave a comment on something that has been added to a story. For example, as you can see I replied to several of the tweets in the story using Storify's text module. But since there is no way for someone to reply to those, the conversation halts. I'm not sure if Storify wants their product to be that interactive, but it's something to consider, at least as an option.

I'm happy startups are starting to tackle curation. For a community manager, it's very nice to be able to capture what your audience is talking about and build an experience around it. It remains to be seen if Storify can make it as a standalone service, but I'd love to see their tools end up in a content management system like Movable Type and Wordpress.

What are your thoughts on Storify and emerging curation tools? Let us know in the comments!

Enter Angel Investors. They give money, usually their own from previous business successes, to early stage startup companies aiming to create the future of the Internet. They enable inventors to quit their jobs and to build their technologies without immediately worrying about revenue. If there's trouble among the Angels, then the entrepreneurs they help fund and mentor face trouble in their efforts to build the future of the internet that we will all benefit from. Michael Arrington's report of collusion among Silicon Valley Super Angels really is as epic a story as it seems - and if the allegations are true, the consequences could affect everyone in the world.

That's contrary to the interests of the inventor entrepreneurs that those Super Angels are charged with shepherding into the world.

Why Should You Care?

Why should you care? Because the Internet has changed your life, and we're only at the very beginning. And each new innovation needs financial support.

World leaders used to have to ride a horse for days to visit a library that held less information than we can all now access in moments with an inexpensive device we carry in our pockets. Angels funded the early development of the systems that made that possible. Ron Conway, now the most prominent Angel investor in tech, was an early investor in Google. Humanity is fortunate that Google's early investors like Conway didn't sabotage its development out of short-term self-interest.

Anyone can now publish text, photos, audio or video, live in real-time even, to any number of people all around the world. Those publishing tools were born in part thanks to the money of Angels, who helped them become real and popular before worrying about how to make money from a communications revolution.

The otherwise unknown people around the world who use free blogs to expose the injustices committed by authoritarian governments? Those people are fortunate that when O'Reilly invested ten years ago in Pyra Labs, the company that made Blogger.com, that backing didn't come at the expense of Pyra's ability to innovate.

Aggregate activity of all these systems can now be analyzed to capture everything from real-time global self-awareness to instant personalization that would have been unimaginable in all but very recent history.

The next step will be machines talking to machines talking to the internet - your refrigerator will be your next friend on Facebook and its newsfeed will update when it has trouble using electricity efficiently or no longer contains a carton of eggs. More importantly, city streets will report to the web about what happens on them, inequitable delivery of public services to different populations will become clear as day when all the data is online and the illumination of new problems will foster the creation of new solutions.

Entrepreneurs will build those systems, and Angels will fund their doing so.

So it's very important that Angel Investors not act contrary to the interests of the entrepreneurs building the future. Because the rest of us all want that future to be developed as well as possible.

Not all important innovation comes from Silicon Valley, or is invested in by Valley Super Angels - but that is the case for a lot of it.

That's why the story of AngleGate is a story of alleged injustice being done not just to competitors of these particular investors, or the startups that seek their funding. It's a story about Super Angels acting against the interests of anyone whose life might be touched by the future of the Internet.

Photo by Joi Ito.

Gigapie launched today, with Facebook priced at 200 credits, or $20. Flickr is 100 credits. AOL is 110 credits. Prices are based on demand for the company and the amount of traffic it gets. You can cash out via PayPal once you earn 500 credits.

The way it works is simple. You're trading whole companies, not shares, and owners have to sell to anyone who wants to buy. The price goes up 10% every time someone buys a company. That means the value goes up a dollar with every transaction, threatening to drive prices up too high, too quickly.

The value of a company is also affected by site traffic as estimated by Compete.com. We're skeptical whether Compete can measure traffic accurately enough to register fluctuations for eBay, Reddit or any of the other A-list sites often enough to reflect the company's real life popularity.

We bet there would be demand for a well-executed site where people could bet on tech companies for a lower cost of entry than the stock market. It could be an outlet for all the fanboys and girls who can't afford to buy Apple at $270 a share, for example. A company's virtual value could become a credible metric for how it's doing, just as the predictions trading on Intrade.com has become a pretty reliable indicator of election outcomes thanks to informed citizens betting on candidates.

Geeks who read Techmeme every morning and posses encyclopedic knowledge of the latest trends already prognosticate about who's coming up, who's going to fold, and who will flub their next launch. (Idea: A virtual stock exchange for startups!) Why not turn that intelligence into money?

Gigapie needs to work on their execution a bit - what's to stop someone (or a group of conspirators) from registering two accounts, buying a company with the free 100 credits, selling and buying the company to and from herself, thereby driving up the price before cashing out? This obvious oversight severely undermines the site's credibility. Gigapie also takes 50% of your profits, an astronomical percentage for a broker.

Gigapie looks like it could be fun. I got 100 credits for signing up, which meant I could afford Flickr, MySpace, Digg and TechCrunch. I thought about which company I thought had the best concept, best track record and the brightest prospects. Which companies would you buy?

While our readers' responses were pretty evenly split, the split between startups that seek capital first far outweigh those that seek to make equity-for-services deals. Also, the number of VC firms (well in excess of 700 in the U.S. alone) is far greater than firms offering services or a mix of cash and services.

Are we just too used to capital? Are "venture services" firms still too new? Why don't we have more services-for-equity programs?

"You need money to buy services, and most of the time, since you do not know where exactly to shop, you overpay or pay for something you do not need," wrote commenter Marfi.

Commener Jorge made a good case for mentor-driven accelerators when he said, "Just getting the cash won't get me some good mentors[...] The main reason why startups need cash is because the model is either not clear or not set to work in the short term[...] Just cash ins't enough unless you're an experienced entrepreneur."

Power commenter Warren Bendetto spoke to the sometimes arbitrary nature of valuation, saying, "When you're starting out, you really have no idea what you'll need. You base your anticipated amount of capital you need to raise based on assumptions and guesstimates that are 99% bullshit.

If you're lucky, you'll raise too much money[...] So you buy servers you don't need, you hire too many people, everyone gets 36" double LCD monitors, and your kitchen has a vending machine that spits out free MacBooks.

That's all fun, until you realize that you gave away 80% of your company in exchange for the funding. By the time you realize that you could have raised less and kept more equity, it's too late."

Salient points, all.

So, what is it about the magic and allure of VC that keeps startups pitching for more funding when they might be better served to take services instead?

Chris Wanstrath, founder of the bootstrapped and profitable GitHub, was in the to-VC-or-not-to-VC panel I moderated at SXSW yesterday. When I asked him if he'd ever considered taking capital to get his business up and running, he said that he absolutely hadn't. He had instead chosed to make business deals, strategic partnerships that would allow him to get the goods and services he needed without being financially dependent on others or having to give up equity.

In that panel, I asked audience members in the packed room how many were currently considering seeking or were actively trying to secure capital for their startups. Between 80 and 90 percent of folks indicated that they'd be making the rounds on Sand Hill Road.

I wish I'd had the chance to ask them if VC was still their preferred option after the panel was over. It seems now that there are more options and alternatives for smart, lean startups to get further with less reliance on the complicated and sometimes predatory business of venture capital.

As for why there aren't more venture services firms in existence, some have said it's because getting the capital to run a VC firm is a heck of a lot easier than building the infrastructure to offer startups mentorship, office space, and other business-building services.

Do you think there's enough justification - both in terms of demand from startups and in terms of return on investment for firms - to warrant more of this new breed of startup support? We'd appreciate your thoughts in the comments, particularly if you're involved in the VC/startup ecosystem.

As of today Waggoner may not have the opportunity to change tactics. The developer wrote a blog post detailing a cease and desist letter sent by Shankman's lawyer. As a community with your finger on the pulse of tech launches and entrepreneurial resources, we want to know whether or not you believe Shankman's takedown notice is warranted. Let us know in the comments below.

The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resulting utility is part pulse check, part search engine, and all fun. It also serves as an automatically refreshing reminder that this social network is far from dead yet, especially where entertainment properties are concerned.

Based on IM protocols, Collecta's search platform pushes out content in real time as it's published. Each result also includes the poster's "mood," which also serves as a built-in mechanism for sentiment analysis.

"Collecta brings the size and richness of the MySpace community to light," said MySpace COO Mike Jones.

"Its instantaneous results provide insight into our users' moods and activities. It's great to see how quickly Collecta has used the MySpace Real-Time Stream API to deliver new value to people on the web."

Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell also called MySpace one of the most vibrant web properties, saying, "MySpace users are actively sharing an amazing volume of pictures and media, as well as expressing their thoughts on a very emotional and raw level. Our search platform cuts right into the center of all this activity. It reveals a slice of humanity that you couldn't see otherwise. Even a search for a basic term like 'happy' is incredibly fascinating."

In addition to showing results for search terms, the new product also shows a brief overview of three top trends currently on MySpace.

Collecta's general search function currently aggregates data from a slew of news and social sites and will soon incorporate publicly available data from MySpace, as well.

MySpace's partnership shows an interesting use of Collecta's site search, but it's far from the only application. The platform can be used to show activity, trends and perspectives on just about any website.

That's not good for early-stage innovation, something the association acknowledges in its published report.

"Of all the predictions put forth this year, a collective lack of enthusiasm for seed and early stage investing is the most concerning," said Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA. "The weak exit market combined with proposed tax policy, which would discourage long term investment, puts tremendous pressure on our industry to move towards later stage investing. Yet, seed and early stage companies represent a pipeline that must be supported if our country is to continue building new and innovative companies. We need the environment to improve for these early stage investors."

If you're one of those cynics that thinks the VC industry funds too many crazy pointless ideas, then perhaps this reads like good news. If you're a small startup hoping to break into the Silicon Valley insider's club that is VC funding, then this probably isn't good news for you. And if you're an early adopter of new technologies, hungry to see all kinds of innovation change the world and are indifferent to the fortunes of investors - then this risk aversion probably isn't good news for you either.