TechStars' Geographical Advantage Over Y Combinator

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TechCrunch: TechStars Launches Ten New Startups In Seattle: six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable.

Y Combinator is in the Valley. Y Combinator has done something remarkable. I think Y Combinator is the reason we have a new species in town: the super angel. But Y Combinator is in the Valley. Being in the Valley, in the Valley alone is a disadvantage. People don't buy servers anymore. They have Amazon web services. Times have changed. Some of the best programmers I know are self taught people. All the material you need to teach yourself programming is available online for free. And so the idea that you have to be in the Valley to be part of the action, well, that is passe.

Ping On Twitter Is A Few Tech StartUp Ideas

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TechCrunch: iTunes Ping Actually Goes Social With Full Twitter Integration; Careful, It Will Auto-Tweet: not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

90 seconds is a lot of music. We live in the era of good enough. Perhaps Apple is lucky the Facebook Connect thing did not quite pan out for them. This is a better deal. And now everybody and their cousin will be tweeting everything they have in their private domains.