Startups interested in participating in 500 Startups can apply through the program’s AngelList page beginning January 31, 2013. Previously, companies had to get an introduction through the program’s alumni network to apply, although beginning with the most recent class they began experimenting with open applications on AngelList.

“We feel like as more people know about 500 and we try to expand more into other markets, our network is still, compared to the rest of the community, not that big,” said Christine Tsai, 500 Startups partner. The program has always had an international focus and has welcomed founders from outside the United States, so widening the application process even further makes sense. Although Tsai noted that by nature, an open process means plenty more mediocre applications, but the diversity is worth it in the long run.

“That’s just how it is,” she said. “We’re still going to rely a lot on referrals.”

The application process will stay open until March 1, although company applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis. The program’s fall accelerator batch will have its demo days in Mountain View and San Francisco next week.

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“We interviewed thirty-five highly qualified candidates for this position and Eugene received our only offer. We are ecstatic that he accepted,” TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen said in a blog post.

Chung is already familiar with the New York startup scene, having helped manage NEA investments in companies like Buzzfeed and Bedrocket. He’s also served as a TechStars NYC mentor, working with companies like Poptip, Condition One, Wander and Pickie.

Interestingly, he seems to have a pretty varied professional background. Before becoming a venture capitalist, he was at Pixar Animation Studios, where he worked on hits like The Incredibles and Up. He’s also an indie film director and worked in the rural Philippines with global micro finance accelerator. Earlier in his career, he was an energy investor at Warburg Pincus and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Since November, Nicole Glaros, the longtime managing director of TechStars’ Boulder, has been serving as the interim leader and she will continue to serve as co-managing director and work with Chung in New York through the next class, Cohen said.

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As I moved from the acceleration side back to being an entrepreneur, I wanted to systematically list what I’d learned and work out what entrepreneurs could generally benefit from. I also ran a survey and a string of interviews to find the value that startups expect from accelerators — and ask why they actually got. My findings form the backbone of my book Speed Up Your Startup: What Entrepreneurs Should Learn From Accelerators To Succeed With Their Businesses. 

What I found was there are 10 primary ways accelerators add value to startups. Breaking them down, we’re able to see how that value is produced, and come up with ways to get the same advantage elsewhere. The goal is both to demystify and examine the workings of a successful accelerator, and produce recommendations that startups can act on.

Let’s take a look.

1. Generating and validating an idea and a business model. Accelerators help through expertise in the field, knowing what has worked and what hasn’t before, and what others are doing that is similar. 

2. Investing and finding more investors. There is more to startup support than money, but it helps a lot. As well as the validation offered by the previous point, investors also like the validation provided by other investors. A startup from an accelerator program has already passed a certain vetting process and is thus likelier to be interesting. This also works in the case of co-investing: many investors like co-investing with proven accelerators and VCs.

3. Providing contacts and opening doors. A good investor can open doors for you that you wouldn’t even get to knock on yourself. This also goes for customers, partners, potential hires and media contacts. Accelerators that have proven successful in the past — or ones that have successful individuals behind them —are more interesting and thus have the strongest contacts.

4. Providing mentors, advisors and guidance. This is a key component of many programs. The startup world runs by advising and mentorship. Other founders share their own experiences on their blogs, in the talks they give, and in the mentorship sessions at accelerator programs. These are both networking opportunities and learning opportunities for startups, but primarily they are geared toward telling the startups what they should do to multiply their chances of success.

5. Providing hands-on help or education. If the startup needs to do something that they can’t do themselves, accelerators may either help them, train them or help find someone to do it for them. It is common for an early-stage accelerator to help in company formation, for example. Some have experts-in-residence for instance in marketing and recruiting. 

6. Helping in product development and testing. An accelerator can help shape the product while it is being developed. This depends much on the length of the program and on the program’s focus. It’s also key whether this is done within the accelerator’s core team, by their immediate network or by securing test or pilot customers and users externally.

7. Helping with product marketing and user acquisition. Accelerators are very concerned with getting real users and customers for their startups, and some help with this by providing hands-on resources for marketing. Without large marketing budgets, the most efficient way to ensure this is building products that have marketing built into their logic.

8. Providing a peer group in a high-pressure environment. Founders get best along with other founders — not because of their amicable personalities, but because they share a passion for doing something special that outsiders often may not understand. While that’s at least a generalization and at worst a cliché, having a peer group who face similar challenges can be highly motivating. Time pressure may seem like a bug, not a feature, but it’s a success factor in a startup accelerator. Deadlines are tangible measures of discipline — and enforcements of it.

9. Providing a physical location and support resources. A place to work from can be a co-working space, an office or a series of temporary gatherings. Physical resources like printers, chairs and coffee makers also make a startup’s life easier.

10. Negotiating and providing discounts, freebies and perks. This is slightly related to points 3–5, but worth underlining separately due to their potential impact. For example, Amazon Web Services partners with leading startup accelerators and offers free credits to their services, making the infrastructure choice effortless to many.

The survey confirmed this breakdown, but also unearthed some interesting differences between what startups expect from accelerators and what they actually receive from them.

Mentorship and advice from the core team, for example, had both high expectations and were deemed valuable by startups taking the survey — but customer and partner contacts in the industry didn’t fare as well.

Forty nine percent of respondents who had not participated in an accelerator reported that customer contacts would be very desirable. However, only 22 percent of the participants reported that the industry contacts provided by the accelerator had been excellent. Forty six percent reported these to have been “neutral” or “poor”. More detailed answers support this, with many founders pointing out that an accelerator would add the most value by providing partner or customer contacts. “Industry fit” was also mentioned as an important criteria when selecting an accelerator program in the first place. 

The lack of auxiliary business services – such as company formation, accounting or payroll processing – provided by the accelerator programs was a big letdown. 67 percent of respondents reported these as “poor” or “neutral”. At the same time, in non-accelerated startups, 65 percent of respondents placed these services in the top two categories of interest.

The survey was taken by 151 startups and supplemented with 33 additional interviews. More about the survey and the book is at the Speed Up Your Startup site.

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So what have I seen?

The fact is that accelerators and early-stage investment programs, particularly in Europe, are not really very differentiated yet. As the market matures we’ll see more vertically-focused programs. In fact, this is already starting. The U.K.’s Springboard, for example, just launched Springboard Mobile. There’s also GameFounders in Central and Eastern Europe, which focuses on the games industry.

But there’s still a long way to go

Where is the advertising technology accelerator, for example?

We’re going to see more and more of this, and it’s a good thing.

Why? Well, in having a tight vertical focus, an accelerator has clear positioning — which helps it immensely in marketing. It’s also likelier that the contacts and mentors on a vertical program have are directly relevant to the startups in the program. Same goes for potential business partners, VCs and acquirers. Finally, there’s a lot more potential for synergy in the portfolio. Take our adtech accelerator, for example: a startup creating an advertising network could benefit from the other startups on the program that are creating analytics, retargeting or creative management services.

And if the products don’t work out, there’s a higher chance of targeted talent acquisitions — potentially a good result for entrepreneurs, and a slight hedge to an investor’s risk.

Contrast this to a non-vertical program.

While getting in early-stage startups guarantees that they will run into a lot of similar problems, there is a lot of slack too.

Let’s assume that 10 startups meets 20 mentors from all over the industry: smart, experienced people who have great input for many ideas but don’t know everything. In most cases, a mentor who doesn’t know your business inside out will still give advice — but it will come from the perspective of an imaginary user, instead of from an industry expert, potential client or business partner.

That’s a real waste for everyone. Startups should be doing user testing and customer development all the time, not wasting precious mentorship time and relations for that.

And even if they really want to help, a mentor who doesn’t know anything about the games industry and doesn’t play games will get frustrated by talking to games startups. Equally, a B2B SaaS expert will mostly give input from their perspective, even if the startup in question is a social B2C product: I’ve seen more than one ‘white-labelled B2B version’ idea thrown around semi-reluctantly in meetings like this.

Having been to quite a few demo days and looked at various programs closely, sometimes it seems like the only common problem for the startups in an accelerator is getting follow-on funding. This, in turn, means that a lot of the participants are all-too clearly engineered for their demo day as an investment opportunity — a single make-or-break moment. But for investors looking for future stars, this can be frustrating as they need to cut through the pitch-clutter of different startups who are all aiming for the same end result.

Instead, a ‘lean accelerator’ should focus vertically to eliminate waste and shorten the iterations. Granted, from an investor’s perspective this decreases the diversity of a portfolio, but hey, you’re investing in early-stage startups: there are more important ways to manage risk than portfolio diversification.

For this reason, I’ve been watching the development of corporate accelerators — like Telefonica’s Wayra, Deutsche Telekom’s hub:raum, or even the BBC Worldwide Labs — with interest. While it seems in some regard that they’re just me-too programs, their deep vertical expertise and contact base can make them very appealing for startups that fit the profile.

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1: Drones for Peace. We all know the impact unmanned aerial drones have had in war. Rotary Robotics co-founders James Peverill and Adam Woodworth saw that up close working with the military, but wanted to find a better way to put that technology to use. Their plan is to create inexpensive 1-lb drones that could help reporters crowd-source stories (a la the Arab Spring) or give farmers a bird’s eye view of their land. The planes themselves are made mostly of off-the-shelf Radio Shack type gear. Their secret sauce is the software and integration that will take a GPS location from Google Maps, send it to the WiFi-enabled drone, which then flies off to film the subject from a few hundred feet in the air.

2: Little Bonsai. This two-man shop, founded by Olin College graduates Jake Felser, a mechanical engineer, and Oliver Haas, a designer, wants to offer well-crafted, locally-made and sustainable gear for everyday use. Toward that end, they’re crafting a reusable toothbrush with replaceable head. Estimating that most people go through four toothbrushes per year, cast-off brushes account for 50 million tons of trash annually, the company says. Shocking, no? Electric toothbrushes sport replaceable heads, but many people don’t like them and, Felser said, there is no evidence to support claims that they are more effective than manual brushes.  Little Bonsai plans to put the idea on Kickstarter this fall.

3: Bio-Fiend.  The growing use of biofuels is leading to an increase in the hard-to-recycle byproduct glycerine. The mining and transportation of iron ore and other materials creates “fragdust” blow-off from iron ore that causes health problems, as well as the loss of up to 5 percent of the ore itself as it is transported. Bio-Fiend, a Brazilian startup, says it can tackle two problems with one idea.  Its glycerine polymerization process takes the waste glycerine and creates a dust suppressor which is applied to ore before it is transported. That keeps the ore dust with the ore and out of the surrounding environment, said Fernanda Vidal, industrial engineer on the project.

4: SoundFest. Nearly 700 million people will need help hearing by 2016, according to the World Health Organization. SoundFest is building a smartphone app it says can replace expensive, ungainly hearing aids.  CEO David Duehren was co-founder and CTO of Brooktrout Technology and knows a little something about audio processing. SoundFest embeds signal processing software into phones or tablets to turn them into “personal sound amplification devices.”  The Real Clarity app, due this fall,  runs on iPhones and Android devices. The company is also working on an optional bluetooth ear piece to work with the app to provide wireless hearing assistance. The earpiece also enables the phone to act as a remote microphone.

This is just a small sample of the 125 finalists — culled from 1,237 entrants.  They will take part in a three-month accelerator program, vying for up to $1 million in funding divvied out in $10,000-plus increments to 10 to 20 winners.

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Tandem began in 2007 in Silicon Valley as a capital fund for mobile startups, taking a particularly hands-on approach with its portfolio companies. Most of the startups in Tandem’s first portfolio either graduated to later-stage funding rounds or have been acquired.

ZumoDrive was bought by Motorola in 2010, becoming MotoCast, the handset maker’s media and storage service. Email management and collaboration software developer Attassa wound up as part of YouSendIt (see disclosure). PlayHaven, which offers up a real-time marketing platform to game developers, hasn’t been acquired yet, but it’s is scaling rapidly, supporting 1500 titles with a combined 500 million game sessions each month.

Last summer, Tandem took its hands-on approach further, launching an accelerator hosting a small number of startups each year. Tandem provides those companies with an initial $200,000 investment and free workspace along with its expertise.

“Tandem’s accelerator program is highly selective and focuses on only a small group of truly exceptional teams,” Tandem co-founder Doug Renert said in a statement. “This way, we can give founders what they need most: time and attention from our team and our entire network. Think of our accelerator like a small liberal arts college where you get to know your professors, as opposed to the large public university where you’re taking each course along with 300 other students.”

The current class includes four companies: mobile gaming rewards platform provider GimmieWorld, social game developer BitRhymes, local event discovery portal UpOut and cross-store shopping tool developer Flit. Tandem is accepting applications for its next accelerator class until July 1.

Disclosure: YouSendIt is backed by Alloy Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media.

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Telekom’s German startup play (which is more of an accelerator, despite the ‘incubator’ designation) came hot on the heels of rival Telefónica’s Wayra. The Wayra proposition is pretty straightforward: seed funding of up to €50,000 ($66,000) per selected startup, with Telefónica getting 10 percent equity and first rights to future funding and marketing.

At hub:raum’s launch, the press release didn’t even mention equity. The website makes one reference to the telco getting a “minority stake.” And I’ve been hearing local players in Berlin saying that they understood Telekom’s not after equity at all.

But the idea that Telekom doesn’t want anything in return for its up-to-€300k seed investment never seemed plausible — and it highlights the confusing nature of the offer.

What’s the truth? One industry source told me that while Telekom “doesn’t take equity per se”, the mentor that you get assigned does get a fixed single-digit stake. What’s more, the startup only gets five to 10 hours a week from its mentor — anything more than that will require a further negotiation.

And that’s not all. It seems there’s a second chunk of equity involved here too:

“You get into the program and you have to choose a mentor, and that mentor does take equity,” the source said. “And you get an investment from T-Venture and you negotiate how much equity they take from that, based on what stage the company is at.”

I’ve asked Telekom what’s going on here, and I’ve not had a reply yet. Depending on the terms that finally get agreed between the startups and hub:raum, the deal may not be so bad. But startups will have to look hard into this gift horse’s mouth — because things seem a lot less clear-cut here than they are with Wayra.

Bad rep?

My source also pointed out that “people don’t like Telekom much,” as the telco can be “very painful” to deal with. No kidding.

The hub:raum launch at NEXT Berlin 2012 certainly generated a fair bit of low-level grumbling. When the show’s pitch contest winners, Squadmail, went onstage to collect their €10,000 prize, they were informed that they had to claim it through the hub:raum program — the existence of which, remember, was only announced at the show.

I don’t know what investment strategy Squadmail’s been working on in the background, but chances are that twist came as quite a surprise.

But hey, suddenly finding yourself in bed with Telekom can’t be all bad — the firm’s a giant in its field with the marketing nous to match, right? Right? Try googling “hub:raum”. Perhaps someone so smart could have chosen a better name…

Update: A spokesperson for hub:raum responded to our request for more clarity.

When startups are admitted to the hub:raum incubation program they are being offered an integrated set of contributions. This set consists of services (e.g., office space and access to corporate resources), funding and mentoring. All three elements constitute the hub:raum incubation program and are not being offered separately.

Services and funding will be provided by hub:raum/Deutsche Telekom with T-Venture having the role of the investment vehicle. Any equity stake hub:raum will get for the combination of services and funding will be held by T-Venture.

Valuation and respective minority stake holding comply with market standards in the pre-seed and seed phase. The mentoring part will be provided by seasoned entrepreneurs. They will get a decent equity stake in return for establishing and maintaining an intense working relationship with the startup company. Equity will not depend on the hours spend with the company, however the mentor may want to increase his or her share by injecting some extra money into the startup.

Well, that clears it up then.

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At the event at the Greenstart offices, five startups focused on using software to change energy and transportation, showed off their ideas to a packed house of hundreds of investors, potential partners and the media. The startups seemed as excited to present their ideas as the investors were to hear their pitches.

But just don’t call the crop of five companies greentech firms. There’s a lot investors that came to look at these five companies because they are just interested in technology and software, not necessarily in greentech, explained Greenstart partner Dave Graham to me. Greenstart shifted its strategy from incubating broad greentech companies last year to solely focusing on working with digital green companies this year.

And the move has paid off. Greentech or cleantech, as an investment class has a become a dirty word these days. There’s just been too many missteps and investors and entrepreneurs that have lost a lot of money. And, at the same time, there’s been a rush of web and mobile-focused folks that have started to make a real killing (Instagram). As I wrote in this article, I’m not even sure cleantech as an umbrella moniker will survive for too much longer.

However, the overarching trends of a growing population, constrained resources (energy, food and water), people moving to cities, and information technology as a way to manage these resources, won’t go away for decades. And the class of companies that presented at Greenstart’s Demo day all fit into this digital green description.

The digital green players

One of the most buzzy and fun ideas came from Scoot Networks, an electric scooter sharing network, which I covered last month, and which we’ll post a Green Overdrive show around this week. Scoot Networks is still in alpha phase, but is starting to roll out its e-scooter network to companies first (think big Internet companies and co-working spaces) as a way to test the concept and the market. Later on — and after they get the required insurance coverage — the company will eventually open up the network to everyone else, in the hopes of becoming the Zipcar for electric scooters.

Scoot Networks is looking to continue to raise a seed round of $700,000 (it’s raised $300,000 of that) and eventually wants to raise $5 million in a Series A round. The low cost of the electric scooters (they come from China), and the fact that they use an iPhone app as the bulk of their scooter control system (your phone fits snugly into the dashboard) means that Scoot Networks will have high margins, said Scoot CEO and co-founder Michael Keating during his presentation.

Another company that stood out was GELI (Growing Energy Labs Incorporated), which is developing software that can control and monitor batteries for the power grid — think the Android for batteries. The system can help companies and utilities make money off of using batteries for various applications like buying and selling energy, demand response, and energy load shifting. GELI is looking to raise a seed round of $750,000 to ship product to its first customers.

The other three companies that Greenstart picked and which pitched to investors on Wednesday included Ridepal, a startup organizing Google-style commuter buses for companies, kWhours, which has developed an iPad app for building energy efficiency professionals, and finally Smart Grid Billing, which makes software to enable real time pricing for utilities. Looks like “digital green,” “cleanweb,” “collaborative consumption,” “green IT,” or whatever people want to call it these days, is going to be the leading way that investors and entrepreneurs will be able to lead to more sustainable changes — and even make a little money.

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TechStars NYC managing director David Tisch introduces the new class

TechStars New York, now a TV brand thanks to a new Bloomberg series, graduated its second class of would-be breakout stars, plucked from a pool of 1,200 applicants. The class shows that the program is still churning out a lot of quality, with a pretty polished group of graduates debuting Tuesday. Many of the start-ups offered services marketed to businesses and looked to help smooth commerce or increase consumer engagement. Six of the start-ups had already raised money and many demonstrated some impressive traction with customers.

The demo day even attracted New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who seems lately to be on a barn storming tour touting the New York tech scene. He exhorted the start-ups to thrive and help turn the city into a tech capital, hiring many people along the way and ultimately paying taxes to the city.

I’ve already written about two of the graduates Piictu and Urtak, which put on strong demonstrations Tuesday. Of the companies I had yet to see, these caught my eye:

Ordr.in looks to create a Sabre for restaurants, enabling any website, app or service to offer food ordering from restaurants. The idea is to unite all the different ordering services around the country like Seamless Web and others through one API into a larger platform that can serve companies and destinations looking to offer food services. Wyndham Hotels, for example, is building a virtual room service widget for guests who use its Wi-Fi network. The service is finding its way on to Facebook, Boxee, Microsoft Windows Phone 7 and also a new food decider app through a partnership with Hunch.

Just like Sabre has helped power Kayak and Hipmunk while Multiple Listing Service (MLS) helped enable Zillow, Ordr.in is looking to have a similar effect on the restaurant industry, helping the sector make a leap similar to when franchising appeared in the 1950s. The start-up is already working with more than 70 local food ordering services, which allow Ordr.in offer service in all 50 states. I like Ordr.in because it seems like a smart way to expand the market for restaurants, who are often seem stuck in the past and are slow to embrace technology improvements. This gives them much broader reach and it helps brings food ordering to a lot services that we might not have thought of in the past. The company has already raised money from Google Ventures, which led its seed round, and is now looking for a Series A round.

Contently bills itself as a structured market bringing together freelance journalists and brands looking to add content. The service has generated more than $1 million in sales and is doubling in sales every six weeks. It already has 2,000 journalists from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and other publications who are making an average of $60,000 annually, 40 percent more than average journalists. Companies such as LinkedIn have already turned to Contently to create content and American Express Open Forum has just signed on for a pilot.

Contently is taking advantage of a couple of trends including the often forced migration of 90,000 journalists into freelance jobs in recent years. Brands are also becoming publishers as they look to engage consumers with original content. I like Contently because it looks like a good solution for the times we’re in. I know a lot of journalists who have moved into freelance work and though it sometimes seems like a more uncertain place to be in, I think a service like Contently can solve a lot of problems for journalists and companies who are increasingly looking to put these writers to work. Contently has already closed a $335,000 seed round with Founder Collective and is raising $3 million with $500,000 already committed.

ChatID is a universal chat platform that lets any business or company connect with consumers through existing chat channels. Right now, users who want to connect to a brand need to head off to their company site to get questions answered. But ChatID allows users to connect through their existing chat services and through popular retail destinations to talk to a company, which should help foster more communication and engagement, increase conversions and cut down on consumer support costs.

This is helpful for companies who sell their wares and services over a lot of different websites. A user who visits Amazon.com, for example, could connect directly to a manufacturer though a chat button on their product page that connects them directly into the brand’s instant messaging system. This makes sense because people increasingly favor text messaging over phone calls. And companies want to be able to reach out to users in real-time just as they’re looking to buy. ChatID has already raised $1 million. I think it’s headed for a lot more if it can become the go-to resource for companies looking to reach out to consumers in real-time.

Here’s a complete list of all the companies in the TechStars NYC class:

Ambassador: Social Customer Acquisition Platform for eCommerce

ChatID: Universal Chat Platform Enabling Businesses to Communicate with Customers on Any Site or Device

Contently: Professional Writing Marketplace for Brands

Coursekit: The Social Network for Education

Dispatch: Service for Cloud File Sharing, Movement, and Management

MobIntent: Ad Optimization and Analytics for Mobile App Marketing

Ordr.in: Restaurant eCommerce Platform Connecting Restaurants Anywhere to Clients Everywhere

Piictu: Visual Network for Mobile Photo Interactions

SideTour: Peer-to-Peer Marketplace for Authentic Experiences

Spontaneously: Mobile Service for Sharing Social Plans and Availability

Urtak: Addictive Q+A Tool Creating Structured Engagement with Web Content

Wantworthy: Shopping Utility that Bridges the Gap Between Browsing and Buying

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