In a program called TimeSpace announced Tuesday morning, the Grey Lady said it will accept three to five early-stage companies for four month partnerships. Those selected will get an opportunity to demonstrate their products while teaching and learning alongside Times employees in the company’s 8th Avenue headquarters. The Times suggests the best candidates will come with seed stage funding and be focused on products like mobile, social, video, advertising technology, analytics and e-commerce.

So will all this help the Times navigate a path to digital prosperity? On one hand, these type of projects can feel more like sizzle than substance. The Times already has an ideas lab called beta620 while the Boston Globe is partnering with MIT students to inject more technology into the news process. So far, nothing earth-shattering has emerged from either project. Likewise, Philadelphia’s major news outlets have been tinkering with incubator-style projects for a while with mixed results.

On the other hand, these type of ventures deliver intangible cultural benefits. Startup companies, including those in the media space, typically have little idea how the news process works and how media companies actually run. Meanwhile, old-line media types are often suspicious or dismissive of new technologies and the people wielding them. Opportunities like TimeSpace, which will also give the startups a gloss of prestige, thus represent a welcome occasion for the two cultures to rub shoulders in a real world news and business environment.

Would-be New York Times partners have until February 19 to apply.

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At the start of this year, both Startup Health and Blueprint Health – two incubator-type programs that provide funding, mentorship and connections – announced their first classes of startups.  Then, in October, the New York Digital Health Accelerator, backed by the New York eHealth Collaborative nonprofit and the private New York City Fund, introduced its own batch of health tech startups.

Now Bio & Health Tech Entrepreneurship Lab, is joining the fun. Supported by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), the new outfit began accepting applications a couple of weeks ago for its first class of health entrepreneurs.

In the past few years, health tech accelerators have popped up around the country – for example, Rock Health in San Francisco and Healthbox in Chicago. But given the concentration of top-tier hospitals, education and research institutions, not to mention drug companies like Pfizer and insurance providers like Aetna, located in New York and the surrounding areas, the city is well-positioned to be a hotbed for health innovation.

Mary Howard, program manager for the Bio & Health Tech Entrepreneurship Lab, said the new program intends to bring the growing health tech ecosystem to a new class of wannabe entrepreneurs who have strong backgrounds in the sciences and a big idea but don’t know the basics for starting a business.

“We’re targeting people who have that great idea and they’re asking themselves ‘now what?’” she said. In particular, the program is intended for graduate science students, post-docs and early-career researchers and engineers. But while most other health tech accelerators focus primarily on health software and IT, Howard said the new entrepreneurship lab plans to also focus on life science companies, including those working on drug discovery and development.

Unlike its peers, New York’s latest startup incubator for health tech companies doesn’t provide funding or space. But over the six-month program, accepted participants will receive coaching, pitch preparation, mentorship and other activities meant to connect founders with the local network of investors and entrepreneurs in healthcare.

Howard and Eric Vieiera, the program’s bio science practice leader, created the program after winning a bid from the NYCEDC. Howard said she previously launched several startups and has been active in the Boston startup community. And Vieira, who has a Ph.D. in developmental genetics, has directed several life sciences and technology projects.  The program is backed by $56,000 from the NYCEDC but Howard said they are looking for private support and sponsorships and hope that the lab can run for 10 years. It will close its application period at the end of the month and announce its first 20 participants next month.

Blueprint Health, Startup Health and Rock Health typically have acceptance rates in the low single digits, indicating demand for structured programs that support health tech startups. But, obviously, a big draw for those applying to incubators is the money (in addition to the space). Still, access to networks of investors and potential business partners, as well as guidance in navigating the complex world of healthcare are critical to a startup’s success. If the Entrepreneurship Lab can supply a strong network for its participants, it could prove to be an attractive option for emerging health startups. Vieira said the goal is to support New York’s growing health tech ecosystem and potentially become a feeder for the bigger, better-funded incubators, as well as a recipient of  startups from smaller, more academic-focused innovation labs.

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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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The group, which claims to be the first of its kind in Europe, had been due to close its doors to applicants on Tuesday. But in an email, co-founder Paul Bragiel told me that the decision to extend the deadline was not because they had not had enough high quality submissions.

“[We] had a big uptake in applications starting yesterday, so just want to make sure we can accommodate,” said Bragiel, who is also a partner at early stage program I/O Ventures in San Francisco.

“I have been quite happy with the applications. Honestly I was wary they would be weak compared to the ones I see with I/O Ventures [where he is also a partner] … but I have been pleasantly surprised.”

The projects submitted so far, he says, include a great deal of mobile and location-based gaming projects, as well as gamification services. There was also some social gaming “but that is considerably less than I saw a year or two ago.”

The program, which is based in Estonia, aims to bring together teams to develop their existing game-related products — which should already be in beta at least — over three months. A range of mentors will arrive from around the Central, Eastern and Baltic regions come together to work with a maximum of 10 companies, with a program that starts in September.

While it is a little unusual to extend deadlines for positive reasons, Bragiel’s co-founder Sven Illing told me that it was not uncommon — and pointed to the example of Startupbootcamp Berlin, which recently extended its deadline after a surge in attention.

“It seems a good idea to use the momentum,” he said. “You can never have too many good applications.”

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They certainly have a high bar to meet. Of the 23 startups backed by TechStars last year (in two classes), 21 raised a collective $55 million.  A few notable alumni include Lore (formerly Coursekit), Crowdtist, Onswipe, Shelby.tv and Sidetour. But TechStars said this year’s crop is its “strongest group of founders and visions yet.” And it has an encouraging gender ratio: it’s isn’t 50 percent, but five of the 13 companies have a female co-founder, four of which are CEOs.

Ahead of the big day, TechStars granted us brief interviews with the graduating startups, and several struck us as particularly compelling. Watching the presentations will give us a fuller picture of each company (and we’ll update this as we learn more) but, for now, here are a few we’ll be keeping an eye on.

Classtivity
Founders: Payal Kadakia, Sanjiv Sanghav
If you’ve ever searched for yoga, dance or other activity classes online, you know that it’s hard to really get a sense of what’s out there. In fact, Kadakia said, about 250,000 fitness and recreation classes are offered globally, but half of the spots go unfilled. To address the problem, Classtivity is creating a consolidated platform to help people search for and book everything from classes in yoga and dance to cooking and languages. By bringing the as-yet undisrupted market online, Classtivity believes they can help it grow larger. The site recently came out of beta, but to receive an invite, you can visit this link: http://classtivity.com/invite/GigaOM. For now, Classtivity is focused on New York, but plans to expand to San Francisco and Los Angeles later this year.

Condition One
Founders: Danfung Dennis, Takaaki Okada, Peter Sung, Karol Martesko-Fenster
Condition One is pioneering a new video format that gives viewers a much more interactive and in-the-moment way of experiencing the moving image. For people with advanced enough cameras, Condition One’s technology allows them to film video that captures 180 degrees of view. Once captured and edited, the video, which can be viewed through iPad and iPhone apps (you can see their showcase app here), gives people an interactive window on to a specific space. As viewers manipulate and move the mobile device, they can see a full field of vision. As my colleague Ryan Kim said, it’s almost like a live version of Google Street View. Just this week, they announced that they raised $500,000 from Mark Cuban.

Poptip
Founder: Kelsey Falter
Inspired by Falter’s passion for feedback, Poptip gives marketers, the media and other organizations a way to instantly take the pulse of the twitterati (and eventually those on Facebook, Pinterest and other social media). The service offers a way to create and deliver polls that exist entirely within Twitter. A few scenarios Falter suggested include helping a news show crowdsource guest suggestions for an upcoming segment or a political candidate solicit feedback to inform future speeches and campaign messaging. The company already has firm plans to work with MLB Fan Cave, ESPN and CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight. Prior to joining TechStars, Falter (who is just 22, by the way) raised a $640,000 seed round from Lerer Ventures and Softbank. (We wrote a bit more about it here.)

Pickie
Founders: Sonia Sahney, Abhijit Rao, Ryan Weber
With all the social commerce sites springing up, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for consumers to filter out the junk to find the gems online. But Pickie, which is set to launch later this summer, believes it can help consumers navigate social shopping with a Flipboard-like app for catalog shopping. It uses social data from a variety of networks to generate a personalized magazine for commerce. In addition to displaying content curated with social data, Pickie gives users a selection of items that are trending across the different sites it tracks, as well as a collection of recommended items.

Rewind.Me
Founder: Craig Danuloff
Rewind.Me believes that all the data we create through Foursquare, Tripit, Instagram, Twitter and more is an asset we should be able to put to work. For now, the startup has an iOS app that gives users a rich view of their past and allows them to visualize their personal data. But eventually it plans to help users get special rewards and deals based on their aggregate data. This week, it announced that it had raised $800,000 in seed funding from investors including First Round Capital, KBS+P Ventures, Silicon Alley Venture Partners and other angels.

Smallknot
Founders: Jay Lee, Ben Rossen, Jason Punzalan
Smallknot brings crowdfunding to the neighborhood level with a platform that lets people invest in the businesses closest to their homes. The average loan size is between $2,000 and $15,000, Lee told us, but they fund specific projects, such as a new oven for a local restaurant or repairs for an outdoor patio. It also gives borrowers the ability to repay funds in-kind, with special goods, perks or private parties (even an oil painting, in one instance). The startup grew out of Greenville, S.C. but has launched a couple of pilots in Brooklyn, so far.

Wander
Founders: Jeremy Fisher, Keenan Cummings
The NY-based location-meets-curation startup has been in stealth mode since its inception, but has already raised more than $1 million from a group of angel investors, including SV Angel, Google Ventures and others. On stage at TechStars Thursday, Fisher pulled back the curtain on Wander, which is somewhat like a dedicated Tumblr or Pinterest for travel and location-based exploring.  On their pages (which are called “Wanderlogs”), users can share places they’ve been, plan to go or aspire to go. The hope is that the site will become a beautiful, expressive social network that revolves around place. “What Pinterest is doing for products, we’re doing for places,” Fisher said.

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Launched at the NEXT conference in Berlin on Tuesday, hub:raum is similar to Wayra (and most incubators or accelerators) in that it gives the selected startups access to mentors and lets them maintain “entrepreneurial independence.”

The money on offer here is a lot more, though: up to €300,000 ($390,000) in seed funding — for a “minority interest” — rather than Wayra’s €50,000 maximum. Of course, the flipside is that it’s tougher to get in: hub:raum will only pick 10-15 companies each year, whereas Wayra picks up to 20.

According to Telekom, one of the mentors is Jörg Rheinboldt, co-founder of Rocket’s eBay clone Alando who became MD of eBay Deutschland when the U.S. company bought its local rival.

Here’s a statement from Telekom innovation chief Thomas Kiessling, although frankly most of these words could come from Telefónica describing Wayra:

“With hub:raum, our incubator in Berlin, we wish to promote promising business ideas and establish contact with innovative talent so as to recognize innovations and growth markets and tap into new business fields early on. The incubator represents an important interface between the flexibly and highly responsive startup scene and the corporate world.”

What’s the difference?

Min-Kin Mak is one of the core team heading up hub:raum. He explained a key difference between it and Wayra, which runs scheduled six-month programs.

“We offer between six and 12 months, depending on the stage of the company,” he said. “People can start any time – we don’t have set dates.”

Telekom has one more trick up its sleeve, although it seems to be partly a matter of coincidence: New York’s General Assembly, which offers entrepreneurs “pragmatic and multi-disciplinary education at the intersection of technology, design, and entrepreneurship”, is about to open a campus in Berlin. And it seems there will be some interplay between the two.

“We’re going to run some of the programs together – there will definitely be close contact,” Mak suggested.

So to sum up, Berlin founders could find hub:raum a more convenient proposition than Wayra because it’s in their city, and they may also find the General Assembly connection providing a bridge to the New York scene.

On the other hand, Telefónica’s bigger than Deutsche Telekom, and since both operators are offering successful startups the prize of access to their global market, Wayra may have the edge there.

We still don’t know the precise details of the equity Telekom is looking for from its fledglings, which is somewhat important. But otherwise, these look like pretty similar deals.

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We’ve written before about the need for newspapers to be “digital first” and to think like startups as they try to adapt to the evolution of the media industry. Can a traditional newspaper take an even bigger step and actually help give birth to new technologies or services by acting like a startup incubator? At least two of them are planning to give it a try: the Philadelphia News Network just launched an incubator, and Digital First Media recently launched a venture-capital arm and says it plans to invest in tech startups. While both of these efforts could easily fail, at least these two media entities aren’t just sitting back and relying on paywalls to save them.

The Philadelphia incubator is known as Project Liberty, and is being operated by Ben Franklin Technology Partners, a non-profit agency aimed at fostering new business in Pennsylvania — who also chose the three existing entrants to the program — but will be based in the same complex that is home to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, as well as the online site Philly.com. The project is being funded by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which has backed a number of media-related startups over the years, and gives the three startups six months worth of office space and other support while they work on partnerships with the papers.

New technologies could help companies adapt

Read/Write Web has an overview of the three startups that have been accepted to the program: CloudMine provides an API service that makes it easier for developers to come up with new applications, and another named SnipSnap lets customers scan printed coupons and then use them online — a natural fit for a newspaper that carries plenty of advertising inserts. The third is ElectNext, which is developing a web app to help readers decide who to vote for, a goal that has an obvious fit with the editorial side of the newspapers.

The CEO of the Philadelphia News Network, meanwhile — former Newsweek publisher Greg Osberg — has said he has much bigger goals for the project, and that he wants to “find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com.”

Whether that’s going to happen or not remains to be seen, but at least the startup idea shows a spark of life from the newly reformed newspaper company, which was created after lenders to the previous owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News bought the assets out of bankruptcy. And it’s not the first unusual venture to come out of the new media company: earlier this year, it announced a plan to offer discounted Android-based tablets to readers who signed up for one or two-year subscriptions to the Inquirer and the Daily News.

Digital First Media, the parent company of the Media News Group — which owns a chain of newspapers across the U.S., including the Detroit News, the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News — is also wading into the tech-startup funding game. The company’s CEO, John Paton, who helped turn around the bankrupt Journal-Register Co. before taking the helm of Digital First Media, last month announced the creation of a new venture-capital arm that will invest in media-related tech startups. Paton said this approach was a natural outgrowth of the company’s “digital first” mantra, which he has outlined in a number of presentations as well as on his blog.

Experimentation is something more companies should try

I admit I was skeptical when I heard about Digital First’s new venture-capital entity, in part because it sounded like the media company was going to try and compete with the hundreds of VC firms and angels who are already trying (and mostly failing) to pick the next Foursquare or Facebook. But Paton said the emphasis of the new venture would be on partnering with companies that could help the company take advantage of digital media in new ways, which is something more traditional media outlets should be thinking about.

Other media companies have already taken similar steps in this direction: the Financial Times just acquired the company that developed its HTML5 app, which allowed the newspaper to do an end-run around Apple’s restrictions on iOS apps — as well as the 30-percent fees it charges content companies that offer subscriptions. And the New York Times helped give birth to News.me, a social content-filtering app that was later acquired by Betaworks, a New York-based incubator run by John Borthwick, in a deal that gave the newspaper shares in the company (News.me has since been spun off). The NYT also has its own in-house incubator of sorts in the beta620 lab project.

As Om and others have mentioned, there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about the explosion of incubators — a trend that didn’t end well in the last tech bubble — but despite the low odds of success, it’s still interesting to see companies like the Philadelphia Media Network and Digital First Media trying to think outside the box a little.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users John Donges and David Daniels

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But right now, some of the most reputable names in Silicon Valley are offering to give their attention to a startup pitch from the highest monetary bidder. There is a good excuse in this case, though: It’s all in the name of charity.

A current auction on CharityBuzz.com is offering a package that includes face time in Silicon Valley with Y Combinator, Wired magazine, and more. Proceeds will go to the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies (yes, that’s its real name) a non-profit which aims to develop ways to incubate and fund projects in under-represented geographic regions.

According to CharityBuzz, the winning bidder will get:

• Office hours with Y Combinator’s Harj Taggar, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan and Jessica Livingston in San Francisco
• Lunch with a Wired editor in New York City or San Francisco
• Airfare courtesy of Hipmunk.com (a $350 flight voucher)
• Accommodations courtesy of airbnb.com (a $300 voucher)
• $250 worth of Z credits from Zaarly

It’s a pretty sweet deal for any startup founder, especially if a company is based far away from California; it appears bids can be made from anywhere in the world. Right now, the highest bid is at $1,900.00, and being that the auction is in $250 increments, the next bidder will have to offer up $2,150 to beat it. The auction closes at noon EST on Dec. 19, so startups still have some more time to shoot for the prize.

It’ll be interesting to see how high the price goes, especially given the currently frothy environment for web startups. If you have any bets on how much a Silicon Valley startup pitch should be worth nowadays, please chime in using the comment section below.

And here’s a video from earlier this summer of Jessica Livingston discussing what Y Combinator looks for in startup founders:

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But there are a few recent developments that, taken together, are creating an even more powerful efficiency boost: one that puts resources that were once limited to well-funded corporations and research universities within the reach of a new generation of startup founders. Perhaps it’s time entrepreneurs took advantage of this new environment to solve larger problems, instead of building yet another lifestyle app.

The way I see it, the big components at play here are:

New money is investing in big ideas

Even though the larger economy is rocky, there are a lot of people just itching to pour money into the next big technological thing — hence pre-launch photo sharing startups that net $41 million in funding. While many tech investors are focused on funding sure short-term bets (i.e. the tried and true realm of web and mobile apps), there’s a budding sect aggressively looking to invest in larger, long-term innovations.

Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs is one of the most explicit examples of this. As we reported at the program’s launch last month, Breakout Labs will aim to fund nascent research proposals: opportunities too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants. Basically, Thiel, who recently told the New Yorker he doesn’t consider the iPhone to be a major technological breakthrough, is saying: Enough with the toys and games. It’s time for us to make something big.

Supercomputers are going mainstream

The next “something big” in tech might not require all that much money to make.

If you want to build something really complex — think aeronautics, new pharmaceutical drugs, medical devices, jet engines, and the like — you need high-performance computing (HPC). HPC solves advanced computational and scientific problems by using a massive amount of computing power to solve very complicated problems that involve a lot of moving parts.

HPC facility at Argonne National Labs (attribution below)

It has historically been so prohibitively expensive to do HPC that only entities such as governments, militaries, well-funded universities, or huge corporations have the kind of access to the machines needed for computational fluid dynamics problems and the like.

But last year, Amazon started offering HPC as a service with “Cluster Compute,” making high-performance computing available in the same way that EC2 made regular servers available in the cloud. Earlier this month, Amazon souped up its Cluster Compute offering significantly — now, Amazon’s HPC-as-a-Service offering provides access to one of the world’s top 500 supercomputers for around $1,000 per hour. Meanwhile, tools such as CUDA and OpenCL give programmers the ability to harness massive numbers of compute cores without having to learn a special programming language.

This takes HPC out of the realm of scientists and makes programming for massively multicore HPC systems accessible to software engineers. What Amazon’s EC2 did for democratizing the ability to develop scalable web apps, HPC-as-a-Service can do for democratizing the ability to solve computationally heavy engineering problems or build gigantic predictive models.

3-D printing is becoming a reality

Printed engine prototype by Mcor Technologies

Once challenging technology problems have been mastered with the help of HPC, some of the solutions will need to be prototyped and put into physical production. This is still a very labor- and cost-intensive process, which is a big reason why many startups prefer to stay in the virtual realm. But the emergence of viable 3-D printing technology is on the cusp of changing that, making it cheaper and easier than ever before to make a physical prototype of a new design.

How much of a reality is 3-D printing today? It’s now available at the consumer level with a startup called MakerBot, which makes a 3-D printer called a Thing-O-Matic. The Thing-O-Matic costs $1,200 and makes relatively simple items such as small toys and gadgets like bottle openers on demand. Three-dimensional printers from companies such as Mcor Technologies are aimed at making more complex prototypes for enterprise-level applications.

Of course, startups have the option of skipping the prototype step and selling simply the IP of their HPC-developed designs to a larger company. But if a startup wants to have more control over the production of what it has made, 3-D printing brings that much more within small companies’ reach.

What will be the hot startup of the next era?

If everything works out as it should, the smart, early stage entrepreneurs of the near future won’t be thinking about how to build the perfect restaurant recommendation app. Instead, they’ll devote their energy to designing a more efficient airplane wing to conserve jet fuel, or a tiny device that can perform real-time monitoring of kidney enzyme levels, or an even more awesome landing gear apparatus for the next Mars Rover. Starting the next SpaceX or Virgin Galactic won’t need the kind of funding that only an Elon Musk or Richard Branson can provide.

Today, the lion’s share of companies that emerge from incubators such as Y-Combinator and 500 Startups deal in consumer-focused web apps. Here’s hoping that in the near future, incubators will look for startup founders who are taking real advantage of their new-found access to serious tech tools to build bigger and bolder products. It seems to me that driving toward that kind of world is where the attention of the tech industry — and the media that covers it — should focus.

“What’s Next?” image courtesy of Flickr user Crysti

Image of the HPC facility at the Center for Nanoscale Materials at the Advanced Photon Source courtesy of Flickr user Brian Howard on behalf of the Argonne National Laboratory.

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Since launching in 2007, the organization has become Europe’s premier training grounds for startups, linking some of the continent’s top young companies to a broad network of advisers and investors. It’s already invested in dozens of businesses, and this week pushed forward with more as it brought 16 companies to London for a week of intensive mentoring. But it doesn’t stop there.

Today Seedcamp is unleashing a whirlwind of announcements — including new investors, new advisers, partnerships with 500 Startups and Angellist, and deeper links to a range of European startup events. That’s on top of the already-announced Seedhack scheme.

And the goal? To make sure that, eventually, every startup of significance will have Seedcamp’s fingerprints on it somewhere.

“We want to be the Ivy League of accelerators,” says Reshma Sohoni, the group’s CEO. “All the accelerators, all the seed programs, the Y Combinators and the TechStars and the startup weekends… they are all about teaching entrepreneurship. We know that lots of these universities can and will exist, but we want Seedcamp to be one of the best places to go.”

“I think everyone’s been talking about an incubator bubble,” she adds. “But we just decided to do what we’ve always wanted to do — build the ecosystem to help startups.

That’s why today’s announcements — released en masse — are intended to make it stand out from the crowd. The details include:

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