TechStars Offering Extra $100K to All Companies with New $24M Fund

Beyond the $6K per founder TechStars invests in startups selected for its 12-week program, the accelerator will offer an additional $100K in funding to all accepted startups beginning in 2012 thanks to a just-raised $24M fund. The money is intended to make TechStars more attractive to entrepreneurs and remove some of the fundraising pressure.

Investors in the new fund include Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, Right Side Capital Management and TechStars alumni. TechStars' existing funding comes from over 75 venture funds and angel investors.

The $100K is in the form of a convertible note, the same type of deal Y Combinator began offering its accepted startups in January though the YC amount is $150K [ see our analysis of the YC deal ].

The fund should last through at least

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Groovebug iPad App: Zite for Music

Groovebug, a personalized music magazine and discovery tool for iPad, scans your iTunes music library to show relevant content and lists artists in your collection on the right sidebar. 

The "Featured Content" section is hand-curated by DJs, musicians and music lovers. Users can navigate by swiping to the left or right.

Groovebug also features music festival content, including schedules, artist info and the option to buy tickets through Ticketmaster.

Groovebug is powered by The Echo Nest, a music application platform open to developers, and the app pulls artist videos from YouTube.

Similar music recommendation services include Pandora, Band of the Day [ see our story ] and Discovr. One thing we noticed: if you don't keep a lot of music on your iPad...

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The 50+ Startups TechCrunch Didn't Cover--But We Did

We just finished our first six weeks with a staff of three writers here at LAUNCH, and we're super proud of the fact that since Aug. 1 we've done over 250 posts, including 70 startup profiles.

Now, if you only read TechCrunch, you would have missed out on 55 startups that we profiled and they chose to ignore -- or covered after us. Copying and pasting short company descriptions into one long article doesn't count as coverage in our book.

Call us old-skool, but we like to talk to the founders, their investors and competitors and give you something with a little more value.

Also, we have no bylines, and we don’t think we’re important enough to write about ourselves (zing! pow!).  MG, Erick, Paul Carr and Arrington -- all have covered TechCrunch's recent dramas.

In fact, we're told that TechCrunch has banned its writers from linking to LAUNCH (what a compliment!). If

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Facebook News Ticker Provides Live Account of Friends' Activity

Facebook's most interesting new feature in awhile, the news ticker, will show you what your friends are doing in real time [ h/t Robert Scoble ].

Facebook's news feed wasn't designed for real time: you don't see every update from every friend, and even when friends post updates while you are both logged on, it may take several minutes before you see the post.

The new ticker sits on top of your chat window on the right-hand side of the screen and runs the length of the window. When you click on an item, a small window pops out to give you more...

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Watch TWiST Episode #189 Live at 1pm PST with Jon Ferrara

Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara will be on This Week in Startups live at 1pm PST today. 

Jon founded Nimble, a social CRM company, Nov. 2008 in Los Angeles. Nimble makes it easy for businesses to manage contacts, calendars and social networking conversations all in one place.

Before starting Nimble, he co-founded GoldMine Software in 1989. GoldMine was...

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