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"A little more than a year ago, we published a list of 9 Latin American accelerators you should know. It included names such as 21212, Aceleradora, Startup Farm and Wayra, which have had a transforming impact on the Latin American startup scene, as showcased during TNW Conference Latin America's Best of Accelerators Startup Battle last month. While it is still valid for the most part, it is now far from exhaustive, as new accelerators keep on emerging. This is particularly true in Brazil, where entrepreneurs looking for seed funding and mentoring now have new opportunities to look into, especially in specific niches. Here are five initiatives you should check out:"

"Venture funding is growing as well. According to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, the amount of New York City-based startups that received venture funding rose 34 percent between 2007 and 2011, while deals in Silicon Valley declined 7 percent and those for the country overall dropped 8 percent. Last year, venture investors plowed $2.75 billion into 390 startups in the New York City area-the most money and investments since 2001, when the dot-com bubble was rapidly losing air in Manhattan's "Silicon Alley" and everywhere else, too. So far this year, $942 million has been invested in 182 startups in New York."

It takes more than a big idea and a thorough business plan to start a new business. Most entrepreneurs aren't quite sure what else it takes until they're well underway, and many are shocked to discover important elements of startup success that they simply hadn't considered at all. To find out what startups learn they really need but never though of, we asked eight successful young entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) for their input. The results may surprise you as much as it did these startup founders:

"Data visualization startup GetBulb was among the five startups chosen by a panel of entrepreneurs and VCs to enter the contest, and it has now scooped the €50,000 grand prize, taking the form of a convertible loan note from venture capital firm DFJ Esprit. GetBulb is targeting media companies, letting them produce data visualisations for high-res print, as well as for interactive online graphics. The other finalists were MyiFli, a mobile advertising and content service; PicTurk, a photography awards platform; KnockOn.ie, an amateur rugby community; and Storyflow, a widget to surface related links around a news story using graphics. Despite missing out on the big prize, each of the startups is working in some way with The Irish Times Group to grow their businesses, and they're also being provided with marketing to a value of €10,000."

Since the crisis of 2008 New York City's massive financial sector - the city's richest economic engine, once seen to have unlimited potential for growth - has languished. In the meantime, attention has turned to its nascent startup sector, home to Foursquare, Tumblr, 10gen, Etsy and Gilt, where VC investment has surged even as it's been flat in other big U.S. tech centers (PDF). I've started to poke around the tech community here with a view toward eventually publishing a paper on the rise of New York's startup scene. In my initial conversations, I've come up with a few broad questions I'll focus on, and I'd welcome thoughts from this blog's legion of smart readers on any of these.

As Start-Up Chile is about to welcome its fifth batch of teams and reach the 500 startup milestone, many would be curious to know what has happened to its previous alumni. That is the question that US entrepreneur Nathan Lustig is contributing to answering; while Start-Up Chile's staff is currently in the process of collecting data on the program's first rounds, which involves contacting hundreds of startups, Lustig has already gathered his own information on a few of them. As a matter of fact, Lustig took part in Start-Up Chile's pilot round, which saw 22 startups move to Santiago from late 2010 in exchange for a $40k grant per company and a one-year visa.

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC, has revealed that it's launching a mentoring scheme for digital startups called BBC Labs. The official launch event is on June 22 at Google's Campus, a co-working space in east London. The six month programme is aimed at emerging digital media companies in the UK, with a view towards helping the selected startups gain traction and scale by working closely with them - the ultimate goal is to help them strike a commercial partnership with BBC Worldwide.

"tartups tend to be discreet when they're raising money. Often it's because entrepreneurs are universally paranoid about revealing any details of their business. But there's also a very real reason to keep things hush-hush: the Securities and Exchange Commission has a ban on "general solicitation," left over from the days when crooks would go door to door selling imaginary oil fields to the gullible and overly optimistic. The 30-year-old ban restricts startups, and other issuers of equity in exchange for money, from pitching to anyone but "accredited investors" who meet a magic combination of criteria. That ban is about to be lifted, however, thanks to the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) that passed in April. Soon, there will be no impediment to plastering "we're raising a $1 million seed round, invest in us" in the middle of a startup's homepage, and there's no doubt that some zealous entrepreneur will. The SEC was charged with hammering out specific rules and adding investor protections related to general solicitation, and it released a proposed rule at the end of August. But critics have joined voices in vehement dissent, saying the agency's proposal merely parrots the vague phrasing in the JOBS Act without adding in any protections against predatory pitching."

C'est un fait qui est incontestable : plus de 90% des jeunes entreprises innovantes américaines qui se créent sont vouées à l'échec. C'est particulièrement le cas dans le domaine des hautes technologies où les risques sont plus importants : exploration de nouveaux marchés, incertitudes sur la technologie, redéfinition des paysages compétitifs, etc. De multiples ouvrages, conférences et partages d'expertise sont déjà disponibles pour tenter de guider les jeunes entrepreneurs et augmenter leurs chances de succès, mais aucun ne peut se prétendre être une "recette du succès" pour toute nouvelle JEI. Chaque marché de haute technologie possède en effet des particularités bien définies, qui empêchent de dégager des structures de succès communes. L'entreprise Blackbox, responsable de l'étude "Startup Genôme", dont nous vous relations l'existence dans une précédente brève [1], a entrepris de centrer son étude sur les startups du domaine du web, industrie la plus dynamique actuellement. Les données financières, économiques, marketing, technologiques, stratégiques de plus de 3 200 entreprises (principalement américaines) ont ainsi été décortiquées pour faire émerger les motifs de réussite ou d'échec de ces entreprises, et ainsi procurer une aide précieuse pour le développement de ces dernières. L'approche est particulièrement intéressante car très scientifique. L'étude a été rendue possible par le boom actuel des systèmes d'analyse et d'interprétation de grand volumes de données (ou "big data"), qui s'annonce comme un marché à fort potentiel de croissance dans les prochains mois.

""In the tech startup world, people tend to equate entrepreneurial activity with innovation, and that's the wrong assumption," said Shenkar, a professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University. "There's a long history of successful startups that are built on imitation, not innovation.""

10sheet hopes to reinvent bookeepping and help small businesses save time and money, the Canadian startup explained today during TechStars Demo Day in New York. As a matter of fact, 10sheet's $69/month price point sounds quite appealing, compared to the costs of a regular bookkeeper for small businesses and startups. In addition, the company also insists that a paperless solution is much more convenient than manual bookkeeping. Here's how 10sheet pictures your future books:

Comment stimuler l'innovation technologique dans le pays ? En améliorant les connexions entre fonds et startup, en popularisant le crowdfounding ou encore en créant un marché de pré-introduction en Bourse.

Social eating startups are one flavor currently flooding the collaborative consumption space, with names such as GrubWithUs, LetsLunch, and local DC startup Wednesdays.com.

Well, it's been quite a year already for the crowdfunding industry. With the JOBS Act becoming law, the tech industry (and the economy at large) are headed for some big changes. Namely, the legalization of crowdfunding in startups for non-accredited investors has come to pass. Yes, now even your mom can invest in your startup. While many of the consequences (positive or negative) of the legalization will play out over the next few years, the most well-known crowdfunding platform has been busy racking up a blockbuster season. If it weren't there already, Kickstarter hit the tipping point in February, as it saw a number of record-breaking projects and landed squarely in mainstream consciousness thanks to a slew of media coverage.

"Higher education is rapidly changing--you don't have to even be paying much attention to see that. Universities have started streaming lectures en masse, schools like Harvard and MIT are teaming up to create content tailored for the web, startups like UniversityNow are creating reasonably priced online universities, and startups like Udacity offer online-only classes from renowned professors. None of this existed 10 years ago, and the field isn't done changing yet. A new report from Pew Internet looks at what higher education will look like in 2020, based on survey responses from over 1,000 "Internet experts, researchers, observers and users.""

Once just an instant messaging startup, Meebo has been officially picked up by Google.

While there are more than 7,000 business incubators around the world, very few focus specifically on education technology. In fact, only in the past few years has there been major growth in the number of these highly-focused incubators. Part of this increased attention is an outgrowth of a mission to genuinely help education. Yet these kinds of incubators are also thriving simply because edtech is a solid investment, as the education technology market is poised to grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years. A handful of successful startups have already come out of these edtech incubators, but as the number and variety of these incubators grows worldwide, the ranks of edtech superstars likely will, too, which could have major ramifications for the future of education. Here, we highlight just a few of the edtech incubators that are making waves in the world today, a list that's sure to grow rapidly over the next decade.

One could argue that Amazon.com has had more impact on the startup community than nearly any corporate venture capital fund, largely driven through the low-cost services it provides via Amazon Web Services. But the venture capital community wasn't always a fan.

In our social entrepreneurship series, The World at Work, Mashable interviews the faces behind the startups and projects that are working to make a global impact.

magine a community that gathered one thousand of the boldest, brightest, and most talented tech entrepreneurs from around the world. Now imagine that this community was a part of Silicon Valley, the best place to scale a high-tech company... Well, that dream is becoming a reality. Plus de 146 Startups se sont montré intéressées.