For the first time since launching its incubator program, 500 Startups is requiring companies in its 2013 spring batch to submit an application. The incubator will accept applications via AngelList beginning today.

Previously, the program/investment fund only admitted startups on the basis of recommendations from venture firms, past 500 Startups graduates, and others — a process that had a track record of relative success for producing good companies. However, 500 Startups is increasingly looking for more international companies, which is difficult to do with an invite-only requirement.

“We generally like to avoid having international startup founders stalk our partners to get an introduction,” said 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai, who told VentureBeat that the invite-only requirement did cause a few founders from outside the country to track them down at a past event. (Note: this actually worked out for the best, she says, but it wasn’t the most efficient way to learn about a company.)

500 Startups first experimented with AngelList applications for its last batch of startups back in September 2012, bringing in about 10 companies from the applications. The partners were so impressed with the results that they decided to make it the new standard for admitting new companies to the program.

“We are now recommending ALL of our startups use AngelList — not just our accelerator companies, but seed and Series A companies and later too,” the group said in a statement. “Given that we use AngelList as a platform anyway, it made sense to use it for all our applications too.”

The registration process for 500 Startups’ incubator runs through March 1, with decisions being made around the end of the month. And as it has with previous batches, 500 Startups said it’s looking for companies that bring diversity to the tech industry, which means it’s looking for women founders and founders from outside of Silicon Valley.

Photo of 500 Startups founder Dave McClure by John Koetsier/VentureBeat

Startup incubator 500 Startups announced its fifth batch of companies today, with over half coming from international markets.

As VentureBeat has previously reported, 500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program that’s become a brand name over the last few years. The group invests $25,000 to $250,000 in primarily consumer and small-to-medium-sized Internet startups as well as startups related to web infrastructure services. This batch of companies is the first that included 500 Startups’ new application process through AngelList. (Previously, 500 Startups was invite/recommendation only).

“The (application) process worked really well for us, and we plan to keep working with AngelList for future batches,” the group said in a statement. “We received hundreds of applications and ended up selecting eight companies.”

500 Startups emphasized how diverse its latest batch is, noting that 21 percent of the 33 companies it chose have at least one female founder, and 57 percent are based outside of the U.S.

We’ve listed all 33 of the new 500 Startups companies below, along with a brief description of each. The group of founders from the batch also created a short video about “Sh*t 500 Founders Say,” which is also embedded below.

• BabyList – A baby registry that works like Pinterest. Put anything on the web onto your baby registry. Makes pregnancy less overwhelming and more fun.
• Chewse – Marketplace for groups to order great food easily.
• Cinemacraft - Because video thumbnails are archaic, Cinemacraft’s videogram service produces an interactive pictorial summary of the video (comic). Makes video thumbnails come to life.
• Club W - Curated, personalized wine subscription service.
• CompStak - Creates transparency in commercial real estate by gathering information that is hard to find, difficult to compile, or currently unavailable.
• Cubie - Cubie Messenger (Android, iPhone) is a free messenger that creatives can use to chat and draw. Over 4M users and growing.
• Cuponomia - Cuponomia is a marketplace to search, discover, and share deals and online coupon codes in Brazil.
• Curious Hat - Builds mobile exploration tools for curious children.
• Dealflicks - Offers movie tickets and concessions for up to 60% off. Like Priceline or Hotwire but for movie theaters.
• everbill - Provides an easy way to issue invoices and estimates.
• femeninas - Fashion and beauty portal for women.
• gazeMetrix - Looks at videos and pictures and help brands measure their visibility.
• Hunie - A community that helps designers get constructive and honest critiques from fellow designers.
• Iconfinder - Wants to be the world’s leading site for icons.
• iDreamBooks - Rotten Tomatoes for books.
• Instamojo - Sell your digital creations with just one click. Gumroad for India.
• Kickfolio – Helps brands promote their iPhone apps. Instead of screenshots or movies, brands can embed interactive iPhone app demos on any web page.
• LaunchGram - Aggregates news about products and launches coming soon in verticals such as movies, electronics, video games, and cars.
• Markerly - Increases publisher page views and engagement by providing next generation social sharing and discovery tools.
• Pick1 - Retargeting via automated market research – big data for opinions.
• Privy - Automated, digital ad agency.
• Qual Canal - Tracks conversations about TV shows in social media to deliver insightful audience information to broadcasters, brands, and agencies.
• Repairy - A web-based customer relationship and resource management system for car repair shops and dealerships, integrated with a spare parts marketplace.
• SupplyHog - Creates a better way to purchase building materials.
• Tealet - Marketplace that connects tea drinkers with tea growers.
• TouristEye - Lets you plan trips on the web and view all the info & maps offline on your mobile.
• TradeBriefs - Empowers Indian professionals through industry expertise and jobs.
• Traity - Measures people’s reputation in worldwide 360 feedback to improve transactions between strangers.
• Translate Abroad - A suite of simple translation apps that uses your smartphone camera to instantly translate text without Internet.
• UniPay - A mobile payment platform for Brazil.
• WalletKit - An SaaS platform to create, manage, and deliver digital passes to mobile wallets.
• Wideo - An online platform that will allow you to create, quickly edit, and share your own animated videos.
• WhoAPI - Delivers extensive information about domain data.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce’s Desk.com has partnered with notable incubators Y Combinator, TechStars, 500 Startups, FounderFuel, and more to give a ton of startups six months of free software designed to help with customer service and support.

As we wrote when Desk.com launched in January, the service competes with Zendesk and TalkDesk to give small and medium-sized companies cloud-based customer support management. With the desktop or mobile apps, business can field queries through phone, email, web, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels.

Basically, Desk.com is the sort of critical software that can make sure your startup is actually being responsive to precious early customers. Y Combinator, FounderFuel, and other incubators/accelerators that partnered with Desk.com already give their startups perks like seed funding, mentoring, and space to work, but they also toss in things like software to make their programs more attractive.

Montreal’s FounderFuel, for example, gives startups a $25,000 investment for 6 percent equity. It also has partnerships with Rackspace and Amazon Web Services for free cloud hosting and SendGrid for free transaction email support. Now it can add Desk.com to that list.

“We see great value with the partnerships we have in place,” FounderFuel general manager Ian Jeffery told VentureBeat. “It’s difficult to get into accelerators like ours. These companies are carefully selected.”

Desk.com, which was previously Assistly, knows about the challenges of being a startup. While it wasn’t part of an incubator, the company saw the things that could go right or wrong as a small San Francisco-based company.

“Even though we are part of Salesforce, we still consider ourselves to be a startup in many ways,” Desk.com vice president and general manager Alex Bard told us. “We had a lot of help from the community and now we’re giving back. Sometimes we give talks to incubators, and we do webinars for startups.”

Of course, Desk.com has self-serving reasons for giving away six months of free software. First, it wants to create paying customers from an elite group of startups that have already been vetted. And second, giving away the service creates goodwill and word-of-mouth with the influential and talkative startup scene.

On a related note, Desk.com is also a sponsor of The Startup Pizza Fund, cash dedicated to events hosted by cool early-stage startups. The Startup Pizza Fund gives a pizza party to one group a month.

Check out some of the other incubators Desk.com will provide its software to below:

Photo credit: Desk.com

WeWork Labs, a spin-off of the successful WeWork co-working spaces, has already picked many of its first crop of workers, including ShopperSeeks.com‘s founder Andrea Gouw and Twitter hacker Abraham Williams. The space is the second of its kind — the WeWork Labs in New York, which calls itself an entrepreneur residency, has proven extremely successful and recently added the mother of all amenities: health insurance. (VentureBeat has a space in WeWork’s New York co-working office.)

For $300 a month, aspiring “startup-adjacent” professionals and freelancers get 24/7 access to the SOMA space’s long shared tables, meeting rooms, telephone rooms, showers (for the bikers), and game lounge with a pool table and an Xbox.

Directors Kaitlin Pike and Seth Blank hope to bring together entrepreneurs, developers, designers, marketers, advisors, and investors, and then sit back and watch the magic happen as they bounce ideas off each other, meet-cute with co-founders, and ultimately “get the hell out of the space.” They hope to make the final mix 50 percent female.

Pike and Blank gave us a tour of the sunny new digs, which feels like a combination of a dorm, public library, and CB2 catalog.

Before signing up for your local startup accelerator or incubator, there are a few things you should keep in mind. Is your pitch perfected? Does it matter which group you join? Is there a right or wrong time to sign up? We asked these fifteen entrepreneurs for their nuggets of advice on navigating the world of startup accelerators.

Do your research to find the right fit

You should do your homework on any accelerator you’re considering. What do they offer? What are some of their success stories? What happens to companies that don’t succeed? How often do their teams get funded? Depending on the accelerator you join, you’ll get very different answers to those questions. Make sure to not only talk to the accelerator but also past companies, both successful and not.

Jason Evanish (@Evanish), Greenhorn Connect

Don’t be a perfectionist and accept the guidance

I think these groups are really important to early-stage startup attempts — the mentorship, community, and exposure they offer far outweigh any equity you might share with them in return. Don’t get caught up in trying to build something perfect; focus your efforts on customer development and proving your assumptions, so they can help you move that learning into a solid first product.

Derek Shanahan (@dshanahan ), Foodtree

Accomplish something on your own first

After having a detailed discussion with TechStars graduate and Contently.com co-founder Shane Snow, my takeaway was to have built an impressive resume of personal accomplishments to show you’re capable of actually building a real business. Incubators and accelerators want to train entrepreneurs, but they need to make sure you’re coachable and have actual potential to become a real star.

Danny Wong (@blanklabel), Blank Label Group

Be prepared to immerse yourself and go all in

You need to dedicate your time into this — it’s an endeavor that requires focus 24/7. Also, look at the opportunity as a time to find the right co-founder, strategic partners, and to be honest and upfront with the organizers about what you need. The more you give, the more you get!

Ash Kumra (@AshKumra ), DesiYou

Prove that you are committed

Demonstrate commitment and focus on results; incubators and accelerators invest in people and teams more than markets. It’s important to have a disruptive idea, but the drive and capabilities of the team are much more correlated to success than the size of the market or details of the business plan. They want to see a smart, dedicated team that is passionate about executing.

John Harthorne (@jharthorne), MassChallenge

Don’t settle for any incubator, find the best

If you are thinking of applying to an incubator or accelerator, be sure to find the best. Even if you have to give up a larger portion of your company, it will be worth it for the amount of growth it will help you with in comparison to a lesser organization. Also, look for synergy and people whom you work well with — you want to feel welcomed into your new home.

Louis Lautman (@louislautman), Young Entrepreneur Society

Make sure your goals match up

All incubators and accelerators are not created equal. Some incubators focus on landing funding, others focus more on helping you build a revenue-generating firm. Make sure your goals align with that of your program.

Doreen Bloch (@DoreenBloch), Poshly Inc.

Reach out to alums

Before applying to an accelerator program, I would talk to alums of the program to make sure they had a good experience. It also might help if you could get some time to validate your idea for a business before jumping into one of these programs. Make sure the “proof of concept” even makes sense.

Patrick Curtis (@WallStreetOasis ), WallStreetOasis.com

Perfect your pitch

Many incubators are looking for the entrepreneur to make some type of pitch, so it’s important to practice, practice, practice. The more excited that you can make them about your concept, the higher likelihood that you will get accepted to the accelerator.

Lawrence Watkins (@lawrencewatkins), Great Black Speakers

Paint a picture of success

When creating your pitch, keep in mind that you want to convince the judges that your startup is truly going places. It’s going to be so successful that they will want to attach their name to get behind it. Show them that you’re going to be successful no matter what, so it’s in their best interest to have you affiliated with their program.

Stephanie Kaplan (@stephaniekaplan), Her Campus Media

Tell a great story

Remember, people are investing in you more than your idea. Businesses are fluid in the startup stage. Which means your personality and background is what really counts. While pedigree or experience matter, your curiosity, obsession and commitment matter more. Character trumps credentials. What’s the riddle you’re trying to solve? How have you overcome failure? Make them believe in you.

Michael Margolis (@getstoried), Get Storied

Master the art of explaining your idea clearly

Good entrepreneurs know a lot about their business and their market. But can you communicate this expertise in a way that resonates with decision-makers in the incubator and accelerator programs? Start by reading “The Art of the Start” by Guy Kawasaki and learn the “business of business communication” in the startup phase.

Kent Healy (@Kent_Healy), The Uncommon Life

Timing is everything

Think about what you aim to get out of the incubator or accelerator program in mind. People tend to assume that these are great kickstarters, and they can be, but it all depends on timing. Joining one at the wrong stage of your cycle can be feedback overload, or slow your growth in other ways. Sometimes you need to collect input and test your idea, and sometimes you just need to build.

Caroline Ghosn (@carolineghosn ), The Levo League

Don’t join on your first venture

Entrepreneurs are going to make mistakes and get things wrong more often than not. I suggest getting as much accomplished in the real world before applying for incubation. The more you can do before you need the help, the better your terms will be and the more serious they will take your application.

Lucas Sommer (@audimated), Audimated

There’s life after an accelerator

These are great opportunities, but your business must happen with or without them. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and the aspiration of being accepted to a “prestigious program” — after all, it’s validation that you’re on to something! But if things don’t work out, the show must go on. Your goal is to create a company, so don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

Tony Navarro (@hoostony ), Streamcal

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Image via tobimcfly/Flickr

In June 2010, ten startups at the Softex incubator at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas decided to break free from the university incubator they were housed in and form an entrepreneurial co-op of sorts, called the Associação Campinas Startups. Instead of relying on local business executives and professors to guide them, the entrepreneurs decided to learn from each other. The university was very supportive, and business mentors went out of their way to share their knowledge and experience. But the advice was always too theoretical or geared towards big companies. In short, it wasn’t relevant to the leaner, fast-paced technology world. Instead, the entrepreneurs found the greatest value in brainstorming sessions and casual information exchanges with each other over lunch or drinks after work.

This is a common problem for nascent tech incubators all over the world. Unless the entrepreneurs receive active mentoring by entrepreneurial superstars like Paul Graham, Brad Feld, and Dave McClure, almost always the startups and incubators both fail. A successful incubator’s value is in the knowledge shared, not in the office space and administrative support.

There was no Graham, Feld, or McClure in Campinas. So, the entrepreneurs decided to pool their knowledge and help one another. They would meet informally every day, and formally once a week. During the formal sessions, each startup would “scientifically” present the one big idea they were pursuing, a hypothesis on why they believed this would lead to success and measurements to back up their assessment. And during the weekly sessions, they would report their progress on implementing their ideas.

When you are a lone entrepreneur, you are answerable to no one but yourself, and it’s easy to go astray. You don’t have a board to hold you accountable or to guide you when you go off track. The Campinas group’s “peer review” served this purpose. It forced accountability, placing pressure on each team to plan and to perform. It also allowed the entrepreneurs to learn from one other.

Within a year of getting the association into high gear, the ten original startups and two more that joined, had increased their aggregated revenue from $330,000 to $2.1 million. They increased their combined headcount from 39 to 56. Many of the startups changed their strategies and plans, but none, so far, have failed. Several received funding from local angel investors. And this year, ten more startups have joined the group.

Gentros, a biotech startup that joined the association after its founding in 2008, produces vaccines for farm animals. Its CEO, Taíla Lemos, told me that, without the advice and mentoring she received, her startup would certainly have failed. Even though she was in an entirely different industry than the other entrepreneurs, the principles for building a successful company were the same. They taught her how to determine what her costumers needed, identify scientific viability, and manage her R&D projects. She learned the principles of “lean startup” development – the process of quickly developing a proof of concept, testing it with customers and iterating.

There is no telling if any of these startups will survive or achieve long-term success. There are no certainties in entrepreneurship. But the quality of the companies I witnessed was distinctly better than that of the startups I’ve seen in Silicon Valley. Ultimately, I give the startups being fostered in Campinas a higher than average chance of success.

There is also a lot happening on the entrepreneurial scene in Sao Paulo. The most energetic of these groups, Brazilian Innovators, is run by Bedy Yang—an entrepreneur who lives in Silicon Valley, but travels frequently to Sao Paulo to organize networking events. The meetings start with words of wisdom being shared by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs talking over Skype, and then turn into information exchange sessions over wine and cheese. What started two years ago as a group of two dozen has blossomed into a gathering of 300 attendees.

My prediction is that, by the end of this decade, we will see some Mark Zuckerbergs emerging from the slums of Sao Paulo or New Delhi, India or Valparaiso, Chile. Why, you ask? Because entrepreneurs are doing what governments can’t—creating innovation ecosystems.

Washington Post columnist Vivek Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, director of research for the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and senior research associate for the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.

Rio de Janeiro image via Shutterstock

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500 Startups, the early-stage firm founded by iconoclastic investor Dave McClure, is getting into the startup incubation business with its new 500 Startups Accelerator.

Incubators, where young companies receive office space, mentorship, and a little bit of funding, seems to be all the rage right now. But the model seems to be a particularly good fit for McClure. Not only did he run the fbFund incubator program for Facebook startups, but he’s also emphasized investing in companies at a much earlier stage and looking for smaller exits.

“We’re out to hit singles and doubles,” McClure told me yesterday. “We’re not trying to hit a home run every time and striking out a lot.”

Hosting and mentoring startups seems like a natural extension of that philosophy. The 500 Startups Accelerator will place an emphasis on design, distribution, and on the “lean startup” methodology. It will include access to the firm’s network of more than 120 mentors. Ten to 15 of those mentors will be “mentors in residence” who work at the incubator’s Mountain View, Calif. office on a weekly basis.

McClure told me that he doesn’t think 500 Startups is necessarily a competitor to other programs like Y Combinator and TechStars, because he isn’t limiting himself to freshly-formed startups. So a company could start out at another incubator, then join the 500 Startups Accelerator afterwards. (There aren’t any YC or TechStars alums in the current batch, but McClure noted that the firm has invested in a number of graduates from both programs.)

Moving forward, McClure predicted that 500 Startups’ investments will probably be split 50-50 between accelerator companies and other seed investments. Companies in the accelerator will receive $25,000 to $100,000 in exchange for 5 percent of their equity, and the firm may follow on with future investments. (For more mature startups that have already raised funding, 500 Startups will just join the funding under the terms set by existing investors, McClure said.)

Here’s the first group of companies:

• InternMatch — helps college students find internships.
• Baydin — offers “a personal trainer for your email.”
• 955 Dreams — says it builds “magical experiences on mobile devices”.
• YongoPal — matches students in Asia and the United States to help the Asian students learn English.
• Spoondate — a dating site for food-loving singles.
• Ninua — “collects the world’s stories, delivers them across platforms, and connects people around them.”
• Crowdrally — helps social influencers get paid for their endorsements.
• Rewardli — says it will help business owners “leverage their social graph in new and interesting ways.”
• Wednesdays — helps colleagues stay in touch through Wednesday lunches.
• A secret startup from Stew Langille, the former vice president of marketing at Mint.com.
• SpeakerGram — connects storytellers with audiences.
• Punched — offers loyalty cards for your cell phone

On Tuesday, the Plug and Play Tech Center, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup incubator, inked a deal with the government of Belgium to help connect entrepreneurs from that European country with Silicon Valley.

Often, the international competition for jobs is framed as a zero-sum game. But the Plug and Play Tech Center has figured out a way to spread the region’s risk-embracing culture to overseas entrepreneurs. And that can lead to jobs in both the U.S. and abroad.

With Belgium’s government research institute, IBBT, Plug and Play Tech Center will screen dozens of startups and bring 16 of them into its building for stays of three months or longer. During that time, it will introduce them to all sorts of movers and shakers. The introductions are a big attraction, since about 40 percent of the world’s VCs are located within driving distance. More than 100 VC firms make trips to the Plug and Play Tech Center every other month.

The Plug and Play Tech Center incubates startups in its Sunnyvale headquarters and various satellite locations. Its mission is to immerse startups in entrepreneurial culture and accelerate them by giving them space and access to other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors and high-tech executives. There are now more than 250 startups in the Plug and Play Tech Center’s buildings and more than 50 of them are international companies that were founded elsewhere.

The international focus started two years ago, amid the onset of the recession. It was a way to fill space in the buildings, but it was also a way of going full circle for Saeed Amidi (pictured, top left), chief executive of the Plug and Play Tech Center. Amidi is an immigrant himself who moved to Silicon Valley from Iran in 1979, after the Iranian Revolution. His family started a Persian rug store in Palo Alto, Calif., and then moved into real estate.

With Rahim Amidi and Pejman Nozad, Saeed Amidi started Amidzad Partners to invest in startups that moved into family-owned buildings; they scored big with investments in Google and PayPal. They started Plug and Play Tech Center almost five years ago, and now Amidzad invests in many of its startups. (Disclosure: Amidzad is an investor in VentureBeat).

The international focus is keeping the buildings full at a time when many are vacant. The company now has 20 agreements with overseas governments and institutions to accelerate international businesses by immersing them in Silicon Valley’s entrepreneur culture. It also has alliances with dozens of venture capital firms, universities, and major corporations such as Hewlett-Packard.

“The world is hungry for innovations and startup culture, Silicon Valley style,” Saeed Amidi said. “There’s a global paradigm shift, where small and medium-size companies are going to change the economies of the world. That’s also going to be good for Silicon Valley, because they will come here to be accelerated.”

He added, “Before, we used to import students that were incredibly smart to schools like Stanford. They started companies like Google. Now, we import the students, the technology, and even late-stage startups that have begun somewhere else. I believe this model will happen again and again, because companies are thinking globally.”

For the dozens of international companies in the ten international pavilions at Plug and Play, that’s true. They keep their engineering teams in their home countries, generating lots of jobs there. But they come to Silicon Valley for fundraising, business development, sales and marketing. That has happened with Amidzad portfolio companies such as Business Objects, which has more than 700 employees in Paris and 350 in Silicon Valley.

“During the downturn, most governments have kept up their investments in startups because they see it as a way to stimulate the economy,” said Carlos Baradello, associate dean for corporate and international programs at the University of San Francisco. “They come here, get accelerated, and now both countries create jobs. That is making the pie bigger for everyone.”

Belgium’s government invests around $40 million a year in companies spawned by its research institute. Wim De Waele (pictured above, right), chief executive of Belgium’s IBBT, said, “I believe our companies can be successful if they think globally and invest in marketing and their network ecosystem abroad. Silicon Valley is a hub for the technology business and we all look to it for what can be achieved.”

Christian Koestler, managing director and executive vice president for North America at Lixto, said his “price intelligence” company got started in Vienna, Austria. But he participated in the Austrian government’s program with Plug and Play and moved to Sunnyvale along with 20 other Austrian startups. It took about a week for him to realize that Silicon Valley was the place where he had to set up business operations, Koestler said. His company employs 20 in Austria and 5 in Silicon Valley.

“I didn’t believe Saeed at first, but now we are doing business as a Silicon Valley company and we have a completely different perception in the market,” he said.

The Amidis now have a $200 million venture fund, and they play to open five Plug and Play Tech Centers overseas. They expect to have one in Singapore by the end of the year and will likely open others in the Middle East and in Europe.