Network testing is hard work. You need to ensure coverage, regular data rates, and spread. That’s probably why T-Mobile happens to be testing their 1900 MHz HSPA+ signal around the Moscone Center in San Francisco just in time for WWDC.

Quoth T-Mobile to 9to5:

Arguably the time and location could feasibly be coincidental, but I doubt it. Where better to test connectivity with a band of iPhones than what amounts to the San Francisco iPhone Festival? As mentioned above, 1900 MHz HSPA+ service should be popping up in other locations across the country although I suspect T-Mobile will focus on markets where users are underserved, techie, and would love to spend $30 on T-Mobile’s unlimited data plans.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Hub Ventures, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on funding entrepreneurs “building a better world,” is the newest member of the TechStars network. The official announcement of its TechStars affiliation will be made next week. For those unfamiliar, the organization’s 12-week program provides companies with typical accelerator benefits like seed funding, mentorship, workshops and access to investors, but what makes this accelerator different are the types of startups it’s interested in. Specifically, Hub Ventures is looking for startups building solutions for things like collaborative consumption, healthy food systems, off-grid energy, clean energy, civic engagement, and other sorts of “change the world” technology.

“Our operating philosophy is that business and technology can play a key role in solving some of the issues of our time and to fill the gaps where government and philanthropy are unable to create sustainable impact, which some would say is quite large,” explains Hub Ventures founder Wes Selke. “The world needs more innovative models to solve these tough problems…and we believe our approach is on the cutting edge.”

The program is based out of Hub Bay Area, a collaborative workspace with over 1,000 members in San Francisco and Berkley, which is connected to 30 other locations through the Hub network. Before Hub Bay Area opened in 2009, there wasn’t really a physical space where like-minded social innovators could get together and collaborate. Now, Hub Ventures is there, hoping to tap into the emerging asset class of “impact investing” – something which JPMorgan forecasted to be a $400B-1T investment opportunity over the next decade.

Besides Hub Bay Area, other partners include Good Capital, Village Capital, ImpactAssets, and SOCAP. Many of the group’s growing list of over 40 mentors come from the program’s partner organizations, but some mentors come from mobile-focused companies like Nokia and ngmoco, some are angel investors, and others come from similarly focused startups, like ride-sharing startup RelayRides.

Participating companies will receive free and heavily discounted services in PR, human resources, web hosting, business process outsourcing, lean UX design, accounting, banking, legal assistance, and more. They also have access to Hub Venture founders via weekly office hours, and access to $10,000 to $20,000 in seed funding.

Hub Ventures officially launched in January 2011 and did a Spring 2011 cohort with 16 impact-oriented startups. Over half have raised money since its Investor Day in June 2011, ranging from $75,000 to $1 million, Selke tells us. Other startups have decided to bootstrap. A few of the standouts from the previous round were MobileWorks, a crowdsourcing platform that doubles incomes for workers in India, Zamzee, a device that combats teen obesity by motivating them to be more active, and SpyGlass, a wireless water quality monitoring platform.

The accelerator is now preparing for its second round, which will be smaller – probably 8 to 10 companies this time, says Selke. Interested entrepreneurs can apply now through March 5th. The program will begin April 16th and will wrap up on July 9th with its Demo Day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Startup incubator TechStars has raised $8 million in new funding for its programs in Boston, Boulder, New York, and Seattle. The new funding comes from more than fifty venture funds and over 25 individual angel investors. This brings the incubator’s total funding to nearly $11.5 million.

TechStars, which launched in 2007, is a “startup boot camp” for tech entrepreneurs in which selected startup receive up to $18,000 in seed funding (or $6,000 per founder up to three founders in exchange for 5 percent of the company), three months of mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program.

David Cohen, co-founder of TechStars, tells us that for the past few years, the incubator has been raising money incrementally for each program and location. But this raise enables TechStars to operate and fund startups for the next four years. He says that more than 70% of TechStars companies go on to raise venture or angel capital after the program ends and 7 of the first 20 companies incubated have now been acquired.

Cohen explains that the TechStars model takes a mentor and community-driven approach to incubating startups and supporting founders. The company pairs at least 10 mentors in the local technology industry with each startup to give founders access to both seasoned entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

While Cohen says that there are no immediate plans to expand TechStars to other locations, he said the new funding will also be used to run existing programs more frequently. For example, TechStars’ New York program will have two sessions this year.

TechStars has also open sourced its model, recently announcing the TechStars Network as part of the White House’s Startup America initiative to spur entrepreneurship. The incubator’s model is now being used by 22 programs globally, says Cohen, including Chicago’s Excelerate Labs.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you are going to launch a new location app, creating an anti-Foursquare is probably not a bad idea. About a week ago, a Qualcomm-incubated project called Neer quietly launched on the Android market, and has been downloaded more than 10,000 times since then. Neer is a free, location-sharing app designed for private sharing between family members and people with close, real-world relationships. An iPhone app and Web interface are also in the works.

Instead of implicitly checking into different spots like you do with Foursquare and Gowalla, or broadcasting everywhere you go in the background like you do with Google Latitude, Neer creates geo-fences that trigger location updates to your inner circle. As I explained in a post last May:

Somewhere in between the concept of the explicit check-in and constant geo-tracking is the notion of geo-fences. The idea is that you would basically draw fences around neighborhoods or other locations from where you want to broadcast where you are and places where you don’t.

With Neer, you create a geo-fence around certain places like home, work, or school simply by marking them on your phone when you are there. Entering or leaving the location triggers an update message to your inner circle. Rather than seeing where you are on a map, all they see is the name you’ve given each place.

Neer is designed to be private for people who are turned off by the over-sharing of Twitter and Foursquare. You can’t broadcast your location to the public, only to your contacts. And in order to be connected on Neer, both people must have each other’s contact information in their phone address books, and both must have the app installed. It is almost as if Neer wants to make it hard for you to find people to track.

And that is kind of the point. Neer is for people who constantly have to keep track of each other and already do so with phone calls, such as husbands and wives with small children. Instead of calling every night to see if a spouse has left work yet in time to help feed the kids or put them in bed, or whether the school drop-off was successful, they can get a reassuring geo-alert. You can also add a text message.

Creating geo-fences that work is a hard problem that pretty much all the geo startups are working on. “As far as I am aware, we are the first geo-fenced location service,” says Neer project leader Ian Heidt. The Qualcomm engineers who built Neer figured out a way to use a combination of WiFi and GPS signals to create and monitor geo-fences without draining the battery too much. Neer is part of a new business incubation unit at Qualcomm that will be announced at the end of this month called Qualcomm Services Labs.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch