There’s been an increasing amount of conversation recently about how difficult it is for startups to find qualified engineers. And yet at the same time, recent graduates with strong engineering credentials are saying that they can’t find jobs.

What’s going on here?

(Let’s set aside those who aren’t looking to work for a startup. Nothing wrong with that – but the hiring process for corporations is governed more by the macroeconomic situation and waiting for executives to feel comfortable that the analysts on Wall Street are comfortable with increased hiring expenditures. I can’t provide much insight into that. But I can offer some thoughts for recent graduates who are chomping at the bit to get out there and put the skills that they’ve spent years honing to good use, and they’re hungry for any opportunity, especially at a startup where their contributions will actually move the needle.)

I think the immediate reaction is to try to attribute this apparently misalignment of supply and demand to some generalization that startups won’t hire recent graduates.

In December, Vivek Wadhwa wrote a post on TechCrunch, Shortage of Engineers or a Glut: No Simple Answer. The post made a lot of useful points and quoted some smart people (including a comment that I left on his blog).

After thinking about this again recently, I went back and read some of the comments on the post.

Most of the comments seemed to be along one of the following themes:

1) Schools don’t train me in what’s really being used in industry. All of the job requirements that I read ask for X years of experience with Y skill (that I don’t have). What is wrong with education?

2) Startups don’t just hire anyone. They are looking for engineers who have strong fundamental skills, can pick up new technologies and run with them, and are willing to tackle any problem.

There is truth in both of these themes.

School doesn’t teach me what I need to know for industry

Perhaps the Information Sciences and Technology program at Penn State was unique in this regard, but the Dean and professors would regularly get up in front of students and say something along the lines of, “Technology is an industry which requires lifelong learning. We will teach you how to learn. Then you can use that skill to learn what you need for your career.” Sure, we learned some useful things along with the theories, but it was always made clear to us that we shouldn’t expect the curriculum to teach us everything we would ever need for a career in technology.

Good thing, too. Because the vast majority of the skills that I use on a day-to-day basis in my COO/CTO role were things that I’ve learned myself.

One of the comments on the post spoke to this point: “I was shocked that so many of my classmates didn’t apply what they learned — about how to learn — to themselves. In the time between my CS degree and my first industry job, I’d taught myself version control, design patterns, unit tests, embedded systems programming, user interface design, and so on. It’s easy to get a good job when so many of my classmates thought that college was the last time they’d ever have to learn something!”

This is why so many companies look for candidates who contribute to Open Source. Because contributions aren’t something that you regularly do as a part of school or as a part of most jobs. Instead, it’s something you do on your own accord, and it demonstrates both initiative and the ability to pick up something and run with it.

Startups don’t hire just anyone

That’s true – they don’t. But it doesn’t mean that you aren’t already or can’t become the kind of person that they will hire.

I make this point in my comment on Vivek Wadhwa’s personal blog, that led to the subsequent TechCrunch article:

Just because engineers are graduating, or there are engineers on the bench with decades of experience, this doesn’t immediately solve the issue that a startup CTO faces in trying to staff their team. At the start, an entrepreneur is looking for a driven technologist who can come in and partner with them to translate their vision into reality. If you’re making hire #2 or beyond, you’re looking for specific needs – startups often don’t have the luxury to train someone into their technology stack and are looking for folks who can hit the ground running and get stuff done. As a result, simply having an engineering degree or decades of experience from BigCompany clearly does not make an engineer an immediate fit.

Try to find an engineer with the right experience and the ability to get stuff done — this is what entrepreneurs are struggling with and is what drives the entrepreneurs and investors to complain that there isn’t enough talent in the market.

Startups are looking to fulfill a need. There’s no leadership development program to train a pipeline of technologist for future needs three years away. Startups have a problem. They need to grow their product. Now. Faster. If you’re not the solution to that problem, you won’t get in.

So, become the solution.

Pick the area that you want to work in. Ruby on Rails web development? Great. Objective C iPhone development? Sounds good. Now start writing code. Show that you get stuff done (code on GitHub, contribute to open source, blog!). If you have experience already, find ways to make it relevant to the position that you’re looking for.

And to really get a gold star, don’t limit yourself to the one technology that you start with. If you’re doing Ruby on Rails development, it’s likely that you may need to do some basic systems administration on a Linux server to get your stack up and running. Embrace that opportunity as a chance to prove that you can do whatever it takes to get the job done. Same thing when you need to setup memcached or Redis or whatever additional technologies might come onto your radar. Because a startup will expect you to pickup new technologies, and to become productive rapidly.

Finally, you need to get in touch – I think this point is under-appreciated: startups don’t have big recruitment search budgets (or a lot of time) – if we can’t find you easily, we can’t hire you. Promote yourself. You are a brand. Figure out how to get found.

I sent some very similar advice to my summer development interns at the end of August. I closed with the comment that, if you put some time into really considering the skillets that you’ll need in the job that you want, and then really make an effort to build those skillets (and any supporting skillets on your own), and then do the extra work to publicize what you’re doing, you will be easily heads and shoulders above 90% of the other students you’re graduating with who could do the work, but won’t bother.

Much has been said about the Gen Y folks who are eager to get out there and start making a difference in the world. You don’t need anyone’s permission to go get started. What are you waiting for?

A security update for Ruby has been released to respond to multiple vulnerabilities. All versions of the interpreter are affected, including the Ruby Enterprise Edition interpreters.

Fortunately, it’s easy to upgrade with RVM:

Tell RVM to upgrade your specific REE installation to the latest:

rvm update                                                   #upgrade RVM
rvm upgrade ree-1.8.7-2011.02 ree-1.8.7-2010.02              #upgrade REE

Accept Y to all options to move elements of your current install.

Then reset REE to be your default:


rvm ree-1.8.7-2011.02
rvm --default ree-1.8.7-2011.02


Following this, confirm that the new install of Ruby is active for your shell session (which ruby). Then, you will likely need to install bundler again to make sure you have 1.0.10 for the upgraded copy of gem 1.5. Also, run bundle install from the app root to make sure your gemset is up to spec.

Despite telling the upgrade process to move everything, I still needed to reinstall Passenger (3.0.2) and reconfigure it for Apache:


gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module


With this reinstallation, you’ll also need to edit your Apache config file (on Mac OS X: /etc/apache2/httpd.conf ) to point to the new Passenger gem.

Restart Apache from System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing and you should be good to go.

Supporting Internet Explorer for your web app is a pain. At least, trying to test your Ruby on Rails (or other localhost-based site) in IE while developing on the Mac should be easy, given the prevalence of virtual machines. Right?? You’d think. However, trying to setup our front-end developer to access a local instance of Passenger running on Mac OS X from a Windows VM proved to be more of an issue than it needed to be. Adding to this, most of the top Google results for relevant keywords for this configuration made the process more overly difficult than it needed to be.

So, to help ease your pain in testing your Mac-based Rails site from a Windows virtual machine, here is an easy configuration for the three main VMs.

We need to do two main things:

1. Trying to serve port-based or subdomain-based sites over to the Windows VM is going to be more challenging. Let’s make things easy – we’ll set the default http://localhost site for our Mac to our Rails site.
2. We need to get the VM’s network to communicate with the Mac’s network correctly so that we can access this site.

On my team, we’re using Passenger on the Mac (running on top of the Mac’s base install of Apache). We’re using Passenger Pane to configure Apache easily. We also have this hooked into RVM, but that won’t be relevant to what we’re doing here. For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume that you have Passenger successfully serving a site that you can access via http://somedomain.local I’ll also assume that for whichever VM you’re opting to use, you have Windows installed and running in it.

** Do yourself a favor. Make sure that VM Ware Tools, Parallel Tools, or VirtualBox Guest Additions are installed – this ensures that the network connectivity will work as expected.

Let’s get http://localhost serving our Rails site

At the bottom of /etc/apache2/httpd.conf when using Passenger Pane, you’ll find the following configuration:

<IfModule passenger_module>
  NameVirtualHost *:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName _default_
  </VirtualHost>
  Include /private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts/*.conf
</IfModule>

To make our Passenger site the default localhost site, go into passenger_pane_vhosts/, view the Apache config file for the site you want to be the default, and you’ll see something along the lines of the following:

$ cat yoursite.local.vhost.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName yoursite.local
  DocumentRoot "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public"
  RackEnv development
  <Directory "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public">
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Copy the lines from inside the VirtualHost block and paste them back into /etc/apache2/httpd.conf so that it looks like the following:

$ cd ..
$ sudo mate httpd.conf
# Added by the Passenger preference pane
# Make sure to include the Passenger configuration (the LoadModule,
# PassengerRoot, and PassengerRuby directives) before this section.
<IfModule passenger_module>
  NameVirtualHost *:80
  <VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName _default_
	####
	DocumentRoot "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public"
	RackEnv development
	<Directory "/Users/username/rails/yoursite/public">
	  Order allow,deny
	  Allow from all
	</Directory>
	####
  </VirtualHost>
  Include /private/etc/apache2/passenger_pane_vhosts/*.conf
</IfModule>

Restart Apache by going to System Preferences > Sharing and uncheck & recheck Web Sharing.

Also, if you’re using VMWare Fusion or Parallels, note the IP address that’s shown here.

Configuring VirtualBox

Let’s start with Virtual Box, which was the biggest pain to configure. Not because there’s a lot of work, but because they one critical detail doesn’t seem to be well known (most of the posts you’ll read online try to guide you through using the command-line network configuration tool). I should note that this was my first real opportunity to use Virtual Box, having only used Parallels and VMWare Fusion beforehand. It’s a little rough around the edges in a few places, but overall very impressive.

1) First, ensure that network settings for VirtualBox should be set to NAT – no port forwarding needed

2) Now, here’s what took a while to dig up: VirtualBox connects http://10.0.2.2 to the Mac’s localhost (thanks to this forum post) That is, just typing that into IE within the VM should connect you to http://localhost running on the Mac.

Configuring Parallels

1) For Parallels, you want to make sure that your VM is running on a Shared Network.

2) If you’re setup with this network configuration, you should be able to directly access the local IP address of your Mac, as shown in the System Preferences > Sharing screen:

Configuring VMWare Fusion

1) VMWare Fusion is much like Parallels. Configure your VM to “Share the Mac’s network connection” via NAT.

2) If you’re setup with this network configuration, you should be able to directly access the local IP address of your Mac, as shown in the System Preferences > Sharing screen, as with Parallels.

Hopefully, if you’ve made it to this point, for your respective VM, you have IE accessing your Passenger-based site. Success!

Hopefully, at least now you’ll be able to spend your time on all of the issues that poor users confined to IE are suffering through and get bug fixing quickly.

We switched from using MacPorts to Homebrew for package management on our Mac OS X development machines. Recently, when building two machines and using brew to install MySQL on them, we ran into an issue where MySQL would only partially install and we’d get a mysql database with an empty user table. This was with mysql-5.1.52:

mysql> use mysql;
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A
Database changed
mysql> select * from user;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

We tried a couple of things to solve this, but were not able to come up with a workable way to insert a root user, as you can’t create users when running with the –skip-grant-tables option.

I also tried the binary download from MySQL.com and hit the same snag.

After a couple of rebuilds and testing with a fresh install of Snow Leopard, we traced the issue back to the following error message from the MySQL setup script:

$mysql_install_db
Installing MySQL system tables...
ERROR: 1049  Unknown database 'mysql'
101121 19:21:38 [ERROR] Aborting
101121 19:21:38 [Note] ./bin/mysqld: Shutdown complete
Installation of system tables failed!  Examine the logs in
./data for more information.
…

Error 1049 proved to be the key to solving this. It led me to this MySQL bug report, which discusses that this error can be generated when the default temporary directory doesn’t exist.

Passing the /tmp temporary directory to mysql_install_db as a param seems to resolve error 1049 and allow us to get the default mysql system database setup with a working root user.

Most of the instructions for installing MySQL with Homebrew don’t mention any additional params needed, which leads me to believe this is something recent in the recent builds of MySQL. We didn’t have this issue when installing MySQL on our other Snow Leopard machines (which have 5.1.49). However, this is the sequence of commands that we found that worked for us – hopefully, this will help others hitting similar snags:

brew install mysql
mysql_install_db --user=mysql --tmpdir=/tmp
mysql.server start
#server must be running first
mysql_secure_installation

Maybe you’ve run into this, too? You’re taking a look at the tables generated by your Rails migration and you see this really odd column.

#<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0x10245fd78>

Here’s another look:

Yuck!

Searching the web didn’t turn up much in this case, so I thought I’d post what I found when figuring out the root cause.

See the issue in this migration?

No? I didn’t the first time I looked, either.

It’s the comma – at the tail end of the last column definition before t.timestamps.

This little typo doesn’t look like much, but it’s the cause of that wacky column.

Here’s what the table looks like when you run the migration with the comma:

And here’s what it looks like when you fix your typo:

Ah! Much better.

As for creating a migration to fix this, I just resolved the typo and dropped the column manually. It’s a little difficult to script this because the column name will be different in each database, so, it’s some variation of this (the part in bold on each database that the original typo ran on):


ALTER TABLE `friendships` DROP `#<ActiveRecord::ConnectionAdapters::TableDefinition:0x10245fd78>`;


Hope this helps someone else avoid wasting time on this!

When I last posted in June, we were heading to Europe to continue growing the FanGamb product. I’ve taken a bit of a vacation from blogging while I’ve been focusing on all that’s been involved in this.

I moved to Dublin in July and we’ve been rapidly rebuilding our team and the product. I’ll be able to go into more detail on the changes when the product re-launches in the near future, but things are going well. We’re having a great time in Ireland and have really enjoyed working abroad.

Since I can’t yet delve into the details of the move and transition, or the next version of the product, I’ll be focusing for a while on what it’s like to working abroad, and also some topics that I haven’t given as much “airtime” to in the past. Most of my posts to this point have been on various startup/entrepreneurship topics, which I’ve enjoyed writing about. A large part of my job, though, as VP of Product & Technology for Three Screen Games, has me deeply involved with both the technical product development and customer-centric product management efforts. These are petty broad areas and I look forward to exploring them further through future blog posts.

And of course, an update to the seed stage accelerator list is overdue – it’s amazing how this space has continued to grow in the last few months.

Anyway, it’s good to be back.

It’s been just over the one year mark since we started Three Screen Games and FanGamb. I left IBM on May 1, 2009, and we began the DreamIt Ventures program on May 18, 2009. It’s been an interesting and crazy year. We’ve learned much about what it takes to make a successful social game, and a successful startup. And we’ve positioned ourselves and our team for much greater success.

Part of what we’ve learned over the last year is that the industry of social gaming is still in its infancy and there is a host of new models to be experimented with. We have some exciting things in the works and as a result, will be moving to Europe later this summer to continue developing our product and business. We can’t yet share all of the details on why we’re making the move, but I’ll share more as soon as I’m able.

It’s certainly quite a change and not one that we expected a year ago, but we’re confident that it’s the best direction for our company and are extremely excited about the next phase of FanGamb. Personally, it should prove to be a valuable experience, working internationally and experiencing the European technology and startup communities.

So, if we’re moving to your part of the globe, or you’re just passing through, give us a shout! We’re very much looking forward to meeting new folks and saying hello. For everyone else, I’ll share the experiences through the blog and photos on my Flickr account.

If you work with people, at some point you’re going to need to motivate them to do something you want. We’re not talking anything malicious, just getting stuff done. For most things, that’s always been the carrot and stick approach – if you do what I ask well, I’ll give you a carrot. If not, I’ll whack you with my stick. In essence – if you reward something, you’ll get more of what you want. If you punish something, you’ll get less.

And the bigger the carrot and stick, clearly, it would seem to make sense that the better the motivation derived from them. Because this system is ingrained in us, we see this everywhere.

To escape the status quo, everyone who works with or manages individuals should watch the below video, capturing the highlights of Dan Pink’s book Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us. (Not only is it extremely interesting, it’s also a really great lesson in using whiteboards to make engaging videos ) Pink also gave a TED talk last summer.

Hopefully, you took a moment to watch it. For those of you that are reading on, here’s a quick summary:

When tasks call for cognitive skill over mechanical skill, larger rewards result in poorer performance. Pay people enough to take money off the table. And, emphasize the three key factors that lead to better performance and personal satisfaction:

1) Autonomy – self-directed
2) Mastery – getting better at their craft
3) Purpose – making a contribution

I found the video extremely interesting. While the carrot and stick approach is so intuitive to us, when you really stop to think about the tasks that we’re motivated to work on, Pink’s points hit home.

When you’re toiling away, in the bowels of some huge project, working on some small part that isn’t going to significantly make or break the big picture, are you really driven to do your best work? Compared with, if you are the “CEO of your job”, making a clear contribution.

This is one key reason why most corporations are at such a huge disadvantage to most startups when it comes to innovation. Having huge amounts of money and resources are fantastic, until you’re trying to get top talent to apply it to new problems. The main corporate driver is to maximize profit, and you work on small chunks of something larger that the end customer really doesn’t care about. Startups facilitate their people in maximizing purpose, making contributions. And if they don’t, they should be – startups aren’t just vehicles to accomplish the founders’ purpose. Startups are an opportunity for everyone on the team to work towards achieving something, a collective victory.

Also, since startups are one of the few places that have the capability to go against the status quo, to implement processes that would make corporate managers shiver in their cubicles, they’re also well setup to allow individuals the other two key factors – autonomy, to decide how best to achieve the task at hand, and mastery, to provide an opportunity to get better at their craft.

The Mark Pincus “Be the CEO of your job” example is a good illustration of this. So is the example that Pink uses in the video about Atlassian and their “FedEx Days”. Who knew how productive one day could be if you just gave your employees free reign to decide how best to make a contribution?

Jeff Atwood has a great post on how he’s applying these principles at Stack Overflow. Are you maximizing purpose and leaving your carrots and sticks outside? Or is your motivation based purely on dollars and thus is an ineffective sham? What’s working for you?

Recently, an alum interested in supporting entrepreneurship at Penn State asked me for my thoughts on the current state of support for student entrepreneurs. Given my involvement with the Lion Launch Pad, an accelerator for students at Penn State that I co-founded, this is a topic that I have a strong interest in.

I have a much longer post on ideas to help support student entrepreneurs that I’m working on, but for today, I’m just going to stick to the current state.

I wrote a summary of the various groups, individuals, and programs at Penn State that I was aware of, which are involved in supporting student entrepreneurship in various ways. That document is embedded below.

If you’re an entrepreneur at Penn State, or even just someone interested in entrepreneurship, I would be very interested in your feedback and thoughts on the programs listed, along with my thoughts.

From the document:
…

Key Strengths:

• There are a number of programs on and around Penn State’s campus that are dedicated to helping students explore and succeed in entrepreneurship. These include both academic and business resources. If students know where to look, there is generally something that can help get them moving in the right direction.
• Penn State has both a history of entrepreneurial success and some recent entrepreneurship success stories. This is in addition to a fantastic resource in its alumni base, spread out across all areas of business.
• The past several years have seen huge growth in programs for supporting early- stage entrepreneurs. No longer is there a gaping void between idea and venture capital funding. Entrepreneurs have a number of programs beyond Penn State to turn to and benefit from.

Key Opportunities:

• Despite the large number of available programs, unfortunately, the entrepreneurship landscape is heavily fragmented and resources are not integrated. Consequently, students interested in entrepreneurship use their time looking for the necessary resources rather than taking advantage of them.
• There is an issue of general awareness. Without high profile recent wins, there is a limited number of students who consider entrepreneurship as a viable career path or application of their ideas/creativity. Furthermore, students are seldom aware of academic entrepreneurship programs beyond their college/major.
• The third section of this document provides a highlights of the recent growth in external programs for early-stage entrepreneurs – there is a large opportunity to align with these programs and incorporate their best practices.
• Penn State’s alumni base is a tremendous resource, yet, unfortunately, it is difficult to access and leverage. There is an opportunity to structure this resource more effectively, thus benefiting all Penn State entrepreneurs.

…

Existing Programs

• Engineering Entrepreneurship Minor, School of Engineering, Design, Technology, and Professional Programs, College of Engineering (http://www.e-ship.psu.edu/)
• Lion Launch Pad (http://www.lionlaunchpad.org)
• Farrell Center, Smeal College of Business (http://www.smeal.psu.edu/fcfe/) — includes Garber Practicum and Smeal IdeaPitch
• Penn State Entrepreneurs Network (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=198392299635)
• Project Blue Pill (http://www.projectbluepill.org/)
• NCIIA Invention 2 Venture (I2V)
• Blue Line Incubator
• College of Information Sciences and Technology (http://ist.psu.edu)
• Ben Franklin Technology Partners (http://benfranklin.org/)
• Innovation Park (http://www.innovationpark.psu.edu/)

…

For details about the existing programs, along with some thoughts as far as how to improve upon the current state, please read the full document, which is embedded below, and leave your thoughts and reactions in the comments!

You can download the document, if you would like it in PDF format.

The list of startup accelerators has been getting a lot of attention as of late. It was exciting to see the list recently featured on Change.org’s Social Entrepreneurship blog. This activity follows the continuing interest and growth in seed-stage startup accelerators. Below are some updates and additions to the list.

Updates from the startup accelerator world:

• TechCrunch featured a nice write-up on Stanford’s recently launched SSE Labs program. Written by Larry Chiang, one of the advisors to the new Stanford Student Startup Lab, the post touches on some of the political hurdles that the SSE Labs program ran into at Stanford in the process of launching. It is interesting (and disappointing) to read of the difficulties students had in launching an entrepreneurship support program at Stanford, typically referred to as one of the gold standards for academic institutional support of entrepreneurship. Still, it is an academic institution and many of the struggles the students ran into sound similar to roadblocks we’ve hit at Penn State and that I’ve heard about at other institutions. I’m glad to see the students are forging ahead undaunted.
• Lots of activity internationally. The next few updates all concern accelerators abroad. One new program was mentioned in the comments on the accelerator list: The first accelerator for China just opened and will be based in Dalian: China Accelerator
• XING’s founder, Lars Hinrichs, is launching HackFwd in Europe. It has some interesting twists over the conventional model. Funding will be up to €191,000, depending on the size of the team, and companies will participate in the program for up to a year. This results in HackFwd taking a more substantial equity chunk, though:

  HackFwd will take 27% of a company it invests in – that’s a sizeable chunk. In the US, Ycombinator takes around 6% but can do anywhere from 2%-10% while TechStars take around 6-10%, whereas the London-based Seedcamp takes 8-10%. However, those latter programmes only last months, while HackFwd’s backing will be designed to last a year.
  …
  Startups will get funding for one year, with the aim of roughly matching the founder’s current yearly salary. Founders keep 70% equity, with 3% going to advisors and 27% to HackFwd. However, that said, they then take care of ‘legal and admin stuff… so you can focus on your product.’

• I came across some interesting comments from Kai Fu Lee on China’s Innovation Works accelerator program. It’s an interesting model and certainly unconventional.

  “To remedy the problem [of not having any early-stage funding for young entrepreneurs in China], he founded Innovation Works, a startup incubator with a twist. Instead of just doling out a million dollars here and there to promising projects, the company recruits top engineering graduates throughout the country and enlists them to help its portfolio companies get off the ground, while simultaneously grooming them to found startups of their own in 12 to 18 months.”
  …
  “‘Y Combinator would have a very hard time making it in China,’ Lee says. ‘It would have a hard time finding the startups and qualified people to fund. It could interview hundreds and find only two.’ The American incubator model only works in China if you turn it on its head, starting first with the people before generating the concept. Right now, Innovation Works is funding two external startups and working on five projects that came from the inside team.”

• TechCrunch announced the launch of accelerator programs in Singapore and Japan: Neoteny Labs and Open Network Lab. The post points out a couple of interesting details:

  “Another difference to the [Y Combinator] model: If the startup chooses a designated mentor, it will have to give away another 2% of stock options. ONL’s mentor line-up, assembled via the Neoteny Labs connection (both labs are partnering), is pretty impressive though, including big names such as Reid Hoffman, Napster founder Shawn Fanning, or Tim O’Reilly.”

• Continuing the international updates, King Abdullah II Fund for Development (KAFD) in Jordan is announcing that it will launch a seed fund in August which will operate on an accelerator model. The program is called Oasis 500. From the ArabCrunch.com article:
  

  Oasis 500 aims to push 500 startups in Jordan in 5 years and will offer several programs starting with training courses for entrepreneurs with ideas.
  …
  [T]he training program will start around August of this year and will take a quota of around 100 entrepreneurs for several rounds every year ( any one with a tech idea according to Usama.) At the end of each program Oasis 500 will choose 10 ideas to invest in with an average of 10,000 Jordanian Dinars per idea and provide incubation (offices) for a period of 2 months. If the startup is qualified there will be additional investment of an average of 50,000 USD.

• It’s trendy to have an accelerator — PayPal launched an accelerator program, PayPal Startup Accelerator a couple of months back.

Programs being added to the list:

Startup Accelerators

• China – Innovation Works – http://en.innovation-works.com/
• Dalian, China – China Accelerator – http://chinaccelerator.com
• Hamburg, Germany – HackFwd – http://hackfwd.com
• Jordan – Oasis 500 – http://arabcrunch.com/2010/06/oasis-500-a-startup-accelerator-to-launch-in-august.html (launching in August – no specific site yet)
• Silicon Valley – PayPal Startup Accelerator – http://www.x.com/community/ppx/xspaces/accelerator
• Singapore – Neoteny Labs – http://www.neotenylabs.com
• Tokyo, Japan – Open Network Lab – http://www.onlab.jp
• Wilmington, DE – BetaFish – http://betafishde.tumblr.com (on Facebook)

University-Affiliated

• Cornell University – eLabs – http://www.elabstartup.com

Check out the full, newly updated list of startup accelerators!

Along with updating the main list, I have also updated the Twitter list of startup accelerators – 51 of the programs are included. If there’s a Twitter account that I missed, please let me know!