TechStars founder David Cohen posted an insightful blog post earlier this week that mentioned the impact second generation entrepreneurs are having on the current generation of first-time innovators. As Cohen points out, five companies from the 2007 Boulder TechStars class

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In response to Google’s recent Fiber for Communities project, a group of entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have decided to conduct their own broadband stimulus experiment. The Philly Startup Leaders are offering a Gigabit Genius Grant , and they plan to award $10,000 to the person who submits the best idea for using super high-speed Internet to improve their community. Sponsor According to Philly Startup Leaders founder Blake Jenelle, “Our contest is showcasing dozens of ways that ultra-fast broadband will change communities. There are projects that will change how we deliver medicine, protect neighborhoods, perform art, educate children, experience history, connect with each other and more.” The projects will be available to view on the Startup Leaders’ website. Although recent studies have shown broadband speeds increasing worldwide, the United States lags behind other countries in broadband speed and adoption. Both the FCC’s National Broadband Plan and Google’s Fiber for Communities project point to the importance in expanding broadband coverage in the U.S., and the Philadelphia startup community has rallied to help lead local efforts for gigabit broadband support. The organizers believe that the Gigabit Genius Grant will serve as a grassroots effort to encourage both technological innovation and broadband implementation in the Philadelphia community. Jenelle says, “As much as we’d all like to be the first with gigabit, we know that the real future of broadband is not going to come from Google or anyone else. It’s going to come from local communities making the decision to invest in broadband ourselves. So we’re all working together to make that case.” Deadline for submissions for the Gigabit Genius Grant is June 30, 2010. Entries received by the end of April will also be eligible for a $1,000 Popular Genius Grant. Discuss

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Nurph , which just launched its public beta, combines a URL shortener and chat rooms. You simply create a shortened link by going to Nurph.com and share it with your friends. That link will then take your friends over to the URL you shortened, which now features a Nurph chat room that pops up on the bottom right side of your browser window. Nurph is the successor of Nurphy.com , which will shut down at the end of April. Sponsor Give it a Try and Chat with Us If you want to give Nurph a try, just click here and join your fellow ReadWriteWeb readers in a Nurph chat room attached to this post. Twitter Integration: Leaving A Digital Trail As Nurph’s co-founder Neil Cauldwell noted when we talked to him and his fellow co-founder Paul Horsfall earlier this week, adding the Twitter feature was a request from some of Nurph’s early beta testers. One interesting way to look at this feature is as a way of broadcasting your digital location. Whenever you enter a room – or “channel,” as the Nurph team calls it – a message is pushed out to all of your Twitter friends who can then join you on this site. One nice feature of the service is that whenever somebody posts a link to the chat room, clicking on that link will simply open up a new Nurph channel and won’t take you out of the Nurph experience. From within the chat room, you can also share your link on Twitter, Facebook and by email. Like all good URL shorteners, Nurph also offers a boookmarklet that will work with any browser. Links will also work on mobile browsers, though you will only see that chat room and not the site behind it. Still in Beta Given that the service just opened up its public beta, there are still some missing features – though they don’t take away from the overall experience. Right now, for example, you can’t see if any of your friends are currently typing in the chat room, which makes sticking to good chat etiquette hard. As of now, there are also no moderation features, though the team is thinking about this and you can report any vandalism here . As you have to sign in with Twitter, though, the Nurph team decided to keep spammers out by only allowing Twitter users with at least 25 followers to use the service. There is also no API for third-party developers to hook into and integrate the URL shortener into their apps yet. Publishers, who often like to see detailed statistics about how their shortened URLs were used will also have to miss this feature if they use Nurph (unless, of course, they decide to shorten the Nurph link with another URL shortener). Verdict Overall, though, this is a very interesting concept and it will be interesting to see if any larger publishers will adopt it for sharing their links and bringing their communities together. The team plans to regularly release new features during the public beta phase and it will be interesting to watch if and how users will adopt this service. Discuss

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AOL is continuing with its push to create content on a massive local scale, according to a story by the Silicon Valley Insider . The story says that AOL is looking to “expand Patch, its network of local news blogs, from 30 sites to ‘hundreds’, by the end of 2010.” AOL recently announced a similar 0-to-60 sort of initiative with its attempt to cover every single band at this year’s South By Southwest festival with its content distribution project Seed . Sponsor The article quotes an internal communication, saying that AOL is looking “to be leaders in one of the most promising ‘white spaces’ on the Internet” as well as “in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content”. Patch is a “hyperlocal” website that offers news, photos and videos, discussions and information about local businesses. It is run by “professional editors, writers, photographers and videographers who live in or near the communities [they] serve”. As such, Patch seems like a perfect candidate for the type of service offered by another arm of AOL, crowdsourced content provider Seed. While the article declares the intention to go from 30 sites to hundreds “quite the ambitious goal,” we wonder if having a system like Seed already in place wouldn’t make an otherwise potentially daunting task a bit easier. Actually, the SXSW coverage seems like a good testing ground for doing the same sort of coverage in hundreds of locations throughout the country. As Paid Content wrote last month , Saul Hansell left the New York Times’ Bits Blog in December to join Seed, with the purpose of “leveraging Seed across all of AOL’s platforms”. Looking at the site, it would seem that the only issue in growing from 30 to hundreds would be general scalability, as each location is identical, but with different content. With an army of content providers at your fingertips, it would seem that the expansion is the obvious next step more than anything else. Discuss

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