Here are some recent news items and essays. I’ll try to make this a regular habit.

News

• Y Combinator discontinuing its Boston summer round of funding
• Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan - Open Source Funding
  • Mark made a post on his blog offering to fund startups that meet his set of criteria. One requirement is that the business plan is posted openly. It’s an interesting read if for no other reason than to see what he considers as investment worthy. Noticed on Buzz in the Hub.
• HubSpot’s Valentine Link Love campaign is kind of amusing. HubSpot is Boston based, and they clearly shot the campaign videos in Boston.

Events

• TheFunded is hosting an event in Boston on Tuesday, March 10 at 7pm at MIT. Noticed this on altgate.

Boston Startup Blogs

Either about Boston startups or written by Boston based startup people.

• altgate by Furqan Nazeeri, CEO of Viridus
• Buzz in the Hub - a blog that’s part of the Genotrope, a career site with a focus on Boston
• Innovation Economy by Scott Kirsner, writer for the Boston Globe. A blog with a heavy focus on Massachusetts. For example, Scott writes about the need to rebrand Massachusetts as a technology friendly state.

Out of the seven companies named Friday as finalists in Amazon’s latest AWS Start-Up Challenge—designed to reward the most innovative companies using the cloud-based Amazon Web Services infrastructure to deliver their products or services—three are based right here in the Boston area.

Original story on Xconomy.

Boston based RunKeeper, an iPhone app that tracks your runs, launched just a few weeks ago, and it has already been mentioned on TechCrunch.

Jason Jacobs is the man responsible for RunKeeper. I met him earlier this year when all he had was an idea. It’s great to see his idea finally become a reality. I think he’ll have a lot of success.

Framingham, MA based MyPunchBowl was mentioned in PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites. MyPunchBowl is an event and party planning web site.

If you notice any other local startups in the list, please leave a comment.

Y Combinator does a Boston round of funding every summer, and the first few startups from this year’s round have launched. Here are some ones I’ve already noticed:

• TicketStumbler - Aggregated search for the secondary ticket market. In other words, they aggregate the listings of second hand ticket brokers.
• ididwork - Performance tracking for the individual employee
• Popcuts - online music store with a twist, they pay you a cut if you discover bands early. TechCrunch explains.

I’ll update this blog as I discover more.