Plug and Play

I just read about Plug and Play, properly Plug and Play Tech Center, a startup accelerator in the Silicon Valley, similar to its famous counterpart Y Combinator. What's Plug and Play? A startup accelerator that in the past five years has built a community of over 280 tech startups, ranging from Web 2.0 to cloud services to systems and telecomms. As of the economics, Pug and Play in these five years has helped the startups in raising more than $750 million in venture funding.

A couple of info that can be not only interesting but also useful for all of you:

First, Plug and Play is offering a 10-week summer program name Plug and Play Startup Camp designed to immerse young startups and entrepreneurs into the Silicon Valley environment, through workshops, speaker series, mentor sessions, as well as coaching to help entrepreneurs cement business models, prototypes, and so on.

Second, Plug and Play organizes 4 EXPOs at the end of each quarter and 2 University EXPOs, in which it hosts a selection of startups presenting their businesses to 100 VCs and investors. In these EXPOs, the judges vote on the top three companies, which then will have the opportunity to raise funding and - hopefully - go on to fame and fortune. As an example, the winners of the last EXPO were Aisle411 (an in-store retail navigation app that allow consumers to search for and navigate to products in stores), Creaza Inc (an online video production platform for users willing to produce and share their videos), and XYZ Interactive (a company developing low cost sensors to be used for example to control devices without touching them).

It all seems very interesting. Sounds like - why am I not that genius? Why am still here?

Well, let's wait and hope - maybe it will be our chance soon...