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Two and a half years ago, San Kim presented a startup called Easel on stage at DreamIt Ventures Demo Day in Philadelphia.

The former high school math and science teacher presented interactive workbooks for the iPad alongside 14 other startups; he hoped to land $300,000 in financing.

He and his cofounder bootstrapped Easel without much success. The next two years, Kim tells us, were a series of pivots. Last summer, they finally created something that showed promise.

ShowMe is a simple iPad app that acts like a teacher’s whiteboard. It’s a blank white screen with a few colors for drawing and built-in audio.

If you want to create a quick lesson, like teaching someone how to solve X+4 =7, create a title, press play, draw, and talk. When you’re finished, the lesson will automatically be uploaded to ShowMe’s site, which students can peruse.

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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/showme-adding-500000-lessons-per-month-2012-5#ixzz1tjAWgR5V

Incubators have become an increasingly important part of the tech startup scene in recent years.

A number of hot startups have emerged from these programs, encouraging more new entrepreneurs to apply. They’ve become so popular that about one accelerator a day launches these days, says David Cohen, head of TechStars. Not only are they popping up in many cities, but also in specific verticals, such as education. These incubators have been called alternatives to MBAs. Emphasizing that concept, Y Combinator now even accepts applicants who don’t even have a startup idea.

These programs provide new entrepreneurs with mentorship, advice and practical training on technical, business and fundraising topics to help them get from idea to product to launch and beyond. They typically take a small piece of equity in exchange for a small amount of cash and entry into the program.

As part of our Midas List coverage this year, FORBES created a list of the top U.S. incubators and accelerators. The rankings (see the chart below) are based on a number of factors, focusing on the value of the incubators’ companies. In other words, we took the exit prices or the last priced equity valuation of the companies that have gone through each program. We also took into account other measures, such as how much venture funding their companies have raised, what percentage of their companies have raised funding and what percentage of their companies have been acquired or gone out of business. (Note: some firms provided us data for the rankings on condition that we not publish it.)

The Midas List, which ranks the top 100 venture capitalists in the world, will be launched Wednesday, May 2.

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A big part of the tech boom in New York has been the arrival of several accelerators and incubators which are minting new classes of top tier startups. Today, in a presentation at Google Ventures in Manhattan, DreamIt Ventures announced its newest class of 15 companies for its New York Accelerator.

DreamIt Ventures is also moving into the old office of Fab.com, following in the footsteps of TechStars, who took Foursquare’s former office in search of some magic startup mojo.

Five of the companies selected are part of the DreamIt Access program, a dedicated effort to launch 15 minority-led startups over the next 12 months. Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of Comcast Corporation, is an investor in the DreamIt Access program.

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We’re a month away, and are very excited to reveal our workshops & judges for the upcoming NYC TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, taking place on May 19th & 20th.

This will be the second Hackathon TechCrunch has organized at Pier 94 in NYC. Last years event had over 300 developers and 100 teams present, and this years event promises to be even bigger and better.

But enough about the past, let’s chat about the future.

We’ve got a lot of really great sponsored API’s, prizes and contests including AT&T, Hatch, Mashery, City Grid, Spotify, The Echo Nest, Knodes, Mobli & more!

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Mobile applications are a strong vertical with startups within the Rackspace Startup Program. Virtually all serious mobile applications require a significant amount of backend work from server maintenance, provisioning and scaling to custom non-application server code.CloudMine offers a hosted Backend-as-a-Service platform for developers to build rich and interactive apps with full backend features without writing a single line of server code.

CloudMine eliminates the development and IT infrastructure overhead usually associated with application development. This allows developers to focus on making their mobile applications shine and to get products to market faster, cheaper and with fewer headaches while still having the benefit of full backend support.

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LevelUp is growing up. The payment app from mobile gaming company SCVNGR lets consumers pay at restaurants with their smartphones, and the company claimed its payment method is now approaching par with MasterCard, Visa, Amex and Discover. “Approaching” maybe, but LevelUp is only available in a handful of cities, so they may have a way to go before the big four card brands feel threatened.

This moment of hubris, a quality LevelUp has been cultivating with cheeky press announcements in the past year, is thanks to a new deal it has with Revel Systems, a maker of point of sale terminals. LevelUp announced that its QR code-based payment method will now be available as a payment option on all POS terminals from Revel Systems, offered alongside the other four major credit card brands. This is the first of what LevelUp hopes will be a series of such partnerships.

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What do you do when you get forced out of your superbly-designed office building because it’s about to be razed? Hold a paintball tournament inside the office, obviously.

That’s the plan at the 28,000-square-foot Cambridge office currently occupied by mobile tech startup SCVNGR.

The event, slated for next Friday night, is dubbed “Cubicle Assassins: SCVNGR Startup Paintball.”

“Seek refuge in a private office, just don’t get caught out in the open board room or a rival CEO will surely light you up,” says the event description on Eventbrite.

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UXFlip won the Best in Show award for its presentation at the Phorum 2012 National Cloud Computing Conference on Wednesday.

The West Chester, Pa., company was one of 14 companies to present at the conference, which was put on by the Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies at World Cafe Live in University City. The companies presented during the conference’s “Demo Pit” segment and the “Best in Show” winner was selected by audience vote.

UXFlip is developing a platform that allows mobile-app developers to manage their apps’ user interfaces from the cloud. The company was part of DreamIt Ventures’ last Philadelphia class and the description of it on DreamIt’s website is more illuminating than the company’s own website.

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ShowMe Founder San Kim joins us today to discuss how ShowMe, a mobile app that allows educators to record and share whiteboard lessons with students, is tapping into the knowledge of great teachers to deliver quality lessons to students around the globe. San Kim first developed the idea of a whiteboard-based online teaching technology while working as a tutor and classroom instructor in high school math, science, writing and more. ShowMe was founded in 2009 and took several years to develop into the simple and widely used app that it is today.

How is ShowMe currently introduced into the classroom? What are some of the primary teaching methods educators are adopting with the app?

Teachers use ShowMe in all kinds of different ways, from creating lessons for kids to watch at home, or recording ShowMes during class time, to even turning the table and asking the students to create lessons on what they’ve learned (“learning by teaching” model). We feature lots of these use cases and best practices on http://showme.com/blog.

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http://gettingsmart.com/blog/2012/03/qa-showme-founder-taps-into-the-great-teachers-of-the-world/