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If you happened to miss the story, as a pay-it-forward social experiment, Jonathan Stark, a programmer, shared hisStarbucks cardonline. He encouraged people to use the card to buy themselves a coffee, as well as contribute money to the card so that someone else could use it. Stark also set up aTwitterfeed to track the changes on the card. In the process thousands of dollars were donated and spent at Starbucks....

Civic engagement and responsibility is undergoing perhaps its largest change in 200 years thanks to technology. Over the course of the last two months the world has witnessed two peaceful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as protests in Libya, Bahrain and other Middle Eastern and North African countries. While the chicken and the egg debate continues over whether social media was the spark or simply the enabler of these uprisings continues, the fact remains that they happened/are happening....

As someone used to seeing Israel portrayed negatively on TV news reports, it was refreshing to attend theTechonomy3conference in Tel Aviv yesterday and discover a rich seam of technology startup teams with original ideas and boundless ambition. “In Israel, almost everyone has a startup idea,” people kept telling me. Whether it’s the country’s compulsory military service that shifts young people’s view of the world in a direction that’s different from other parts of the world, liberal immigration laws, or maybe the country’s limited natural resources forcing people to think creatively – whatever the reason, the many entrepreneurs I met there had a real fire in their eyes when they talked about the companies they’re building....

Maybe I’m just crazy. Maybe my love of startups and the culture surrounding them has gotten the better of my brain. Whatever the case, on April 2nd, I’m going to board a couple of planes and fly halfway around the world to Tel Aviv, Israel forTechonomy3. Organized by partnersOrli YakuelandEddy Resnick, Techonomy is a third-year event that has put names such asInterludeandFace.comon the map. For the past two years, over 400 of Israel’s best and brightest have shown up to see the presentations, and this year promises to be no exception....

It took me two days, around 10 emails and a lot of begging, but I had finally stepped foot into The Bunker, the basement-level home of the originalTechStarsin Boulder, Colorado. All week long, nearly every interview that I had done mentioned TechStars as one of the driving forces behind the continued success of entrepreneurs in this town, so I knew that I had to get inside and find the special sauce that made the accelerator tick....