Cloudkick, a Y Combinator startup that offers a free server management system to businesses whose web infrastructure is maintained by Amazon’s EC2 or Slicehost cloud-based servers, is unveiling a nifty feature today at Under the Radar. Cloudkick has added the ability for users to migrate their Amazon Machine Images (the template for servers on EC2) on their EC2 servers to another service provider, like Slicehost (which is owned by Amazon Web Services competitor Rackspace). This lets users who are tied to Amazon’s servers be able to easily switch to a less-expensive provider.

Silicon Valley has Y Combinator. Boulder, Colorado (and now Boston) has TechStars. Boston also as of today has Start@Spark. Washington, D.C. has LaunchBox Digital. Philadelphia has DreamIT Ventures. And now Atlanta is joining the seed incubator movement with Shotput Ventures.

Started by a group of Atlanta tech entrepreneurs who want to attract and keep startup talent in the Southeast, Shotput Ventures is accepting applications from young, first-time founders for its summer program. The deadline is April 10.

The latest venture fund to set up a separate seed financing program is Boston-based Spark Capital, a prolific investor in Internet and new media companies such as Twitter, Boxee, Tumblr, Veoh and KickApps. The initiative is dubbed Start@Spark, and is primarily geared towards startups from the Boston and New York areas.

Early-stage investments will amount up to $250,000, and will not be restricted to information technology companies but also periodically be granted to startups offering financial or educational services. Entrepreneurs who get into the program will have access to Spark’s partner network and legal counsel, and will also be prepared for a second, more formal round of funding at a later stage if progress is deemed satisfactory by the firm. You can apply here.

Exploding term sheets are nasty. If you don’t know what they are, it’s a fairly literal definition. Someone gives you a term sheet to invest in or acquire your company (or some other transaction), but they put an expiration date into the term sheet and if you don’t accept by that date, the offer explodes. Investor Y Combinator (recently in the news for taking an investment from Sequoia Capital) posted an advisory tonight that their competitors are using exploding term sheets, and suggesting companies ignore them.

Companies use exploding for a variety of reasons. But the goal is to put additional pressure on the company to accept the terms and quickly, without much further negotiation. In particular, they don’t want to see a deal “shopped,” which is when you take their term sheet and go to other buyers/investors looking for a better deal (which is exactly what you should be doing as soon as you get a term sheet from anyone).

But they are bad news for startups, who can’t take their time to find the best deal possible when presented with one. I’ve received a couple of these in the past and have always ignored the clauses. Generally speaking, the day after the explosion they’re still very happy to do business with you. If they’re not, they weren’t good partners anyway. (there are exceptions, such as when certain financial milestones or other important dates are coming up, but those situations are fairly obvious).

Y Combinator, a seed stage venture firm that has invested in a whopping 118 startups since summer 2005, has to date only invested capital provided by its four founders: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris. Now they are raising $2 million in capital themselves, from Sequoia Capital and a number of prominent angel investors. Sequoia partner Greg McAdoo is leading the investment.

Sequoia and the angel investors (Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit and Aydin Senkut) aren’t investing directly in Y Combinator. Instead, they are putting money into a new entity, managed by Y Combinator, that will make investments in new startups going forward. In other words, Y Combinator won’t just be investing their own capital any more, and they’ve got a larger war chest to expand operations.

Today some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent angel investors and entrepreneurs are coming together for AngelConf - a crash course in angel investing that is designed to get the many wealthy tech veterans littering the Valley involved in the startup scene. The event was put together by Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, who believes that while there are many potential investors in Silicon Valley, most of them are unsure how to actually get started (he suggests there may be only one actual investor for every 100 would-be angels). AngelConf is designed to help these potential investors get on their feet, with tips on everything from the legal paperwork involved to picking out the best startups. For more details, check out our past coverage here.

The event is being streamed for free by Justin.tv.

AirBed and Breakfast, an online portal for renting space on a stranger’s airbed or couch, has re-launched its website to AirBnB, an eBay-like marketplace for all accommodations. Now a Y-Combinator start-up (the startup is currently in the winter session of the incubator), AirBnB, which launched as AirBed and Breakfast last August, found that users wanted to use the site for more than just renting space in someone’s house and were actively posting rental listings for apartments, houses and vacation rentals. The founders, San Francisco designers Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, and software engineer Nathan Blecharczyk, quickly realized that increased and varied choice is more appealing for consumers and are now re-branding their site to incorporate a variety of local accommodation options.

There is also a monetary benefit to opening up the site, says Chesky. For each rental, AirBnB takes a 7 to 10 percent cut of the traveler’s payment (as the rental price of the accommodation goes up, AirBnB will take less of a cut) and also takes a flat 3 percent cut of what the seller receives. With an increase in number of listings and a greater amount of pricier listings, AirBnB has had a jump in the number of transactions and seen a 50 percent jump in revenue plus created a profit. Vacation rentals can be a big business. Recently, HomeAway, a popular vacation rental site, raised $250 million in a venture round and was valued at more than $1 billion.

Boulder, Colorado-based startup incubator TechStars has decided to open a second office in Boston where it will run a concurrent mentorship program starting this summer.

The Boston program - which will probably be located in Cambridge - will accept the same number of companies (10) as the Boulder program, effectively doubling the number of TechStars companies admitted each year. Assuming application rates don’t rise dramatically, this will make it easier for companies to get into the program - especially if they’re willing to relocate to either city.

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is teeming with wealthy tech veterans, many of whom are eager to try their hand at angel funding a few new startups. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them are put off by the logistics of figuring out exactly what they’re supposed to do (handing out money isn’t as easy as it sounds). In light of this, Paul Graham and the team at Y Combinator are putting on a special event, dubbed AngelConf, that will bring together some of the Valley’s most prominent investors to tell these prospective Angels how it’s done - and hopefully help give a new wave of startups a chance to make it big. The event will be held on March 5th at Y Combinator’s office in Mountain View and will be free of charge, though you’ll need to request an invitation from its homepage.

Graham believes that there are probably 100 times as many would-be angels who haven’t actually gotten around to investing as there are actual ones. He should know - he spent seven years after selling Viaweb before he started his Y Combinator incubator. And during the time since founding Y Combinator he’s also found that the number of startups emerging is directly related to the amount of angel funding available. Even a modest boost in the number of angel investors could be a boon to the startup community, especially in light of the economy.

Cloud storage and file synchronization is becoming increasingly important as users access the Internet and their data via a plethora of devices - desktop computers with large hard drives, laptops with smaller drives, and netbooks and mobile devices with relatively small internal storage. There are a lot of online storage/syncing startups and products out there to choose from, ranging from Microsoft Foldershare, dropbox and Sharpcast to pure online storage services like Wuala, box.net and drop.io.

Newcomer Zumodrive, from Y Combinator startup Zecter, enters this space with an interesting twist. Like other syncing services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But instead of syncing those files with all of your other devices, Zumodrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

That’s not such a big deal when in comes to PC-to-PC syncing where hard drive storage isn’t an issue. But I have far more music files than will fit on even my laptop. Zumodrive lets me access them (even via iTunes) in a way that makes them appear local. And when it comes to netbooks and mobile devices with very limited hard drive space, Zumodrive is a Godsend. It just appears to make your hard drive limitless in size.

One other thing Zumodrive does that’s smart is it actually syncs files you use a lot across all your devices. That way you’ll have access to those important files when you’re offline. You can right click on any file to make it local on that machine. The service also makes guesses as to other files that should be synced locally.

The product is launching into private beta today. If you’d like to try it out, we have 1,000 invitations, just use the invite code ireadtc or click here.

Posterous, which launched in June, is one of those sites that I tested and it stuck - I continue to post pictures to it regularly.

What I like about it - you don’t have to create an account to use it. Just start emailing text and files (images, video, whatever) to post@posterous.com and you’ve got a site where it all goes. And they’ve steadily added features. You can, for example, repost all the stuff you email in to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr or wherever.

Today the company is announcing a new product, group blogs. You can add your friends or family’s email addresses to any Posterous site you control, and they can then email stuff in too. It’s useful for families, sports teams, etc. to share photos and video. Once you’ve added those emails, all they have to do to post is send whatever they want to publish to post@sitename.posterous.com. No registration required. An example is here.

Posterous is a Y Combinator startup. They also just raised a second angel round of financing - $725,000 from XG Ventures and a whole bevy of high profile individuals.

Easy site building service Synthasite, which we first covered way back in 2006, has acquired Y Combinator startup Clickpass, which launched earlier this year.

There are no details on the purchase price or terms of the deal, other than that Clickpass CEO Peter Nixey will be joining the SynthaSite team (Clickpass had one other employee who will not be making the jump). Synthasite has raised $5 million in capital, Clickpass just raised the Y Combinator seed round.

Clickpass helps make OpenID more accessible to users by allowing them to use their accounts on services like Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN to log in to other sites. This is essentially what OpenID was built for in the first place, but it has taken many months for major companies to actually implement the standard (though they have been making strides lately). Randy Almond, SynthaSite’s VP of Marketing, says that the Clickpass technology will be used to make it easier for users to import content from other services into their SynthaSite pages.

BackType, a Y Combinator startup that launched in August, is a sort of “Twitter for comments” that aggregates comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream.

Today they launched a new feature called Alerts that will let users track keywords included in comments on tracked blogs - a sort of Google Alerts for blog comments.

This will be useful to anyone who likes to track what’s being said about them, their companies or their brands online. Google Alerts only show keywords that are in the main text of articles or stories, and sometimes only catches keywords when they are included in titles of stories. BackType gives users another level of information.

For now alerts can be tracked on the site’s dashboard or via email delivered daily, weekly or whenever a new one pops up.

Last week, something turned. We found out that not only are we in a recession, but it started a year ago. Tech layoffs went into overdrive (12,000 at AT&T, 600 at Adobe, 130 at Real Networks), bringing the total unemployed tech workforce to at least 90,000, by our count. Even Facebook decided to indefinitely postpone an earlier plan to allow employees to sell some stock privately.

Capital is drying up, and things may still get worse before they get better. So far in this downturn, we’ve seen startups batten down the hatches (as they should) and hope to survive long enough to make it out the other end.

But what about venture capital firms? When will we start to see the VC layoffs and fund closures?

Y Combinator startup RescueTime lets users monitor which applications and websites they use/visit the most, and then lets them use that information to try to cut down on inefficient uses of time. It’s useful on an individual basis, and it helps businesses (who pay $4-$8/user/month) monitor what applications are being used, and where time is being wasterd.

It’s also a lot of fun to look at the patters from the aggregate data.

Giving away products can be a logistical pain. For instance, when we give away a T-shirt or laptop, we have to go through hundreds of comments, contact the person, and do a lot of manual processing. A new Y Combinator startup called ContestMachine that just launched makes giving stuff away as easy as putting a widget on your blog.

You create a contest widget by entering all the details of the giveaway: prizes, deadlines, rules. Winners can be randomly chosen by ContestMachine or judged by the blogger. It automates the process of creating giveaways, and opens up contests to any blogger or small business who has a Website. The service is free to try out for up to two contests a month, and then charges $9 a month or $90 a year for more contests.

Dropbox is one of those infuriating startups that just won’t show us much of what they’re up to beyond the basic user experience (see video). We first saw them at Y Combinator demo day in August 2007, and talked to them again in March when they went into private beta.

It looks like Sequoia was on them fast though. Last September, we’ve learned, the company raised a small $1.2 million round of financing from the fund, making it Sequoia’s second known investment in a YCombinator company (the other is Loopt).

Expect more news on Dropbox in the next week or two.

BackType is the newest YCombinator startup to launch from their summer program. They’re a blog-comment focused startup - founders Christoper Golda and Michael Montano are for the first time aggregating all comments from millions of blogs into a single, searchable, parsable stream. Think Twitter for all comments on the web.