Developer funding events gear up

DEVELOPERS lacking the funding to even power the light bulbs hovering over their heads should take solace from a couple of events meant to pump much needed cash into their peer group.

Starting later today, the TechCrunch50 event is a sort of techie beauty parade that cherry picks 50 notable startups and parades them in front of a panel of hungry investors, buyers, VCs, and corporate angels. The event has some $1.3 million in its coffers and is ready to fire the cash - in the form of online-advertising assistance and cloud space - at those startups that it feels worthy.

Break Media, Glam Media, AIM, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and MySpace have contributed to this pot, so the lucky players are likely to be seen by more eyeballs than that monkey scratching itself and falling off a branch. Law firm Perkins Coie will be providing free legal advice, which could come in handy when you come to sell your social notworking site for household appliances for billions of dollars.

Judges include a veritable A-list of tech players such as Robert Scoble, pictured on the event's website holding what looks like fireworks, Kevin Rose, the founder and chief architect of Digg, Tim O'Reilly, Marissa Mayer and Marc Andreessen. The fifty entrants will be announced later today. The overall winner will be awarded with a special prize of $50,000. Last year Yammer, an enterprise- focused productivity tool won

Over in Europe the application process for Seedcamp Week 2009 has recently closed and the chosen finalists announced. Seedcamp weeks kicks off in London on 21st September and, like Techcrunch50, features a number of local heroes in place to act as mentors and business angels, such as Lastminute founder Brent Hoberman.

Seedcamp also puts its chosen developers and entrepreneurs in front of seed investors and the like, and in three years has invested money and ongoing support into some 14 companies including blogging tool Zemanta and social-notworking comment aggregator uberVU.

And even if your startup doesn't win backing, there's always next year. µ