Thanks to my fellow Kickstarter project managers for sharing their stories last night at our event at the Microsoft NERD (New England Research & Development Center) in Cambridge. Laurie Kahn, who just hit her pledge goal yesterday spoke about her project Love Between the Covers, a documentary film about romance writers. Joel Brown left beautiful Newburyport to visit the city and talk about his guide book to the gorgeous area around his home -- The Essex Coastal Byway Guide. Check it out here. Ian Schon added his great Pen Project to the other bibliophile projects. His pen is terrific and like the others, despite making their goals, you can find them all on Kickstarter and still buy into all three. And my project is starting to take baby steps -- it's only 2 days old -- and you can find my Founders Less Than Three video here.

From TechStars in Kendall Square to the Middle of Mitte

A week before Demo Day here at TechStars Boston in Kendall Square and I'm solidly in love with our gang of 12 start-ups, including my e-publishing start-up, Libboo, but also infatuated with what's going on in Berlin and can't wait to be there for the NextBerlin conference.  Yes, I can finally say it, NextBerlin is NEXT WEEK!   And I can't wait to get there and test out SoundCloud co-founder, Alex Ljung's theory, "We don't really live in a country.  We live on the Internet.  The idea of countries is secondary."

But maybe cities are not secondary.  And as for innovations in printing and books, I start my trip by flying to Frankfurt (not far from Mainz where Gutenberg printed his bible and invented moveable type) then visit friends in Alsfeld on the fairy-tale route where you can see a statue of the famous Grimm Brothers' Rotkäppchen (Little Red Riding Hood) -- and those guys were the original storytelling innovators.  From here we take the train to Berlin where Techcrunch says this week, "There is a chapter in the history of technology startups, or perhaps more a book, that will be dedicated to Berlin," then reports on The Factory, a new building dedicated to start-ups.  (Also check out Henrik Berggren's quick demo of ReadMill on Techcrunch here.)

So I hope to finish up my visit to Berlin with a lot of stories about innovators and why that city is a great place to build companies.  Feel free to leave some comments about any start-ups you think I shouldn't miss.