It seems that Y Combinator and TechStars-like incubators are popping up everywhere. BoomStartup just launched an incubator in Utah and TechStars is expanding to other cities in the U.S., as is The Founder Institute. Chicago has a new incubator that recently launched, called Excelerate Labs.

Excelerate is the brainchild of OKCupid entrepreneur Sam Yagan, Kapil Chaudhary, Kelli Rhee, and Troy Henikoff. Yagan says the Chicago-based incubator has a similar model to TechStars and Y Combinator. Six to ten startups will be chosen for a three month long program, where founders will be given resources to build their products, access to mentors and funding. Each startup will receive anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 (depending on the number of founders) for five percent of equity.

The program is currently accepting applications until April 2. Yagan says that one of the reasons that we wanted to start the program was to help make Chicago become “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” Sandbox Industries and i2a Fund have invested in the incubator, but Yagan says that other venture funds have taken an active interest in Excelerate, including DFJ Mercury. Mentors include TechStars founder David Cohen, OpenTable’s Chuck Templeton, Apex Ventures Partners’ Lon Chow and a host of other notable entrepreneurs and investors.

Groupon directors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, also recently launched Lightbank and will invest as much as $10 million annually in early-stage technology companies through a new fund dubbed. Similar to Excelerate, the fund aims to help establish Chicago as a technology hub.

It’s always great to see investors and former tech executives investing time (and money) in promising startups and ideas. And we are seeing a plethora of innovative startups emerging from a variety of incubators around the country and world, including Y Combinator, TechStars, The Founder Institute, Launchbox Digital and more.

“We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer.”

Okay, yes, that’s slightly taken out of context — but it’s still one hell of a way to rile up developers. And to light a fire under some would-be entrepreneur fanboys. Here’s the full statement around the sentence:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

Following the iPad’s unveiling in January, people seem fairly evenly split about whether the device will be a failure, or the next big thing (I’m on the record as saying I think it will take some time to catch on, but then will quickly rise in popularity towards the future of computing). This is a smart bet for Y Combinator (and the startups that apply for this RFS) to make. If they’re right, and this is the future of computing, these startups getting to work around the time of the iPad launch (it’s still set to ship at the end of this month) should be well positioned to fully take advantage of the device.

And Y Combinator is thinking big for these startups too. It would be easy to tell companies to make apps for the iPad that are basically ports of current mobile apps, but the RFS points to this post by Facebook’s (and FriendFeed co-founder, and Gmail creator) Paul Buchheit, noting the future iPad applications may be unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.

Something else that is interesting to Y Combinator is how you get this new device in the door in businesses. They seem to think you’ll have to trick your company’s IT department:

One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They’ll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn’t really count as a computer and thus can’t be vetoed by the IT department. Don’t worry about this; it’s just a little tablet computer.

Just as iPhone app development has exploded, and Android developers are finally starting to see some real money, iPad developers are already in demand. Windows-killer or not, this is certainly an area to watch for the foreseeable future.

We got a tip recently about a startup called BillFloat, which sports a rather limited website with nothing but a logo and a call for fresh engineers. The intriguing thing about BillFloat, however, was this sentence on the placeholder website: “We are a PayPal and Venrock backed startup re-defining a $100 billion market and are looking for Rails engineers.”

Since PayPal doesn’t have a particularly noteworthy track record of funding other companies, we asked the company about said investment, and got the following response:

PayPal did provide some seed money to billfloat, but we’re not disclosing any specifics. This is in line with what Naveed Anwar and Osama Bedier talked about at our developer conference in November … to encourage developers through guidance and resources to build innovative payment applications. Developers have the opportunity to secure support from PayPal and VC partners including seed funding, coaching, market insight and strategy. We also announced a developer challenge and a VC Network.

Digging a bit deeper, we found out that BillFloat was founded by two Entrepreneurs-In-Residence from VC firm Venrock (also called The Quarry team): serial entrepreneur Ryan Gilbert and former Yahoo exec Sean O’ Malley.

Gilbert, for one, knows his way around the digital payment market. He was co-founder and CEO of PropertyBridge, which was acquired by MoneyGram for $28 million in cash back in October 2007. He is also an advisor to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s latest startup, Square, which aims to revolutionize card payments on mobile phones.

I had a chat with Gilbert about BillFloat yesterday, in which I learned more about the company and its plans in the payment services space. Turns out BillFloat is not exactly meant to become a stand-alone company, product or service, but rather to function as an incubator for the development of multiple electronic payment ideas he, O’Malley and some people from PayPal have been chewing on for a while.

Here are some of things he said (paraphrased):

I’m excited by the opportunity to do something big in payments – to change the way consumers and businesses transaction. So at “BillFloat” we’re investigating new payment ideas, developing them, testing and softly launching in market in a couple of months. We are building our own products for launch under a brand that we will own; BillFloat is just a working name.

This all sounds rather vague, but Gilbert stressed that they have a clear road map ahead and that they aim to shake up the digital payments space, which he claims no one has done in a big way since the birth and rapid rise of PayPal over a decade ago. The basic idea behind BillFloat is to develop solutions that can payments easier for everyone, whether on the Web, mobile or interactive voice response platforms. We’re all for that.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one.

(Thanks to Judd Daniel for the tip)