March Madness is here, and not just in the basketball sense.

Startup Madness is a one-day event that invites student entrepreneur teams from the Atlantic Coach Conference to demo their products and ideas, answer questions and be judged. The top eight teams then move on to the next round.

The event is set up in a bracket form. Each first-round winner will then face the other winner in their region in the Elite 8. Those winners move on to the Final Four and eventually the championship.

The winning team gets a trip to Silicon Valley and lunch at Facebook in San Francisco.

Participating students come from campuses including N.C. State, Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill and other incoming and outgoing ACC schools.

Startup Madness starts at 8:30 a.m. on March 27 at N.C. State's Hunt Library in Raleigh.

Click here for tickets and more information.

Triangle Startup Weekend starts Friday.

The 54-hour event, which will focus for the first time on education, gives entrepreneurs the opportunity to work with coaches and other entrepreneurs to create and plan education-themed presentations. The pitches will then be judged at the end of the weekend.

The event includes speakers Wendy Lybrand and Jenny Eigenrauch, co-founders of DoTheData.com, and coaches such as Brian Marks, CTO of WebAssign, Susan Kellog, CIO at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, and software developer Sidd Chopra.

Triangle Startup Weekend runs Friday, March 8 through Sunday, March 10 and will take place at HUB Raleigh, located at 711 Hillsborough Street.

Register and get more information here.

Venture capital funding for Triangle startups hit a 15-year low in 2012, although the numbers increased in the second half of the year.

According to a report from accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, Triangle companies raised $11.8 million in the first quarter of 2012 compared to $53.6 million in the fourth quarter.

Read David Ranii's story here.

Triangle Entrepreneurship Week, which extends through Friday, is connecting local startups to investors. 

The five-day event seeks to connect local entrepreneurs to resources, capital and collaborators, according to co-founder Jon Leonardo.  Monday marked the start of the event’s second year in the Triangle.  The schedule includes four morning pitch sessions, along with other discussions such as “Government role in startups” or “How to raise money in the Triangle.” Individuals pay about $15 to attend one session or $199 for a week long pass.

About four of the 12 companies that pitched in the Triangle last year received funding, Leonardo said.

So far, at least two local companies that have pitched to angel and other investors have set up follow-up meetings with investors, Leonardo said.  On Thursday morning three companies pitched to Grant Allen, vice president of ABB Technology Ventures Ltd.

ABB is a large engineering conglomerate based in Zurich, Switzerland.  

“What we do as a corporate venture capital outfit is take balance sheet money from ABB and deploy it into early stage technology companies of strategic interest to ABB,” said Allen, a Duke University graduate whose office is in Washington D.C..  “Those investments are typically two to 10 million dollars, even though we can write checks up to 20.”

Allen is also involved with NextGen Partners.

“We are a group of 40 under 40 angels,” he said. “We are looking to write checks anywhere really from $50,000 to $200,000.”

After the presentations, Allen said he was interested in connecting one of Thursday’s presenters to some Washington D.C.. investors and talking with his NextGen Partners about another.

The fourth and final pitch session will be held Friday morning. For more information about that and Triangle Entrepreneurship Week go here. 

American Underground, the office space in Durham's American Tobacco Campus that offers cheaper rents to startups, is expanding.

A new space called Underground @Main Street will offer 22,000 square feet of space for startups at 201 W. Main Street. The building is owned by Self-Help Credit Union.

The space is expected to eventually host about 50 startups and support organizations. Fifteen tenants have already signed up.

Bandwidth, the Raleigh-based telecommunications company, and Yealink are providing the building with complimentary phone systems.

The American Underground space in American Tobacco opened in 2010. It includes 26,000 square feet of space in the lower levels of the Strickland and Crowe buildings.

Durham's American Tobacco campus is getting another laboratory for incubating startups.

N.C. Idea, a nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs, and Capitol Broadcasting, the owner of American Tobacco, announced today that they are forming Groundwork Labs.

The incubator will select technology startups for a three-month program, providing up to $20,000 in funding, mentoring, office space, legal expertise and other support. 

The first group of startups is set to start in the spring of 2012.

Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, a new support network financed by the private equity giant, has named Robert Creeden to be its first executive director.

Creeden is founder and managing partner of Boston-based Partners Innovation Fund. 

The Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network was announced in April.

It is a partnership between the company and the Triangle's four major universities -- Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill -- as well as the Council for Entrepreneurial Development.

Financed with $3.6 million from Blackstone's charitable foundation, it is designed to provide entrepreneurs with the support they need to turn their ideas into fast-growing companies.

American Underground, the recently opened basement space at American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham, has announced five new tenants.

The startups include Acorn Innovestments, Adzerk, Jaargon Ltd., Preation and Two Toasters.

They join the earlier announced companies Launchbox Digital, Joystick Labs and the Council for Entrepreneurial Development.

American Underground includes 26,000 square feet of space on the lower levels of the Strickland and Crowe buildings. It had been used as storage space until this fall.

The space is designed for startups -- rents are about $5 per square foot cheaper. It includes offices and suites, shared conference rooms and break rooms and a classroom that accommodates 60 people.