people

San Francisco's RocketSpace accelerator has named Karl Knight as its new president and chief financial officer. Knight was previously the managing director of Recurrent Energy and before that was CFO at Regenesis Power. Knight joins CEO Duncan Logan, COO Todd Elsberg, CRO (chief revenue officer) Eryc Branham on RocketSpace's management team. That's a lot of chiefs. Knight will be responsible for RocketSpace’s finances and strategy.

Startupbootcamp Amsterdam has named a new operations manager. Zaïsha Cowles (pictured here) was a 'young executive' at Boer&Croon, a large consulting firm that is one of the sponsors of Startupbootcamp. Startupbootcamp runs 13-week accelerator programs in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Haifa, and Dublin. Some locations, like Amsterdam, run one program a year. Others, like Haifa, run two. Startupbootcamp provides $20k seed money and take 8% in return.

The UK's University of Cambridge is lookng for an academic to work at its new incubator and accelerator. Part of the university's Judge Business School, the incubator/accelerator was set up thanks to $500k funding from Cisco in May 2012. 

We're seeing reports today that New Zealand's The Icehouse incubator is setting up its first satellite office. Peter Wogan (pictured here) will visit  New Zealand Hawke's Bay area about twice a week to facilitate The Icehouse program there.

November has been an outstanding month for UK's Birmingham Science Park. Earlier in the month BSP successfully hosted the LAUNCH gaming conference. Last week it celebrated its 30th anniversary (click here to see our special coverage of that event).

Nick Sturge, who heads the SETsquared incubator at Bristol University, has won the UK Business Incubation (UKBI) organization's "Outstanding Contribution to Business Incubation" award. Sturge has led SETsquared since 2006. The incubator has so far supported 150 companies which have raised more than £75million. The incubator ranks high in the UK startup scene: it won the Best Established Business Incubator  award in 2008. There are currently 60 businesses operating out of the incubator.

Communitech's Hyperdrive accelerator, based in Waterloo, Canada, has named  Doug Cooper as its new Managing Director. He takes on this new role after 18 months as an Executive in Residence for Communitech's Venture Services Team. I know Doug personally; he's an excellent choice for this important role.

In a press release yesterday, the Stamford Innovation Center incubator named Peter Propp as its VP of Marketing. The incubator also appointed Pattie Simon as its VP of Sales and Operations.

Simon was a director at LISTnet for five years until she left in 2004 to be the director of marketing and sales at Prime Visibility. Propp worked at IBM for many years. More recently he was VP of marketing at Imaginatik and principal at Shore Communications Inc.

Togo DeBellis is the new Managing Director, of Growth Services at High Tech Rochester. DeBellis was formerly the president and CEO of Badger Technologies until August of this year. High Tech Rochester is a non-profit business incubator based in a suburb of Rochester NY.

Stephen King has been named the first executive-in-residence at AcceleratorYYC in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. In an announcement today, AcceleratorYYC said that King, who is currently CEO of TCELab and President of Stephdokin.com, will be available to provide hands-on guidance to startups there. Apparently this is a one-year position.

It's Monday morning and we've already got our first announcement of a new incubator. The Business Standard reported earlier this morning that Vinod Khosla (pictured, left), one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, is setting up a tech incubator in India to be called, surprisingly, Khosla Labs.

The Batten Institute today announced that Kathryne Carr, co-founder and Managing Director at Tall Oaks Capital Partners, LLC., has joined the Darden School of Business's Batten Institute to run its expanded world-class business Incubator.The incubator will be housed in the W.L. Lyons Brown Innovation Laboratory (i.Lab). Formerly available exclusively to qualified Darden students and alumni, the incubator will now be open to qualified University of Virginia and local community start-ups.

Dan Khan joined New Zealand's Lightning Lab accelerator this week as their program director. In a post on his blog, Khan describes his role this way: "Ostensibly my role at the Lightning Lab is one of a Managing Director of sorts, responsible for getting quality startups into the programme; building the programme content; and developing the mentor networks to allow the startups to get on with building their startups with the best possible support."

Chile is making big waves in the global startup community by re-writing the rules for seed accelerators. Some very forward thinking people in Chile decided to attract high quality startups from all over the world (for example, with $40k equity-free money) and to make it insanely easy to move to and work in the country. The way they did it was to create Startup Chile, something we've written about several times before. QA on Request, from Montreal Canada, was one of the companies accepted into Startup Chile's most recent cohort. Simon Papineau took some time to send us this email about his experiences in his first three weeks there, and we thought we'd share it with you. Here is the view from inside the Startup Chile accelerator....

Jorge Varela has been named the new Assistant Director at TECH Fort Worth, a non-profit business incubator in Texas.

Varela has experience in both the telecommunications and IT industries. He was most recently the Director of Projects at Global Now, and Executive Director of Artes de la Rosa, a Latin arts and culture festival in Texas. Before that, he founded Varela Construction and JMA Communications. Varela was also the Chairman and CEO of the Technology Business Corporation.

Originally from Belize, Varela has lived in Mexico, Germany and the U.S.