This is the first in a regular new series rounding up different blogs and articles that our team of Costa Rican Code Commandos found interesting. This “news from the startup front” will focus on agile development, startups, and anything else related to our team.

Join AgilityFeat’s Costa Rican Code Commandos on the beach and learn more about best practices in building your startup the lean way!

The Chilean government has selected a new batch of startups for its startup accelerator. This is the 5th batch of a program the Chilean government has been using to encourage startups in Chile. Its a sign of the growing awareness of the benefits of nearshoring in Latin American countries, and the vibrant community being built across Latin America for startups!

A lean scorecard for freshbooks, by Arin Sime. Arin from AgilityFeat takes a look at the history of freshbooks based on a recent email announcement they made, and considers how lean startup principles might have affected the situation.

Don’t drink the startup Kool-aid. Just find a problem and try to solve it, says Adam Fletcher. Its great advice (and humorous) for any startup out there. Don’t chase the billion dollar buyout lottery, and instead focus on making a healthy profitable business.

Twitter API changes are already posing challenges to tweetbot developers. TechCrunch reports on how Twitter’s much maligned API limits are having negative effects on how one company is treating it’s alpha period. Will this kill free twitter app launches?

Does your startup need a product overview video? A great landing page video can be sexy, engaging, and highly appealing to entrepreneurs. But also expensive – do you really need it? DesignStaff.org says you probably don’t.

Costa Rica Corner

Costa Rica earthquake could have been worse.We had an earthquake in Costa Rica last week! This article has nothing to do with startups, but is certainly relevant to our team and customers. The earthquake was just before one of our project standups, so understandably our team call was slightly delayed. Fortunately our team and their families are all fine and there was minimal damage in Costa Rica. We appreciate those of you who asked how we are doing! Costa Rica does a pretty good job of adhering to sesimic codes according to this Tico Times article, so the damage wasn’t bad. The only death reported was a heart attack fortunately.

Dare To Be Lean Workshop for Startups

If you’re already signed up for our Dare To Be Lean workshop coming up in January, please don’t forget to fill out this survey for us to help our planning:

http://ow.ly/drajN

If you don’t know what Dare To Be Lean is, then please check out this landing page and sign up for email updates! We are planning a great 3 day workshop on the beach in Costa Rica, where you will learn everything you need to know to get your product built!

http://D2BL2013.com/