"It's a similar approach to Ron Conway and Yuri Milner's deal with Y Combinator," Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro told Betabeat this afternoon, on his way to a board meeting. Mr. Shapiro, whose firm has invested in Kickstarter, Simple, TaskRabbit, and Codecademy, was referring to the blanket investment Collaborative Fund just announced--offering $50,000 a piece in all five of the startups to come out of Brooklyn Beta's "Summer Camp," an incubator of sorts.

(Last January, Mr. Milner and Mr. Conway launched the Start Fund to plunk $150,000 into every new Y Combinator startup.)

Brooklyn Beta, which launched in 2010, is a non-profit conference--going on right now!--put on by Fictive Kin, a design-focused product shop in Brooklyn. But the organizers, who target the “work hard and be nice to people” crowd (be still our cold heart), are expanding. For the first time this year, Brooklyn Beta offered a "Summer Camp," a 12-week incubator program where designer-developer teams focus on "making stuff that matters" and then present at this week's conference. The organizers offer $25,000 to each startup for a six percent stake and then reinvest the profit back in Brooklyn Beta.

Collaborative Fund's interest in funding the initiative came about through an investment they made in Creative Morning, a global morning lecture series for creative types. Creative Morning is run out of a coworking space called StudioMates in Dumbo, which is where Mr. Shapiro met FictiveKin partner and Stanford alum Cameron Koczon. The two discussed the importance of design and a shared frustration with "how Silicon Valley has such a heavy emphasis on engineering and placing engineering talent ahead of design talent," Mr. Shapiro told Betabeat. Part of the thinking behind investing in SkillShare and Kickstarter, he added, was looking for design-led startups.

But there's another overlap in the venn diagram between the two organizations: working towards something with a broader impact. "Not from a sacrificial or philanthropic angle, like a soup kitchen," Mr. Shapiro explained, but having people build applications, sites, programs, and services that push the world forward in a way that at a minimum is interesting and new, as opposed to pure entertainment or another photo sharing app."

"Not that I have anything against that!" he was quick to add, "But that's something that we talk a lot about."

In addition to investing, Collaborative Fund has enlisted Ryan Jacoby, the former head of the New York studio of Ideo, the much-lauded design and innovation consultancy that boasts clients like Proctor & Gamble and Pepsi, to mentor the startups.

Mr. Shapiro said he wasn't sure at first how Collaborative Fund could help and contemplated sponsorship. "[Mr. Koczon] asked me to be a mentor, which is sweet, but I'm not adding any value," he said. Collaborative Fund is "the anti-Ron Conway, in a sense--not in a mean-spirited way, but we're sort of slow and deliberate and we don't make that many investments," Mr. Shapiro said, admitting some nervousness to investing in five companies pre-product.

Ultimately, however, he said, "It was really as much a bet on Cameron and his team at FictiveKin and their ability to select good people and bring in good talent. But it actually turns out that I'm pretty excited about the companies and the diversity of the teams and the actual problems that they're trying to solve."

Sadly, Mr. Shapiro, who said he will consider this kind of blanket offer for next year's class, had to fly out to San Francisco for that board meeting, and was missing today's line-up. But you can follow along with the speakers via Twitter under the hashtag #BrooklynBeta.

Here are the five startups from this year's Brooklyn Beta Summer Camp:

Sticker FM - a collaborative video platform allowing people from around the world to track and report in real time how a situation is developing.

Webe.at - a platform to easily follow, collaborate, and stylize calendars, breaking them out of spreadsheet-like boxes to include media rich content.

Farmstand - an app  that uses your location to show you where to buy local produce from farmers, CSAs, co-ops, community gardens, rooftop gardens and local markets.

MakersRow - a curated search platform and learning community that connects manufacturers and makers.

Skillcrush - a community-driven learning platform to help you increase your digital literacy and achieve your goals with technology.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

Brooklyn Beta is run by Chris Shiflett and Cameron Koczon of web development shops Analog and Fictive Kin, respectively. "We're putting together an incubator of sorts," Mr. Koczon said in an email introducing the summer camp. "We've got some great folks involved and an important mission of bringing designers and developers together to co-found startups."

The incubator will be run under the same nonprofit that operates Brooklyn Beta (lawyers told Brooklyn Beta it shouldn't have any trouble investing as a nonprofit, but research continues). The camp will take a six percent stake in each company in exchange for $25,000, which Brooklyn Beta says is meant to subsidize, not pay for, the entrepreneurs' risks. Companies can work remotely or shack up in Brooklyn, which Mr. Koczon suggested would be "most fun."

Applications open next week and will close on May 31. In the meantime, Brooklyn Beta is working on its next project, "a little something we’re cooking up to help keep the web community close in between conferences." We prodded Mr. Koczon for more hints. "It's going to be a news site. It's pretty sweet. We just didn't want to launch with a whole glut of stuff that would lessen the impact of each thing," he said.

A news site with the acronym BB? 'Scuse us, we've got to see about launching a summer camp.