Hands down, nerd of the year for 2010 is the billion dollar man Andrew Mason of Groupon, Inc.

For so many hackers and tech startup entrepreneurs it is a dream come true to make a fantastic exit and become acquired by Google. Let alone to be their biggest acquisition to date. Yet that wasn't exactly the case, when just last month, Mason and his company ultimately decided to turn down Google's reported $6 billion dollar offer.

That's a lot of money. But apparently Mason doesn't care.

I never wanted to be in this position. I just wanted to work on cool stuff.

Today marks the first official 'prototype' release of GameGigs - a new community platform for connecting game developers, designers, and (eventually) players.

The project was born at a Startup Weekend (Edmonton); a unique type of tech event geared at assembling teams of random nerds to build random ideas. GameGigs, alongside several other competitive projects, was hammered out over the course of the weekend.

The concept is blatantly simple: connect game developers, designers and visionaries. By providing a platform for the open exchange of code, artwork, and ideas.

You might assume that pitching to a VC is the only way to raise a huge amount of fast action capital for your innovative new startup. Yet there is an alternative strategy. And it involves pitching to foreigners.

A new company based in Alabama caught my attention yesterday as I read about their efforts to raise $1 billion of startup capital. It wasn't this lofty target that caught my attention, but rather, it was their strategy to make it happen.

The strategy involves taking advantage of the EB-5 Visa immigration program.