The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Women of Color in Tech: How Can We Encourage Them?
- Has The Age Of Totemic Gadgets Passed?
- Conduit Acquires Web Application Platform Wibiya For $45 Million: Sources
- Instagram Founders: Instagram Is A “New Entertainment Platform” (TCTV)
- Will Social Media Save WrestleMania 27?
- (Founder Stories) Moot On The Origin Of 4Chan And The Evolution of Memes
- Weekend Giveaway: A Tagged Tumi Bag
- State Department Builds A Panic Button App
| Women of Color in Tech: How Can We Encourage Them? Posted: 03 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT
Over the last five years, I have taught more than 300 really smart students. One of the smartest, at the Masters of Engineering Management program at Duke University, was Viva Leigh Miller, a black woman. She had the ambition of moving to Silicon Valley after she graduated last year. I expected she would become a hotshot CEO. But Viva couldn't get a job in the Valley—despite introductions that I gave her to leading venture capitalists. I have never understood why. During my tech days, I would have hired Viva in a heartbeat. She had the determination, drive, and education that all tech companies look for. It raised a red flag in my mind. You can't take one anecdote and extrapolate from that. It could just be that Viva didn't connect with the right companies at the right time. But the harsh reality is that there is a dearth of women in tech. Just look around Silicon Valley—you don't see many blacks there, or Hispanics either. Until recently, I didn't know of even one black woman CEO (though I had heard a rumor that one or two existed). Yes, I know that few women and members of ethnic minorities study engineering; that some women can't deal with the stress and just want to raise children; and that this is not Mike Arrington's fault. It is noteworthy that blacks and Hispanics constitute only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley's tech population—well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%. At an event I attended this week, called Alley to the Valley, at the overpriced Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel in Menlo Park, I discussed this subject with 50 very successful women. Half of the attendees were from the east coast, and half were from the west coast. We agreed that the best way of supplying this dearth is through recognizing that there is indeed a problem; providing mentoring, encouragement, and assistance to all aspiring women entrepreneurs; and showcasing the successes. I have already presented hard data that show that there is a problem, and I've suggested remedies. Now I'll showcase some successes—black women CEOs that graduated from Founder Labs, a pre-incubator for emerging entrepreneurs and from a related organization, Women 2.0. I'll let them tell you their own stories.
Raissa was born in Paris, where her father was pursuing a PhD in linguistics. Her family later moved to the Ivory Coast, where she lived most of her life. Her parents have since returned to their home country of Burkina Faso, where her father is a university professor, and her mother, the mayor of her home town. Raissa studied finance in college and started her career at Wall Street at firms including JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, and ICV Capital. Raissa’s parents valued academic excellence and wanted her to pursue a traditional career, not entrepreneurship. Her role models were her mother, who dedicated her life to community service, and her grandfather, who was the first black doctor of pre-independence Burkina Faso. Raissa says she gets her drive and tenacity from her mother, whose determined recovery from an illness of more than 10 years’ duration was an inspiration. Raissa was comfortable working in investment banking, but itched to become an entrepreneur and pursue her passion for food. So she quit her job, attended culinary school, and was training at a high-end restaurant in Paris when she decided take her passion for food to the web. She then packed her suitcase and bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco. While networking her way around the Valley, she heard about Founder Labs and applied to the program in hopes of learning the fundamentals of tech entrepreneurship. Founder Labs helped her validate her idea, find a co-founder, and ultimately secure angel funding. She says that entrepreneurship has been a great experience. She learned that there is always something to learn. While her co-founder is writing code, she's out talking to potential users and learning ways to make her products better. Her advice to others who may want to follow her path:
Kimberly was born in California and raised in Colorado, where she has been a competitive figure skater for most of her life. Her father was a prison warden; her mother, an artist. Kimberly received a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh because of her skating skills, and completed a degree in marketing and in anthropology before attending business school in Michigan. Her mother was the most profound influence on her, and taught her to express herself freely and use her talents. When Kimberly was three, she saw a show on TV and decided to become a figure skater. Skating is an expensive sport, and her mother could only afford an hour or so of practice time weekly. So she skated her routines on a tennis court at night, on special roller blades that were fashioned onto to skating boots. She says that falling on concrete is a lot worse than falling on ice, so it actually made her a better skater. She learned that there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. Kimberly says she became an entrepreneur because she found a problem she wanted to solve that no one else was solving. Founder Labs taught her about the tech scene in the Bay area, and she made valuable contacts. She says that she is glad there were also men in the program; that it is much better that way than being all black or all female. Kimberly believes that the reason there aren’t more black women in the tech world is that it doesn’t offer them an equitable path to success—because of which most educated African Americans get into law or medicine. Her advice to entrepreneurs: go to as many networking events as you can—particularly the inexpensive ones. Meet others, exchange ideas, and learn to pitch your ideas. And she says that they should get used to rejection: "If you aren’t getting rejected, you aren’t playing the game right."
Arielle grew up in Vallejo, CA. Her mother was a single parent and worked as a customer-service representative while she raised two children. Arielle says that it was a little difficult growing up, because she and her brother had to spend a portion of their time in foster care. She gained a scholarship to study Information Technology & Media at UC-Berkeley and was determined to make the most of it. She says her mother was her role model because she is very passionate and independent. Arielle learned early how to make something out of nothing. She learned how to start at the bottom and solve problems through technology. She realized that entrepreneurs could impact affect of people—and that is what motived her to become one. Arielle was a volunteer with the organization, Women 2.0 which helped herArielle build a network and connect to role models, investors, customers, and partners. It was through the Women 2.0 network that Arielle met her co-founders, and really felt empowered and supported to be an entrepreneur, even while still in college. Her advice to entrepreneurs:
Being an entrepreneur has helped Arielle build self-confidence and meet amazing people who share her determination to change the world. All three of these women defied the odds and became entrepreneurs. With a bit of luck, they will achieve big success and help others behind them. It doesn't take much to fix an entrepreneurial imbalance. We just need to recognize the reality, provide a little bit of mentorship—and a lot of encouragement. *Photo credit–510 Media Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.        
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| Has The Age Of Totemic Gadgets Passed? Posted: 02 Apr 2011 06:15 PM PDT
The lads here, mostly Devin and Matt, were talking about Everyday Carry, a website dedicated to the things we carry in our bags, pockets, and purses. Most of the EDC gear looks pretty heavy-duty – many EDCs include guns and long stickin’ knives for, you know, those times when you need to stick stuff (Merlin Mann’s is particularly interesting, for example) – and from the looks of the site it seems lots of people have totemic items, items of power that they carry to get things done. You’ve got Leathermen and diving watches. Little Moleskine notebooks. Pocket cameras and Space Pens.        
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| Conduit Acquires Web Application Platform Wibiya For $45 Million: Sources Posted: 02 Apr 2011 03:44 PM PDT
Exclusive - No, Conduit was not acquired for a billion dollars or more by Google or Microsoft … yet (although one executive suggested to me in a phone call this week that the company should, in fact, be worth about half of Facebook’s valuation on the private market – meaning about $35 billion at present day – because they reach about half of the social network’s audience). We’ll see about that. Either way, what’s really happening, according to solid sources close to the company, Conduit is in fact acquiring another Israeli startup in the Web app publishing and distribution space, namely Wibiya, and they added that the deal could close as early as next Monday or Tuesday. According to those people, who are familiar with the negotiations, the transaction hasn’t been signed off yet and the deal could still fall through, although multiple sources I’ve spoken with are confident the acquisition will close soon. I hear that the purchase price is roughly $45 million, which means the deal would give a solid return to both Wibiya’s founders and investors, who have pumped about $2.6 million into the company. Backers include Primera Capital, Yossi Vardi, Oded Vardi and Jeff Pulver. If the acquisition closes, all 17 Wibiya employees are expected to join Conduit. Wibiya essentially enables publishers to add a social layer to their websites, rendering said sites interactive, free of charge, in order to grow their audience organically. It is similar to what Conduit does, although Conduit is mostly known for its Web toolbars and web application marketplace. Complementarity seems to be the key word, here. From what I’ve gathered about the company, Wibiya currently partners with publishers of about 120,000 websites, many of which are small ones, although its customer base also includes the likes of TheStreet.com, Playboy.com and Glam.com. In total, Wibiya is said to reach 200 million unique users, although that is to be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion (even Twitter reportedly boasts less active users than that). Conduit partners with companies like Zynga, Fox, MLB and Time Warner Cable to reach about 230 million unique users, according to its own count. I should note that the company does seem to do extremely well even though those numbers seem to be inflated: it has raised less than $10 million since its founding in 2005 and boasts about 250 employees today.        
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| Instagram Founders: Instagram Is A “New Entertainment Platform” (TCTV) Posted: 02 Apr 2011 03:03 PM PDT Somewhere between yesterday afternoon and last night, Instagram hit 3 million users after only six months of existence. To put that into perspective, that’s like 1% of the population of the US using a service that currently only fully exists on a iPhone. Instagram’s explosive growth has made them the current go-to success story for pivoting and unleashed a torrent of buzz around the white hot photo-sharing space. But founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger don’t think of the service as just a simple way to share images, but as more of mechanism for users to tell stories and discover the world around them, a “new entertainment platform” the co-founders told me in an interview for TCTV yesterday. “By no means do we think of Instagram as just a photo-sharing service,” said Systrom. “It’s something that a lot of people lump us into, but we’d like to think of ourselves as a storytelling service. It’s the way you go out in the world and tell a story about your life, and it’s a new entertainment platform. You can open it up and see a story about what your friends are doing, but also [that] ABC World News is posting photos of someone in Japan reporting on the nuclear crisis. It’s really moving to see those things coming together through images.” During our interview Systrom and Krieger outlined a couple of interesting use cases for the service. Systrom explained how he often goes to demo.instagram.com and observes location-based phenomena like users uploading pictures of the same sunset in Portland and in Seattle. Brands like Burberry who (has over 13,000 followers) hold man-on-the-street Instagram hashtag campaigns like #TheArtOfTrench to help build brand engagement. BravoTV, which just joined the service a couple days ago, photographed and uploaded its entire Top Chef finale to #TCFinale. The founders have a sharp idea of where the service is headed, including how they will eventually handle revenue. Systrom explained, “We’re moving in a very clear direction that will allow us to make money in the future. In the history of advertising the most profitable avenues of advertising have been pushing images to people. As we see outside of the digital world those verticals are struggling in one way or another, money is moving online. We’re going to be one of the largest ways to push images to people, that entertainment platform I was talking to you about. That puts us in a really interesting spot in terms of making money on advertising in the future.” The co-founders are cool with sacrificing short term profits for long term value. “What is uninteresting to us is charge a user 99 cents and never see them again model. To be a world changing company we need to think bigger than that,” Systrom continues. And while both co-founders do insist that an Android app and website are both in the works (they’re “thinking really critically about them”), their grander goal for the product goes beyond any particular avenue for distribution, “Our vision for Instagram in the long run is seeing the world as it happens through other people’s eyes.” Instagram currently has $7.5 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, Baseline Ventures as well as investment from angels Chris Sacca, Jack Dorsey and Quora’s Adam D’Angelo.        
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| Will Social Media Save WrestleMania 27? Posted: 02 Apr 2011 02:49 PM PDT
       
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| (Founder Stories) Moot On The Origin Of 4Chan And The Evolution of Memes Posted: 02 Apr 2011 12:48 PM PDT When Christopher Poole (aka Moot) was 15 years old, he founded the 4chan image board on an IRC channel with 20 people. Today, the site attracts about 12 million people a month and is the font of many of the Internet’s most pervasive memes, from Lolcats to Rickrolling. Moot doesn’t like to do video interviews, but after much pestering, Chris Dixon got him to come on Founder Stories for a rare video appearance. We’ll be running the entire conversation throughout the week, including a sneak peek at what he’s doing with his latest startup, Canvas. (Disclosure: Dixon is also an investor in Canvas through Founder Collective). In this first part, Moot explains the origins of 4Chan in the video above. Both the idea and software was borrowed from a Japanese site called Futaba channel, but 4chan took on a life of its own—a completely anonymous site where community members felt free to express themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the unique characteristics of the site is that there are no archives. The most popular images, gifs, and comments bubble up to the top, and cascade through the site like a waterfall. Every so often, a meme will develop on the site and be picked up elsewhere. In the video below, Moot talks about the evolution of memes, how they start as one thing and change over time. For instance Rickrolling (which thankfully is a meme in decline), got it’s start on 4chan as a bait and switch where the word eggroll became filtered into duckroll, and then people started linking the word to a picture of a duck on wooden wheels. Somehow this static image of the duck on wheels got posted to YouTube, where duckroll evolved into Rickroll. Part of the appeal of 4Chan is to watch these memes as they spring up and influence them. Since everything is so ephemeral on the site, it’s hard to go back later and reconstruct what happened. “It’s hard to find a primary source,” says Moot, “the primary source deletes itself every five minutes.” Which is exactly why we need Know Your Meme, which was just purchased by the Cheezburger Network. According to Moot, the life cycle of a meme is that it starts on 4chan, is studied on Know Your Meme, and then is monetized by Cheezburger.        
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| Weekend Giveaway: A Tagged Tumi Bag Posted: 02 Apr 2011 10:33 AM PDT
       
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| State Department Builds A Panic Button App Posted: 02 Apr 2011 10:26 AM PDT
The State Department tells TechCrunch government funded work is underway to build an Android version of this “panic button” app. No release date has been set. Another version designed to work on low-cost Nokia phones, more common in the developing world, is being considered. No iPhone app is planned for now. The special app, first reported by Reuters, is part of an initiative to promote new technologies for social activists. So far, the State Department has funded $22 million in “Internet freedom programming.” The money goes to innovators in the form of small grants ranging from a few to tens of thousands of dollars. TechCrunch asked who was getting the money, but due to the sensitive nature of the project, the government won’t disclose names. An open, competitive bid process was used to award the grants. While the government isn’t looking for more help building these apps, they may have future projects designed to advance “Internet Freedom” in other ways. Keep an eye on www.grants.gov for any additional info. Some of the past program objectives have included developing technology “to enable users in closed societies to get around firewalls and filters in acutely hostile Internet environments” and training bloggers and activists to safely and anonymously participate in online forums. The effort is another example of how the administration sees the important role social media and technology has played in global politics. In 2009, the U.S. asked Twitter to delay maintenance work so real-time information about the Iranian protests could continue. The White House has also called on Egypt and Libya to restore internet blackouts. The State Department says it’s not just writing checks. The government is trying to use venture capitalist techniques to produce the best results. No, the goal is not to make 10x on the investment. But, the government is supporting a diverse portfolio of innovation rather than just funding big established technologies. It’s providing knowledge and connections, not just cash. And they are investing to incubate a new community focussed on the intersection of technology and human rights. Of course with any well intentioned program, there could be negative side effects. What happens if the panic button app gets into the wrong hands, such as drug dealers or terrorists? A State Department spokesperson tells TechCrunch it’s a legitimate concern and they are taking that into account when planning the distribution and publicity of the app. It seems TechCrunch readers won’t be a problem.        
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Raissa B. Nebie is the CEO of 
Kimberly Dillion is the founder of 
Arielle Patrice Scott and her partners, Gleb Podkolzin and Danielle Leslie, recently launched a company called 
Well, maybe not "save" WrestleMania, but help ensure it does better than last year's edition, WrestleMania 26, which, at well under one million pay-per-view buys worldwide, was considered a bit of a disappointment. What's different this year is WWE's use of social media—that is to say they're actually using it this time around. But even if this year's edition, WrestleMania 27, which airs from Atlanta tomorrow on pay-per-view, does better than last year's, how much of that can be attributed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how much of that can be attributed to the return of The Rock? Serious business, etc.
This weekend we have a jam for the ladies (and the fashion forward men.) Tumi would like to offer you this handsome $445 suitcase tagged by some guy named Crash. I didn’t dig too deeply into this one but I assume someone out there a) likes Tumi and b) likes stuff like this, so here you go.
Imagine you are a pro-democracy protester on the streets of a repressive government. You’ve got your cellphone and you are messaging your friends. In the crowd near you, the police start making arrests. Fearing the government will confiscate your phone and investigate your contacts, you push a “panic button” on your phone. It deletes the contacts in your address book and sends out an alert. Such an app wasn’t readily available so the U.S. State Department, acting as a venture capitalist, decided to build one.| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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