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Juggling A Full-Time Job And A Startup (Hint – It’s Not Easy)

By Brittany Haas (Co-Founder, Something Borrowed NY) I am miserable since I'm missing out on the #wefestival going on right now. I was accepted...and elated! What a wonderful opportunity to learn from my idols and meet with other aspiring entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, I'm heading off to Paris on Friday with my full-time company for market. We've been swamped here (...we're talking 9am-1am days swamped) and it would be totally irresponsible of me to take off a day, just two days before we jump on a plane and have 2 full on crazy, busy weeks.

Enter the boo/hisses here... I know... nobody feels bad

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Surround Yourself With Great People, No Matter What

By Sonia Kapadia (Founder & CEO, Taste Savant) While I’ve been working on my startup, I’ve received a lot of advice, some good, and some bad. One of the pieces of advice most people mention is to “move fast.”

Time is of the essence and everyday that you haven’t launched is an opportunity for your competition to get stronger, and a lost opportunity to learn from your users. And so, that’s what I’ve been doing — moving fast.

Here is the downside to moving fast, you make a lot of mistakes. Here is the upside, you learn from those mistakes quickly and move

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The Best $750 I Ever Spent Bootstrapping My Startup: One Plane Ticket West

By Leah Busque (Founder, TaskRabbit) Editor's note: Vote Leah Busque for TechCrunch's Founder of the Year!

It was Friday and it had been a long week. I was back in Boston after spending the last two weeks in Palo Alto, participating in the Facebook Fund program (fbFund).

Over the past 12 weeks, in fact, I was flying back and forth between Boston and San Francisco, alternating weeks on each coast. My company TaskRabbit (RunMyErrand.com at the time) was up and running in Boston, and I was splitting my time between the two cities in order to get the most out of the fbFund incubator program while continuing to grow my business in Boston.

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An iPhone Developer Learns Android: Some Thoughts On Code

Here are basics to coding in Java/Android for Eclipse. By Anna Billstrom (Developer, Momentus Media)

At first, doing a “Hello World” was quite easy.

The hardest part was learning Eclipse (for Mac):

  • Open Eclipse and don’t worry about opening a project, on the left hand side will be all of your “workspace” projects.
  • Running (the play button) does an automatic build.
  • Mouseover red squiggly underlines to find build errors.

I lost one of my panes, and that took forever to learn how to open again.

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As If You Needed Another Reason To Hate Big Media Today

By Alicia Liu (Product Manager/Mobile Developer, Select Start) You’re probably frustrated by Stop SOPA Day today, your work is going slow because Wikipedia is blacked out, and you can’t amuse yourself because Reddit is out too, and you’ve already signed Google’s petition, what’s left to do? You can read about another reason to despise the big media companies (if trying to censor the Internet wasn’t reason enough).

I finally watched the Sundance documentary Miss Representation. Everyone should watch this. Girls, boys, women, and men.

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MIT Sloan Women In Management Conference (February 10)

By Clara Brenner & Julie Lein (Co-Chairs, MIT Sloan Women in Management Conference) We make up 3% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Our startups secure only 9% of venture capital funding. And we still earn, on average, 76 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same job. Overwhelmingly, women are not rising to the top.

The theme of the 2012 MIT Sloan Women in Management Conference is “innovating through adversity.” In addition to celebrating the successes of women, the conference will pose hard-hitting questions about the systemic gender inequalities that still exist in business today.

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Stop SOPA: The Tech Community Must Lobby On Our Own Behalf

By Nnena Ukuku (Co-Founder, Black Founders) I encourage everyone to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). However, we can not consider our "duty" done to society if SOPA does not pass — we must push on.

The tech community must become more involved in politics past SOPA. Otherwise, the tech community will be fighting many more battles greater than SOPA with varying degrees of success.

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Ezebis Interview With Angel Investor Christina Brodbeck About Investing In Women-Led Companies

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Editor's note: Christina Brodbeck will a judge on February 14, 2012 at the Women 2.0 PITCH Conference - get your ticket now! Ezebis's Pemo Theodore interviewed Christina Brodbeck about angel investing and startups. The full interview is on Ezebis but we've extracted the parts about angel investing, women-led ventures and how to get into an accelerator program below:

Ezebis: I know that you’re an investor as well as an entrepreneur. Could you tell me what you’re interested in

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Negotiating The Glass Maze: Professional Organizations Helping Women Advance In Technology

By Dr. Jane LeClair (Dean, School of Business & Technology, Excelsior College) It shouldn’t come as a surprise that women are underrepresented in the technology fields.

The numbers are stark: today women earn less than 20% of engineering degrees in the United States. For those women who do enter the tech industries, an incredible 56% leave by mid-career. In fact, I myself left the nuclear field after two-plus decades, for a new career in academia. It is for that very reason that I’ve made the issue of “women in tech” a cornerstone of my time at Excelsior College. My goal is to increase academic retention

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For Women Starting Tech Companies, Brilliance Is Mandatory

By Carla Rover (Writer, The Advertising Technology Review) There are two sides to the post-feminist world for women creating startups technology companies.

Here's the good part: most investors, at least publicly, acknowledge the need for a more diverse field of leadership in the startup community.

Here's the bad part: women may have to do a little extra homework to get over the industry's age-old tradition of choosing leaders based on their educational or demographic similarities

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Partner Event: Vator Splash (February 2 in San Francisco)

Vator Splash will be held in San Francisco on February 2, 2012 gathering leading entrepreneurs, innovators, venture capitalists and angel investors across technology to inspire and energize the audience about entrepreneurship and innovation - bringing together high-caliber speakers who talk about how to build and scale great successful companies, how their industries are changing and the opportunities those changes are creating. Women 2.0 members save 15% on tickets with code “Women”.

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Woman Entrepreneur: Lynn Perkins, Founding CEO Of UrbanSitter

By Joanne Wilson (Blogger & Angel Investor, Gotham Gal) Sometimes you wonder why someone didn't turn the idea of UrbanSitter into a business a long time ago. Technology has given entrepreneurs a platform to take ideas that might have been around for a while the ability to actually build them. So what is the idea? Creating an army of babysitters for parents through direct connections, references and friends. If you have kids and need to find a babysitter for Saturday night, sign up now.

Lynn grew up in San Diego with two parents that were entrepreneurs. Her father is a real estate developer and her mom is a child psychologist who build a line of stress management

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Miss Representation Screening (January 24 in San Francisco) Benefits StartOut’s Lesbian Entrepreneurship Mentoring Program

By Leanne Pittsford (Founder & CEO, StartSomewhere & Board Member, StartOut) If you're in the Bay Area, I hope you'll join me January 24, 2012 at 6pm for a screening of Miss Representation benefiting StartOut’s Lesbian Entrepreneurship Mentoring Program.

Did you know: Women comprise over half the U.S. population, hold 51% of U.S. wealth and have 83% of purchasing power but only comprise 3% of leadership positions in media, 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs and women's representation in politics is abysmal (we're 90th in the world). Worldwide, women do 66% of the world’s work and earn only 10% of the world’s income.

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Buyosphere CEO Tara Hunt Shares Lessons In Seed Funding

By Jen Consalvo (Co-Founder & COO, Tech Cocktail) Editor's mote: This article is courtesy of Tech Cocktail, which offers tech startup events, news and resources across the country. Buyosphere CEO Tara Hunt will be pitching live on February 14, 2012 at Women 2.0 PITCH Conference - get your ticket now!

After launching last year, Buyosphere, a Montreal-based startup, was offering a product that would go head-to-head with Pinterest. You could curate collections of products, find interesting new products through friends, and establish yourself as a tastemaker.

Pinterest has since taken off and Buyosphere

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Former TechCrunch Writer Sarah Lacy Raises $2.5M For PandoDaily, Talks About An Exploding Diaper

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) One of the most recognizable women's names in the Silicon Valley and former TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy has raised $2.5M in funding from individuals including Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Tony Hseih (Zappos), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Andrew Anker, Chris Dixon (FounderCollective), Saul Klein (IndexVentures), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Jeff Jordan (ex-CEO, Open Table) and Matt Cohler (ex-Facebook & Benchmark Capital).

Sarah blogs about why she started PandoDaily here and writes, "There’s a nice side-benefit about starting PandoDaily: I can officially now call bullshit on people (usually men) who insist

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.