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Increase In Patent Applications By Women Entrepreneurs

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) The number of women obtaining patents grew at an accelerated rate in the past 35 years -- and in numbers considerably higher than previously reported.

Reported by the National Women's Business Council who commissioned the study, the report demonstrates that the largest spike came in 2010 as 22,984 patents were granted to women (a 35% jump over the previous year). In 2009, women received 17,061 patents (a 4.5% increase over the 16,321 issued in 2008).

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Pass It Forward: Interview With Bad Girls Ventures Founder Candace Klein On Investing In Women Entrepreneurs

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Women 2.0 interviews Candace Klein, Founder & CEO of Bad Girls Ventures - a non-profit, micro-finance organization focused on educating and financing woman-owned startup companies. To date, Bad Girls Ventures has educated over 250 businesses, financed 26 women with $700k and created 154 jobs across Ohio. Here is her heartfelt story of starting up and empowering women -- to solid economic results and job creation!Women 2.0: How did you get the idea for Bad Girls Ventures? Start at day one, or even before then. Candace Klein: I was born to a teenage mother on welfare and lived in a trailer park near Cincinnati, Ohio. As the oldest of five children and 35 grandchildren in my family, I was the first to go to college. I secured four degrees from Northern Kentucky University

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Why Women Have A Hard Time Raising Money For Startups

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By Jolie O'Dell (Writer, VentureBeat) Every now and then, we hear from a female startup founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money.

She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s a woman pitching an idea to a roomful of male investors.

Women 2.0 CEO and co-founder Shaherose Charania came into VentureBeat’s studio to chat about a few issues experienced by a lot of female founders, not the least of which is

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Five Lessons Learned From Raising Series A For My Startup

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By Joanne Lang (Founder & CEO, AboutOne) It’s been an amazing journey to get AboutOne where it is today. Through the process of developing an award winning app and raising an over-subscribed Series A with lead investors Golden Seeds, I’ve navigated quite a few hurdles and learned many lessons while juggling my roles as tech start up founder and mom to my four young boys.

As I celebrate the closing of my first series A funded by Golden Seeds and MAG, I thought I would give you a sneak peak at five lessons I’ve learned about the funding process.

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UX Designer Starts Up Mobile Publishing House, Builds Top Apps

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By T.J. Zark (Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer, 955 Dreams) I am co-founder and Chief Design Officer at 955 Dreams, a mobile publishing house with some amazingly successful titles we created last year. How this all happened is a bit unusual. I met a guy in a parking lot. It’s true. I met my co-founder in a parking lot and two meetings later we were up to our ears making incredible experiences for users!

It started for me late in 2009 when my partner took a job with Google and I found myself in Palo Alto, having moved my design business. I had been designing UI and UX design on

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A New Year & New Beginning: Meebo Co-Founder Elaine Wherry

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By Elaine Wherry (Co-Founder, Meebo) It’s a New Year and I’m looking ahead to new beginnings.

In 2011, I found myself with a set of Meebo responsibilities that no longer comprised a 40-hour work-week and a nagging feeling that this was the right point to start gracefully unwinding from my formal tasks.

In October, I started transitioning into an advisory role. It was a difficult decision but nothing makes you prouder than seeing the next generation of leaders take the company to new heights and witnessing the company grow from three people to

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The Developer Renaissance: An Investment Road Map For 2012

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By Sarah Tavel (Senior Associate, Bessemer Venture Partners) What an exciting time to be in this business. The “post PC era” and cloud computing are colliding to create a perfect storm. First, thanks to the post PC era, demand for software is exploding. Second, thanks to cloud computing, software development is becoming increasingly accessible.

There's an interesting positive externality to these trends: The developer "citizenship" is exploding. Consequently, developers are finally a large enough community with enough purchasing power that you can actually build a company just by selling to developers. I'd love to invest in companies doing just that.

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SkinnyScoop Powers Social Curation Platform

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By Eden Godsoe (Co-Founder & CEO, SkinnyScoop) I was not one of those women who always knew she would be an entrepreneur. Around the time I became pregnant with my first child, I began looking into the dynamics of female purchase power and how women influence one another. What I saw was a huge, untapped opportunity that I had the know-how and the passion to address.

I am originally from Toronto, Canada where I got a BA in Economics and Philosophy before moving to New York to work at Morgan Stanley. After a few years in NYC, I headed west to Stanford Business School. Post business school, I honed

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Why Pivot After Making $10,000 Our First Month At LaunchBit?

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By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit) Happy New Year! 2011 was quite a ride for us at LaunchBit. Jennifer and I are so thankful to everyone who's helped us.

We started LaunchBit in January 2011 as a way to help entrepreneurs start and grow their internet businesses. This is a problem I've become really passionate about, as I've mentioned here. But, we didn't know exactly how to tackle this problem, because we didn't know *what*, in particular, entrepreneurs were struggling with.

We decided to hold a class on customer development and we built a customer development workflow-tool to learn

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Women In Technology: Not Anomalies, Token Hires Or Tomboys

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By Kaliya Hamlin (Founder, She's Geeky) From the beginning of human civilization women have been engaged in understanding the science of the natural world. Ada Lovelace was the first programmer ever and women programmed the first vacuum tube computer the ENIAC. The stories of their pioneering and innovation in geeky fields like engineering, chemistry, physics and mathematicians are amazing.

Are there enough? Definitely not. We need to encourage girls and young women to pursue their passion for STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). We need to

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Tara Hunt’s Buyosphere Raises $325K In Seed Funding After Pivot

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By Jolie O'Dell (Writer, VentureBeat) Buyosphere is web celebrity Tara Hunt's greatest gamble, and after some shaky months, it might be starting to pay off.

Following a successful rebranding effort, the team has just closed an oversubscribed seed round of funding — $325,000, to be exact.

The funding will be aimed squarely at new user acquisition as well as a couple key hires.

The round, which eschewed big-name Silicon Valley

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Aim For High Growth And Apply For TechStars NYC By January 10

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) The TechStars NYC early application deadline is January 10, 2012 and the final deadline is January 23, 2012.

Want to hear how TechStars can affect an early-stage startup? Read this blog post from a TechStars participant:

"What I needed, and what I got from the TechStars process, was a huge shift in focus – from minimizing risk to maximizing the opportunity for Red Rover.

This shift happened over the course of 100 meetings. This happened under the influence of mentors

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.