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3 Ways To Scale Without Losing Savvy Customer Service

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By Natalia Oberti Noguera (Founder & CEO, Pipeline Fellowship) How can a low-tech, high-touch startup scale to a high-tech one without losing users? I asked several tech startup founders, community managers, and users for any lessons learned on how startups can successfully transition their early adopters, who are used to feeling like VIPs, to technology that reduces hand-holding.

Here are three principles they work by as their startups continue to scale from high-touch to high-tech:

  1. Canned answers can be a good thing -- According to Danae Ringelmann, IndieGoGo co-founder and... Read More...
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Mentorship and Networking Especially Important for Women Entrepreneurs (Stories of Leadership)

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Last week, Andreessen Horowitz invited women to their Menlo Park office to hear stories from leaders: Padmasree Warrior (CTO, Cisco), Marissa Mayer (VP Location & Local, Google), Freada Kapor Klein (Founder, Level Playing Field Institute), Angela Benton (Founder, NewME), and Sandy Jen (Co-Founder & CTO, Meebo).

Panel moderator and TechCrunch writer Vivek Wadhwa conducted research with NCWIT, finding that the only difference between women and men to become entrepreneurs is that women feel discouraged from starting up.

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SugarSync CEO On How Star Women Are More Portable

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By Laura Yecies (CEO, SugarSync) I happened to read a fascinating article in Harvard Business Review – it’s a couple of years old but it was part of an email to me by HBS and the title caught my eye, “How Star Women Build Portable Skills”. You can read the full text of the article here.

The thesis is that, unlike men, when star women switch firms, they maintain their “star” performance. The author, Boris Groysberg, attributes this to two factors:

  • “Unlike men, high-performing women build their success on portable, external relationships – with clients... Read More...
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Apply For A Facebook Fellowship (2012 Graduate Fellowships)

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By Jocelyn Goldfein (Director of Engineering, Facebook) Applications for Facebook graduate fellowships for academic year 2012-2013 is now open. The deadline for fellowship applications is December 16, 2011.

We’re also excited to announce that we’ll be doubling the number of awards we give out this year. These fellowships support exceptional Ph.D. students in a wide range of academic topics.

This year, we are also increasing focus in “systems” areas (Compilers, Databases, Distributed Computing, Fault Tolerance, and Networking). These areas represent

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Early-Stage Battery Startup Founder Seeks Commercialization Help

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By Danielle Applestone (Co-Founder, SnipeSwipe) The first company I started was SnipeSwipe, a small, two-person software company. It was me, my then boyfriend, and some books on how to code in Perl. We wrote all the software for an internet-based eBay sniping service, hosted it on some dirt cheap virtual servers, and we were profitable in ten days. We didn’t get to pay ourselves for nearly six months, but now it’s eight years later, we have around 800 monthly paying customers, and we have helped people win hundreds of thousands of items on eBay.

You’d think I might know something about starting

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Who Are The Top 10 Women in U.S. Technology?

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By David Zielenziger (Contributer, International Business Times)  

Nobody would ask who the top 10 men are in U.S. technology because their ranks fill the executive suites at Intel, Apple, Texas Instruments, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Motorola Mobility....and on and on.

Finding the women is harder because there are fewer, especially at the CEO level, where they can really influence the company and the industry.

Here are a few more than 10 to start:

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Palo Alto Research Center Wants to Help You (November Events)

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By Kelly Coupe (Program Manager, Intelligent Systems Laboratory) Those of you starting new companies are executing upon insightful ideas, unique to solving a problem you’ve identified in the world. But what if you’ve found that it leaves a little something desired in order to take it to the next level? Something truly unique that will set your company apart?

Whether it’s building a completely new concept, or finding that you need to implement a never been done before novel technology, you may find that you need additional support to execute. For example, let’s say you have a great idea for an online

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Gamification… The Future of Marketing (November 9)

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By Nelly Yusupova (CTO, Webgrrls International) Are you marketing a product or service? Do you want to create a dynamic team within your company? Are you building a business, website, or a blog? Do you want to create better relationships with your customers?

If you said YES to to any of these questions, then you have to learn gamification on Wednesday, November 9 in New York.

Join NYC Webgrrls and one of the top thought leaders in Gamification, Gabe Zichermann (author of Game-Based Marketing and Gamification by Design), for an interactive

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The Income Disparity of Women in the Creative Class

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By Richard Florida (Senior Editor, The Atlantic)  

"What if the modern, post-industrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?" asks Hanna Rosin in her widely-discussed Atlantic essay, "The End of Men."

"The attributes that are most valuable today -- social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus -- are, at a minimum, not predominantly male." Rosin argues that the post-industrial playing field has been tilting toward attributes associated with women (such as their superior social and communication skills) and away from physical skills essential in industrial

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A Report from Startup Weekend #DCEDU, From 1 of 4 Finalists

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By Ainsley O'Connell (Director of Strategy & Partnerships, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship)  

I arrived at Startup Weekend EDU in Washington, D.C. ready to dive in and work on someone else’s idea. I ran into my friend, who said he was planning to pitch a couple of ideas and encouraged me to go for it, even if I hadn’t prepared anything. After all, why not? Surely I’d been mulling over an idea that had some promise?

I realized that I did have something, I had been thinking for a while about the shortcomings of our existing tools for communicating student data to parents. Complex assessment data increasingly guides educators’ work, effectively cutting

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Female Founders to Follow (Women 2.0 Startup Weekend Mentors)

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By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) Women 2.0 Startup Weekend (November 18-20, 2011 in San Francisco, CA) will host 150 hackers, designers, business and marketing people to build early-stage startups in 54 hours.

Women 2.0 Startup Weekend 2011 MENTORS and their ventures:

Sasha Laundy (Founder, Women Who Code) Sasha loves helping others learn cool things

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Accidental Entrepreneur Seeks Structure, Stability and Sanity

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By Elizabeth Grace Saunders (Founder & CEO, Real Life E) Confession: I never thought I would be an entrepreneur.

I grew up in a traditional family: My dad worked at a corporation, and my mom did an awesome job of raising four kids.

I excelled in school, got a full scholarship to a university, completed four internships, and then was hired for a corporate job (and was super excited about it!) before graduating from college.

Then life happened: I was laid off from my first

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1 Weekend, 30 Geeks, 5 Projects: Hacking for a Good Cause

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By Anita Schillhorn van Veen (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) There’s a dizzying energy around startups in America these days --

New York City’s Silicon Alley, tech corridors in states throughout the country, and of course Silicon Valley are all abuzz with new ventures, young entrepreneurs, brilliant ideas for mobile applications, cloud services, and social media spin-offs.

When the blogs are abuzz with stories of nine-digit investments and IPOs, it’s easy to forget that there are millions of people throughout the world that subsist on next to nothing.

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BostInnovation: Figure Out Who You Are, Ignore All The Rest

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By Melissa Ablett (Marketing & Events Coordinator, BostInnovation)  

Today at Microsoft’s second annual Women’s Leadership Forum there was no cheer-leading about “girl power,” rather just powerful women who are making a difference.

Organized by Microsoft, MITX, the Commonwealth Corporation, and others, the NERD Center was filled with women (and a few very lucky, seemingly lost men) eager to attend the long line-up of speakers, panels, one-on-ones, and networking.

Sara Spalding, Microsoft’s Cambridge Site

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10 Things I Learned From the Founders at F.ounders 2011

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By Lindsay Harper (Founder, Swayable) F.ounders Dublin was truly the most amazing networking experience I’ve ever had. Having an extensive background in experience marketing, this high praise to be sure. I’m still trying to fully process the entire experience a full 2 days after being home.

I was invited to attend F.ounders last spring, and am very honored to have been included in the 150 founders from around the world. Seattle was represented by myself and Werner Vogels, Amazon CTO.

The structure of this global event is brilliant -- 3 tiers of founders; those that have built era0defining companies, those who’s companies

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The Women 2.0 Editorial Staff.