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Why AboutOne Uses Gamification

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Gamification technology was something we could harness to benefit our users; adding a game element instantly brought the fun! By Joanne Lang (Founder & CEO, AboutOne)

The Deloitte annual Tech Trends 2012 study reported the latest figures on who plays social games online. Their results were surprising to some, but validating to the rest of us.

The average online gamer is a 37 year old woman. The articles that came out after the study portrayed this gamer as compulsively tending to an imaginary Farmville crop on Facebook.

What they missed was what I saw – these gamers are Moms.

When I created AboutOne, my goal was to help moms

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Being Comfortable In Your Skin

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I’m not sure where this road will lead, but I am excited to find out. By Mili Mittal (Co-Founder & CEO, mor.sl)

I was on the phone with my 13-year old niece today. She recently launched her own jewelry website and 4 days post-launch was deflated by the fact that she had no customers. I’d been dreading this call.

She’d had hopes of instant success. And it’s no wonder — with all the hype about entrepreneurship these days, it seems that anyone can get customers, get bought, or get funded “overnight”. The hype is false. The media tends to leave out the arduous tale of toiling and pivoting that most startup founders go through before they “make it.”

Here’s my tale (still in progress!) and some of the big

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Sophia Amoruso’s Los Angeles-Based Fashion Retail Website Nasty Gal Raises $40M Series B From Index Ventures

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From eBay store to major online retail destination, CEO Sophia Amoruso goes big with Nasty Gal. By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0)

Los Angeles-based shopping site Nasty Gal raises $40M Series B from Index Ventures.

In 2006, Nasty Gal started as an eBay store "Nasty Gal Vintage" curated and painstakingly grown by founder and CEO Sophia Amoruso, who hired friends as employees to grow Nasty Gal into its own web domain and major online retail destination. Forbes reports that without outside financing or marketing, Nasty Gal took in $28M in revenue in 2011, up from $10M in 2010.

Index Ventures' portfolio companies include UK-based

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Democratizing Entrepreneurship: The Next Generation Of Networks

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Online connections give entrepreneurs access to a global network of founders, mentors and advisors. By Lesa Mitchell (Vice President, Kauffman Foundation)

In 1950, Ewing Kauffman launched his pharmaceutical company, Marion Laboratories Inc., in the basement of his modest home in Kansas City. During his first year in business, he had sales of $36,000 and a net profit of $1,000. By the time he sold his company to Merrell Dow in 1989, it had become a global diversified healthcare giant with nearly $1 billion in sales.

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak launched Apple. The first world headquarters for their world-changing venture was Jobs’ family garage.

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Facebook Engineering: Announcing The Grace Hopper Scholarship

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The Facebook scholarship awards women excelling in computer science with the chance to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference from October 3-6, 2012. By Jocelyn Goldfein (Director of Engineering, Facebook)

This fall, we'll join hundreds of remarkable women in technology in Baltimore, Maryland for our fifth year at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. We're looking forward to tackling this year's theme, "Are We There Yet?" with 25 university and industry Facebook Grace Hopper Scholarship winners.

The Facebook scholarship awards women excelling in computer science with the chance to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference from October 3-6, 2012.

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What Is A Design Product Manager?

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Design Product Managers sit at the intersection between technical and business (engineers and marketers). By Samihah Azim (Design Product Manager, BizeeBee)

This is a question I’m often asked. Sometimes we’re labeled as Product Designers, other times it’s Product Managers, and even other times we’re Product Managers of User Experience. But labels are just that – labels. To fully understand what a Design Product Manager is, I’m going to attempt to summarize below.

Traditionally, Product Managers have either come from engineering (technical PM’s), or they’re more business minded, typically hailing from Marketing (PM’s focused on growth). But what we’re seeing in Silicon Valley is this understanding that users

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