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What Pink Ghetto? Women Start Technology Companies

By Marian Mangoubi (Founder & CEO, Sassy CEO) There’s an image of entrepreneurial women focusing on their startups on beauty, shopping, and fashion ("Pink Ghetto"). However, after a year of studying tech companies founded by women, I can say emphatically that this is a misrepresentation.

Last year around this time there was a lot of discussion, “where are all the women in tech?” Each time I heard or read this. I noticed there were never statistics provided on the number of tech companies founded by women.

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How To Rapidly Prototype A Mobile App In 54 Hours: PhoneGap

By Karen Zeller (Contributing Writer, Women 2.0) Interviews done with the majority of teams at Women 2.0 Startup Weekend revealed winning mobile strategies to have in mind for aspiring entrepreneurs. The overwhelming majority of startup teams had ambitions of including a mobile solution as part of their offering.

Whether mobile applications were considered so core to their business model that they were prototyped during the weekend varied from team to team, although at least 40% of the teams had not only a web application prototype but also a mobile prototype.

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Favorite Apps Of Designers, Creative Professionals (Infographic)

By Steph Palmeri (Senior Associate, SoftTech VC) My friends at Best Vendor pulled together data from 180 design and creative professionals on their site to see what tools dominate and unearth some hidden gems and rising stars.

One observation from their post:

Designers’ powerhouse tools like the Adobe Suite remain on the desktop, but more than half of their favorite apps are in the cloud.

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Free Online Stanford Class On Tech Entrepreneurship In January

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) This January 2012, you can attend Stanford's Technology Entrepreneurship class from the comfort of home, online!

This class is for technology entrepreneurs and provides a combination of in-depth case studies and research on the entrepreneurial process. The professor is Chuck Eesley from Stanford University's Management Science & Engineering group. He teaches and conducts research on technology entrepreneurship so that the next generation of entrepreneurs can have the greatest chances of success possible.

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Infographic: What It Means To Be An Expert (“10,000 Hours”)

By Gagan Biyani (Co-Founder, Udemy) Seeing this infographic may change your mind. Did you know that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert?

Aaccording to Malcolm Gladwell in his book "Outliers", it does.

He claims that the “10,000-Hour Rule” is the key to success in any field and is a matter of practicing a specific task for around 10,000 hours.

See what it takes to become an expert in areas such as astrophysics, sports, litigation and even poker.

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Three Things I Learned Pitching to Investors (The Next Women)

By Kimberly Rothman (Founder, I'd Love To Do That) I have been told that successful actors often worry that they will be "found out" that they are not really any good after all.

As I arrived 5 minutes late and walked into a very hot and crowded room of 10 women entrepreneurs and mentors, it crossed my mind: is my business really worthy of this event, and what the hell had I signed myself up for!

The feedback I got was

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48 Hours In The Silicon Valley: Canadian Startup Entrepreneur Krista LaRiviere

By Krista LaRiviere (Co-Founder & CEO, gShift Labs) One of my favorite questions I get asked is, “Is it more difficult to start a software company and raise money when you’re a woman?” My sarcastic answer is always, “I have no idea because I’ve never been a man.” My serious answer is, “I think starting a business, raising capital and growing a technology company are all difficult regardless of gender.”

As a Canadian software entrepreneur, I have the distinct honor of being one of 19 Canadian companies taking part in the C100’s flagship

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How to Ask Smart Questions

By Penelope Trunk (Co-Founder, Brazen Careerist) After I realized that the most underrated skill is asking good questions, I realized that I am not very good at it. I don’t ask for help enough because I don’t know what question to ask. And also, I worry the question will be bad and then the person won’t want to help me again.

So I started forcing myself to ask for help. Like, I put myself on a schedule. And the result was not so much that I got good help (I did) but what I really got was good at asking questions. Because I thought so much about it.

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Partner Event: Save 15% on Socialize: Monetizing Social Media (Jan. 27 in Toronto)

Join Mediabistro, SocialTimes, and AllFacebook on January 27 at Socialize: Monetizing Social Media (Toronto) and learn how all the social media pieces fit together to create a unified and profitable business strategy. You’ll have the chance to connect with over 30 of today’s most influential social media leaders including Fazila Nurani (Founder, PrivaTech Consulting), Susie Parker (Owner, SPARKER Strategy Group), Judi Samuels (Manager of Corporate Communications, Maritz Canada Inc.), Michelle Stinson Ross

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Ruby: More Than A Fun Programming Language

By Elaine Tsai (Organizer, Hack Nights for Beginners) The Ruby programming community in San Francisco is phenomenal. While there may be a shortage of Ruby programmers in the Bay Area, there is no shortage of people interested and excited about the opportunity to learn.

I attended my first Ruby on Rails event a couple of months ago, a RailsBridge “Outreach for Women” workshop. Not knowing what to expect, I came with an open mind, an excitement to meet other female programmers, and finally, an opportunity to learn some programming in an environment where I wasn’t the only female with absolutely no background knowledge.

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Where Do Entrepreneurs Get Their Money?

By Brad Feld (Managing Director, Foundry Group) My friend Paul Kedrosky who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family.

It’s a creative 3-minute video with plenty of meat to it.

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On A Culture Of Constraints In Product Development

By Poornima Vijayashanker (Founder & CEO, BizeeBee) In 4 days, it will be the 1 year anniversary of launching BizeeBee my second startup. When I started BizeeBee, I was determined to put in place engineering principles that I hadn’t been able to at previous companies. I also wanted to avoid a lot of bad practices that I had experienced throughout my career such as splitting the responsibilities of development and testing, and product bloat.

I know most startups like to take the quick and dirty approach to product development, and then go back and refactor or rebuild their product. That’s great and we’ve certainly refactored a lot of our code base too. But I started charging customers from

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Startups Go Holiday Shopping Too! (Corporate Gift Giving)

By Lynley Sides (Founder & CEO, The Glue Network) 'Tis the season for media advice and commentary about consumer shopping, but what about the $17 billion businesses spend each year on gifts and branded items?

At Red Herring, we received a spread of "thank you" items during the holidays -– chocolates, branded mugs, shirts, gift baskets. We shared most of them around the office and some invariably wound up in a landfill.

The only memorable gift was a donation to one of a few wonderful causes of my choice given by small agency, Swirl and 10 years later, I’m still telling people about it. I have no doubt that some of the gifts and incentives given away by companies this year are really cool.

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To Solve The “Woman Problem”, End Your Stereotypes Of Women

By Cristina Cordova (Business Development, Pulse) What is this? Mad Men?

Penelope Trunk wrote another ridiculously egregious article on VentureBeat about the “Woman Problem” in tech startups. She’s written similar posts on Techcrunch before like Women Don’t Want to Run Tech Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children and Why Diversity is Bad for Startups.

I’ve always wholeheartedly disagreed with her remarks about women in technology, but she’s continued to push her views as guest posts on several of the blogs I read.

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