GigaOm >> Incubators for Tech Entrepreneurs

When yet another smart pal told me that they’re applying to an incubator for their early early stage startup, the scale of incubator and accelerator programs’ growth was notable. GigaOm wanted Women 2.0′s take on the trend (which has expanded so much that TechStars’ co-founder David Cohen warned recently of an “implosion”). Shaherose Charania and I collaborated on the piece you can read here, and the graphic is hers.

Traditionally, business school gave young businesspeople the “chops” to get ahead in corporate America. But even though the tech startup has become an almost everyday part of modern business, B-schools are still highly focused on issues that large corporations face. And while many do now offer entrepreneurship classes, today’s smaller, more nimble, and highly iterative businesses need a place that’s specifically dedicated to their unique needs. Where’s a person with an idea to learn how to make their own job or company? Enter incubators.

Think of them as e-schools — entrepreneurship schools, to use a term from entrepreneur Steve Blank — of varying lengths and formats that help businesses launch by providing hands-on startup skills, space and mentorship (and often taking equity in return). more

IMOW Delves into Latin America

Estimado amigos y amigas:

(And you thought my attempts to learn Spanish in SF weren’t going anywhere. Naysayers.)

A new International Museum of Women exhibit focusing on Latin America launched today to explore how women in Argentina, Costa Rica and Mexico are making a difference in their country’s economies. Regional artists’, activists’, and thought leaders’ contributions are included in English and Spanish, and I’m especially a fan of the work by Costa Rican-Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes that explores displacement and identity.

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Apply In The Sky & a Different GSB

Apply In The Sky, one of the startups that demonstrated its product at Women 2.0′s recent PITCH night, has quickly proved its value with pals who are applying to B school. SF-based Emily Chiu founded the application organizer with Chicagoan Chiara Piccinotti before launching around Labor Day. Together with tech lead Ryan Kaminsky, one of the creators of the MBAPlanner iPhone app, the founders are looking to eventually streamline law and medical school applications and job searches (all in an attempt to become a platform for making life changes more manageable). If you’re about to be shelling out money and synergistic language to study management, this could be your first step.

And if you’re intending to go your own way, this weekend will mark the first of two Saturdays and Sundays for the Global Startup Battle. Intended to inspire company ideas around the world during Global Entrepreneurship Week, teams will still have only 54 hours each to develop teams and functional prototypes–they now just can do so from Beirut, Tulsa, and lots of other host cities.

La Marketa Comes to SOMA

As proof that good things in twos (and threes), on Thursday the market Liga Masiva will be coming to Chronicle Books to launch its international wares. Direct trade coffee, Latin street food and education about the organization’s work with farmers in the Dominican Republic are planned. And given their motto (“our standard is awesomeness”), the night should be as well.

In Conversation >> Catapult’s Heather Fleming

After she brought the wonderfully insightful Fail Faire to SF, Heather Fleming, the co-founder of Catapult Design, and I talked at her Mission Street office space (the consultancy’s work to develop products and technology that improve livelihoods were the topics du jour). The engineer and Stanford design and sustainability instructor talked to Women 2.0 about wearing business development and project management hats simultaneously at the helm of the new non-profit.

See “Me No Speak”

Chalk it up to wanderlust, but when designer extraordinaire Lenny Naar passed along Me No Speak, it made me bust out a world atlas. SF-based travel writer Cheryn Flanagan and IT specialist Benjamin Kolowich independently publish a book series that travelers can use to point to the things they want, need and think when they don’t speak the local language. The concept was born out of a hungry night in a Chinese hotel room with hand-drawings created in lieu of spoken communication, and the rest is, well, picture perfect. The guides are also available as an iPhone app should you Turkey or Thailand-bound.

Good News for IMOW, Women 2.0

This post isn’t objective. It doesn’t even try to be.

But I’m a bit giddy over pieces by Ms. and SFGate regarding the work of two local organizations, The International Museum of Women and Women 2.0, respectively. The first, “Global Economics as Feminist Art,” details how examining “gendered economics can be a pleasantly informative experience” thanks to organizations like IMOW that lean in to multimedia to demonstrate the value of women’s work. I first got turned onto the virtual museum’s work last year when covering the Economica exhibit for HuffPo, and you can see the important work firsthand with an upcoming portion of the project that is to focus on Latin America.

The second story, “Women 2.0 gives female-led startups a boost,” provides great insight into the group aimed at increasing the 10 percent of women who currently run tech startups. In detailing the team’s efforts to get more women to try their hand at starting endeavors, there’s a preview to Thursday’s Pitch Night:

“The event, the fourth annual one of which will be held tonight in San Francisco, features nine finalists that have been whittled down from nearly 130 submissions. They make their pitch, American Idol-style, to a panel of judges, including Maritza Liaw, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Julia Hartz, co-founder and president of Eventbrite. The winner receives a startup package that includes meetings with high-level investors and marketing, business, Web and legal services.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.


Artisan Manufacturing as Craft


Today’s Artisan Manufacturing as Craft program on Yerba Buena Lane is to feature five creative types whose studios I’d love to tour: Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey of Heath Ceramics; Patrick Buckley, co-founder of DODOcase; and Eric and Danette Scheib, co-owners of fashion retailer Lemon Twist. In lieu of private visits, SFMADE’s discussion about artisan expansion (a co-presentation with the Museum of Craft and Folk Art) will suffice, especially when coupled with conversations about entrepreneurship and financial sustainability.

Reimagining ROI (A Nice Way to Win Your Way to Wine Country)

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A family trip to Sonoma this fall was a nice reminder of the sun, tasty Cab and scenery that’s a short rental car ride away. After four years in SF I definitely don’t get up to wine country enough (though a recent trip to Scribe winery has me rethinking that). And I’m already envious of the to-be-named winner of a new program that promises to send a small business team to wine country for a week.

HP has partnered with my company, Federated Media, and the Clever Girls Collective to launch “Reimagine ROI,” a program for its LaserJet printers that includes a contest with $30,000 in rewards for users who share stories of their best investments. The campaign for IT influencers and business decision makers runs through the end of October, and participants (that means you) can enter tales of value found to win a five-day trip to NorCal wine wonderland for six staff members along with an HP tech makeover for their office.

Eighteen FM authors, including BoingBoing, ReadWriteWeb and Small Business Trends, are contributing content to the project. They share anecdotes about getting more than they anticipated from cell phone upgrades, home improvement projects, and learning how to play music at an early age. (Not doing so–now there’s another regret.)

Creative Meritocracy >> The Feast

I’m a bad blogger this week, I know. Content to come, but in the meantime I’m at The Feast conference at The Times Center thinking and talking about social connectivity for, well, good.

Creative portal Behance founder (and Federated Media partner) Scott Belsky discussed ways that our workplaces are not designed to recognize our talents and ideas. None of the conference goers seemed surprised by the diagnosis that our organizations don’t incentivize risk or encourage bold talent. But as individual creative types we may not be taking charge of our career growth enough–if you follow Belsky’s thinking, no one else is up at night considering how we can be stimulated.

But all isn’t lost: he mentioned a string of companies that are implementing voluntary assignments in which employees choose from a range of projects depending on their interests. If it sounds good to you, or if you have other ideas, you can chime in at CreativeMeritocracy.com, which redirects to Behance.