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Posts Tagged ‘Technical Background’

You Can’t Launch the Next Generation of Startups Without Women

A serious geek I know asked me how many people with gray hair were at Internet conference I had just attended. I answered that there were quite a few. He shook his head and said that when the suits take over, it’s the beginning of the end of innovation.

There are two things happening here. First, the suits are taking over and, second, the pioneers are going gray. Together they make up the startup establishment. But things have changed since the early days, and this establishment hasn’t kept up with the times. The current startup system essentially excludes the untapped pool of innovators who aren’t developers – for example, women who want to launch Internet startups.

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Pamela Poole is a blogger, translator and tech writer, and founder of Francophilia.com, a social startup for francophiles. Originally from California, she now lives in Paris, where her involvement in the vibrant startup scene keeps her from spending too much time in the bakeries.

A startup is traditionally the brainchild of one or several creative programmers – and less than 25% of programmers are women. This is not the only aspect of the current system that just isn’t consistent with women’s reality or, for that matter, with the reality of a society that has changed radically since the last bubble burst. And it’s not just women who are at a disadvantage, but all entrepreneurs who don’t have a technical background.

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Social scientist Jane Margolis conducted a four-year study on women in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, which explored why so few high school and university computer science students were women. The study is pretty old – it was conducted from 1995-1999 – but things don’t appear to have changed much since then, according to this 2009 study commissioned by Cisco. And though the Carnegie Mellon study addresses computer science education, for purposes of this article, I take the liberty of extrapolating and applying these findings to the startup environment in general.

In the Carnegie Mellon study, she found that:

[W]omen come to the field of computing at a different pacing and have different forms of attachment. [...]They attach their interest in computing to other arenas, to a social context that’s more people-oriented. We refer to this as computing with a purpose as opposed to programming for programming’s sake or a totally technology-centric focus.

The Tortoise and the Hare

Let’s look first at the question of pacing. Women tend to take the entrepreneurial plunge later than men typically do, once they’ve had some professional and life experience (Why Women Mean Business). In fact, a study done in the U.K. in 2006 showed that women over 40 were more likely to start a new business than any other age group.

For this reason, certain elements of the current startup support system, like accelerators, or events like Startup Weekend, are not necessarily realistic or appropriate options for women founders in need of mentoring and funding. How many grown-ups – women or men – can reasonably be expected to drop everything and move across country for three months? More appropriate structures for those entrepreneurs who are past the footloose and fancy-free stage would be an incubator or accelerator program that resembled night school, or a series of intensive Saturday workshops.

An excellent example is Paris Pionnières, an incubator for women’s projects in France, which offers a very flexible program. First there is a pre-incubation phase that includes six free workshops and monthly meetings over a three- to six-month time period. Once that is completed, the project is submitted to the organization, which decides whether to accept it into the incubation program. This lasts six to 12 months and can be renewed once. It is also flexible in that founders have the option of working in the organization’s facilities or not.

Next page:Snips and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails

Google Sites Offers Templates; Claims It’s Easier Than Sharepoint

Google Sites is getting an upgrade. Starting today, Google will provide templates that it claims makes it possible for users with no technical background to create web sites with a degree of functionality that includes page layouts, adding links for navigation and embedded gadgets.

Templates are available for intranets, project sites, team sites, employee profile pages and other sites that people would use within the enterprise. Employees using Google Sites may submit their own templates to a gallery, similar to the services that Sharepoint offers.

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Google Sites is making a clear strike against Microsoft which requires a certain level of technical skill to create a Sharepoint site.

The differences between Google and Microsoft are often quite striking. Microsoft is a document-centric organization. Sharepoint uses a file system architecture for customers to deposit their documents. With Sharepoint, companies may use a web inetrface to share their documents.

Google’s approach is entirely web centric. Documents are web pages. Each document is a link, not a file. When documents are uploaded to Google, they are converted, so to speak, each document receiving its own unique URL.

It is this approach that you see with Google Sites. By being entirely web-centric, Google believes it is making it easier for employees to share information, act faster and cross-pollinate ideas.

It’s difficult to say which approach is better though web converts will tell you that sharing web links is far easier than files. We agree with that point but the Sharepoint environment is tremendously popular. It has its core set of users who are happy that they can share documents in such a manner. Most organizations work in a document centric environment and are therefore comfortable with Sharepoint. It’s an environment that many people trust.

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Apple hires former Newton guru as new VP of Product Marketing

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Odds and ends, Apple, Blast From the Past, Apple History

The New York Times Bits Blog is reporting that Michael Tchao, a member of the team that brought the Apple Newton MessagePad to market, is going back to work for Apple after a 15-year absence. In Tchao’s new job as Vice President of Product Marketing, he’ll be reporting to Apple Senior V.P. of Product Marketing Phil Schiller.

For the past 7 years, Tchao has been General Manager of Nike’s Techlab, which has been responsible for the Nike + iPod line as well as the online integration that makes nikeplus.com so powerful.

If you wanted to start doing a bit of speculating, it’s interesting to note that Tchao was part of the team that was responsible for Apple’s first tablet computer. Of course, the Newton platform wasn’t exactly a huge success during its 5 years of life, owing primarily to its high price and (at least in the first versions) less-than-stellar handwriting recognition. Tchao wasn’t in a marketing position at the time as the General Manager of Product Planning and Strategy for Apple’s Personal Interactive Electronics group, and most of the marketing fumbles of the Newton era can be laid at the feet of the Apple execs in charge at the time.

Tchao certainly has the street cred as a tablet computing expert, with 5 patents to his name during his time with the Newton team. Although we don’t know for sure at this time if Tchao has been tapped to resurrect tablet computing at Apple, his background both at Apple and Nike Techlab shows that he not only has the technical background to shepherd a new product to market, but the marketing savvy as well.

Welcome back, Mr. Tchao!

[via Mashable]

TUAWApple hires former Newton guru as new VP of Product Marketing originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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