One key to entrepreneurs’ success is that they frame things differently, they connect existing dots in unique ways.

via Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism | Co. Design.

In his post at BusinessWeek, Rob Hof writes:

It was pretty amazing to see these young entrepreneurs slinging PowerPoint slides in front of a huge conference room screen in front of more than 400 people–including the VCs from whom they were asking for real investments of $100 and up. I’d be scared to death, but they all had their pitches down cold. They had been working on their businesses for months as part of the school’s Entrepreneurial Education program, now in its 10th year. And they had rather precise projections of their profits and the amount they’d return to their prospective investors. Judging from sales at the booths they had set up before their presentations, they were going to beat those projections handily.

Vivian Wu, a judge at the Girls’ Middle School (GMS) Entrepreneurial Night for the past three years writes about the experience at Techcrunch. She explains that the program is a full year course at GMS with volunteer business coaches helping the girls conceive of ideas, write a business plan, and prepare to present on the actual night. This level of commitment to teaching is really key to change: both encouraging and teaching applicable skills to kids. The other part of the project that resonated with me is the philanthropic angle.

Worth noting is the fact that the girls are all taught to develop profitable and philanthropic businesses. In May, they liquidate the businesses, return capital (and more) to investors, and each donate 5-20% of profits to charities like Greenpeace, SPCA, CARE and the school library! Several of the teams focused on recycled products as well, which Trae Vassalo from Kleiner particularly applauded when she funded Reuse, Recycle and Relax.

Concepts of social entrepreneurship and sustainability aren’t limited to any industry. Instead, they benefit the business, the world, and each of us in this connected ecosystem.

Women 2.0 Business Idea Competition

The second event is the Women 2.0 “Submit your business idea… on a paper napkin” contest. Women 2.0 is a branch of Entrepreneur27, and “connects like-minded, motivated young women in the Silicon Valley to swap energy, ideas, and experiences with each other.”

The competition requires that you submit a business idea on a paper napkin for a chance to pitch your plan to a judging panel of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I love the minimalism of condensing your idea to a 5 inch square napkin. It’s not just entrepreneurs that might sketch their most brilliant thought in a few line graphs or words, it’s also engineers, artists and writers who have revered paper napkins as medium for inspiration ;)

Women 2.0 is accepting business ideas that are in concept stage or in beta launch only. The deadline to submit ideas is Thursday, March 15. Afterwards, semi-finalists will be notified by March 20th and then need to email a 10 slide presentation by April 15th. Finalists will notified by April 20th with the presentations taking place at 7 pm at CNET in SF on April 25th. You can have a team of up to four individuals. At least half of the team must be female and at least half of the team must be under 27. Get all the details and requirements at the Women 2.0 site.

CNET Japan will be translating eHub Interviews as they are released at featuring them at http://japan.cnet.com/column/ehub/

The first interview to go live is eHub Interviews Amiglia.

Japan has consistently been in top six countries for traffic to my site and I look forward to new readers. In the next few months, eHub Interviews will be expanding to interviews with more creators and companies outside of the United States. If you’re a web company anywhere else in the world and interested in an interview, please contact me or leave a comment as I hope to be doing reverse translations from other languages into English as well.

Visit eHub at CNET Japan

Also, if you’re interested in more eHub Interviews in Japanese, you can also see my previous post with links to Ryutaro Kamitsu’s translations of my interviews with Netvibes, Codase, goowy, ColorBlender, and Last.fm

And, of course, new interviews being released regularly in English at eHub Interviews.

Read the 11Qs interviews, currently including with new ones added regularly. Keep up the great work, Klaas.

Email interviews with:
- Christoph Berger of studylounge.de
- 11Qs-Special with Peter Schink for the reader edition of the Netzeitung.de
-John Mishek Milah of blauarbeit.de
- Floyd Celluloyd of Largestonlinestadium
- Tobias Kobier of Woopy
- Enrico core of yigg.de
- Nico Wilfer of myblog.de, amiamo.de and watchmedoing.com
- Daniel “Tourist” van Moll von Bagook
- Marcus Rojas of Prangr
- Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload
- Claus Morell of DerWunsch.de
- Andreas Anthony of milles of Spreadshirt
- Michael Muehl of Valoony
- Gerrit van Aaken of loudblog
- Siegfried Hirsch of Seconds11
- Jan Miczaika of Hitflip
- Dr. Heiner wolf of webmobs.de
- Stephan Uhrenbacher of Qype
- Peter Schink von Laufrausch.net
- Ole Brandenburg von Pageflakes

Also see:
eHub Interviews
eHub Interviews in Japanese

Archived comments

1. Siegfried Hirsch on June 01, 2006 at 05:50 AM:
   Hi, thanks for the information about the web 2.0 interviews, which I was one of the participants. I like your translation of my last name, which is Hirsch, which you translated to deer. But anyway nice to see, that these interviews get recognized over here.

   Siegfried, your deer Hirsch

2. Andre on June 03, 2006 at 02:28 AM:
   January Miczaika of Hitflip ist not quite right. It’s “Jan Miczaika” ;-)
3. Peter Schink on June 04, 2006 at 12:05 PM:
   Thank you for mentioning the german web-2.0-scene, Emily. For anybody interested in german Web 2.0 (and is able to read some german), visit the german Web20workgroup, called “web20spot” – Klaas is one of the participans, too. It’s here: http://www.web20spot.de .
4. Emily on June 08, 2006 at 01:16 AM:
   Siegfried and Andre, sorry about the spelling or translation but I got your names from Klaas’ site originally ;) Thanks, fixed now..
5. Strafverteidiger Freiburg on May 02, 2007 at 04:35 AM:
   Nice, guys. And thanks for the information about the web 2.0. C.u.
6. Tarife on October 05, 2007 at 05:41 AM:
   That’s a bunch of pretty cool interviews.. thanks for the link..
   And the best thing is that they’re in german :)
7. Fernstudium on October 15, 2007 at 11:23 PM:
   nice interviews :)
8. Produsu on October 29, 2007 at 09:19 AM:
   Really informative Interviews, thank you for the link.
9. Prepaid Tarife on December 12, 2007 at 11:58 PM:
   Pretty inspiring interviews, thanks for the information.
10. Susanne Hamburg on September 28, 2008 at 05:18 PM:
    Hey, I just wanted to tell you what a small world we live in. I met one of the guys you blogged about only a couple of months ago while on a train. Andreas was kind enough to enlighten me about the web 2.0 as I’m still a very green tomato in that field.

    Amazing indeed.

11. Comdirekt Tagesgeld on January 10, 2009 at 11:11 AM:
    I know 2 of these guys personally, awesome!

For years, the company Steve Jobs called a hobby was little but a serious money pit. Unexpectedly, Pixar became the source of the majority of Steve Jobs’ immense wealth after an extremely successful initial public offering. It was this month in 1986 that Steve first acquired the hobby that eventually paid off big.

On January 24 of this year, Disney announced paying $7.4 billion in stock to acquire Pixar. Jobs will be on Disney’s board of directors, and two executives from Pixar will head the new Pixar and Disney Animation Studios and lead the creative vision. See “Disney buys Pixar” at CNET for more.

The takeaway for my Web 2.0 readers? On the one hand, be careful of the decisions you make when you’re in financial need (eg. startups trying to cash-out). On the other, your hobby (eg. your “little web app”) may sometimes become much more than that, but only if you take it seriously.

The event offered a behind-the-scenes look into some of the innovative new products currently in development in terms of consumer electronics and online services. The Showcase was organized by Auren Hoffman and Patrick Flanders, co-founders of the Connector Group.

A cocktail reception preceded the presentations, with a chance to view various product displays by presenting companies. Each company then gave a quick, 5 minute presentation with visuals displayed on four large screens.

My Ideacodes partner, Max Kiesler, has a podcast of the presentations available.

Presenting companies included:

Google (Google Maps and Google Earth)
Google showed some exciting features from Google Earth, including real-time route mapping (Ireland’s DART train map and planes landing at SFO). The 3D layer of Google Earth is amazing. Mac users aren’t left out anymore since Google Earth for Mac launched on January 10. You can see more samples of mapping applications and mashups in my eHub category for geotracking and mapping.

Meebo
Meebo is a free web-based IM service. I first listed Meebo in eHub on September 20, 2005 and then had a chance to chat with Seth Sternberg a couple of months later. Meebo now has a global community and 340,000 logins daily, with the majority of that user base built with no direct advertising and only viral marketing – by bloggers and friends telling friends.

Wolfgang’s Vault
The Vault is a site that “features the complete archives of legendary rock impresario Bill Graham, whose headliners included Paul McCartney, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Cure, The Clash, Iron Maiden, Journey, Queen, KISS, and Motley Crue. Here, you’ll find rock posters, concert photos, remarkably preserved vintage t-shirts and more from over 17,000 concerts worldwide.” Wow. Even more amazing, they’ll be announcing audio downloads for $.49 a song or $5.99 an album shortly!

MobiTV
Live television for your mobile phone. Has a wide selection of channels and phone types that are compatible. If I watched TV, I would probably get into it.

Palm
Treo Smartphone: increased usability, fewer clicks to access core features, Windows mobile OS. (Didn’t catch part of this presentation.)

Pay By Touch
Free service that “allows you to pay for purchases simply by placing your finger on a Pay By Touch sensor.” The concept is compelling, but it conjures images from the movie, Gattaca, where identity theft takes on new meaning when it’s tied to your finger.

Peerflix
Sign up and trade DVDs with other Peerflix users for $.99

Findaway World (makers of Playaway)
Playaway is a self-playing digital audio book. Packaged to look like a mini-book with cover art and a spine, it comes with simple ear plugs plays digital sound from the lightweight player that has eight buttons for controls. No web connectivity is needed. It’s a self-contained digital audio book – no iPod needed.

Roku
For those of you like me who love streaming web radio, Roku makes SoundBridge Radio, a wi-fi music system that plays thousands of internet radio stations wireless from your Mac or PC library. It also connects to your stereo or powered speakers.

Sling Media
Slingbox is a piece of hardware (small enough to take with you) that allows you to watch your own TV programming from wherever you are by turning any web-connected computer into your personal TV. They debuted their SlingPlayer Mac during the Macworld Expo on January 10.

Cocoa Designs
Cocoa nuts and artisan chocolate – what more is there to say? Delicious.

The invite-only event was created by Noah Kagan, Shivani Sopory, and Nancy Gong, and featured nine new startups with web 2.0 products and services. Some of the companies and products have literally just launched – one as early as this morning; others will be launching in the near future. I’ll be posting these to eHub as listings as well, but see below for notes on each product. My partner, Max Kiesler, has a podcast available of the presentations (updated 1/29).

Billmonk

Billmonk is a free web service that makes it easy to track, manage, and automate the process of sharing financial responsibilities between friends. In their own words, “Billmonk wants to ease the strains of finances on friendships…Our patent-pending technology makes it super-easy for you to tell us about bills using your cell phone or web browser, and then we do all the work of figuring who owes whom how much.”

Noted: Billmonk includes a mobile feature so you can use SMS messages to keep track of finances on the go. For example, sending a text message of “28 3 gas” to your account will record that you paid $28 dollars for 3 people for gas. You can login to the site later and add details or edit.

Next up, they hope to launch more currency options in response to international requests from web users in France, Germany, and Japan.

The Team
Gaurav Oberoi, Co-founder and Developer
Chuck Groom, Co-founder and Developer

inFreeDA’s 411metro

inFreeDA is the company behind 411metro, a free directory assistance service. The service is free to users with advertisers paying to place short voice commercials while the service finds your request. Relevant ads are delivered based on the request of the customer, location and demographic. Normally, I would find this type of advertising somewhat intrusive, but the sample demo of a call request that Derek Merrill presented was fast and relevant.. and of course, free.

Noted: There were six billion 411 calls last year (despite other offline and online directories).

Founding Team
Alec Andronikov
Derek Merrill
Alexey Bulavin

Standpoint

Standpoint launched this morning. The site is a “social encyclopedia of belief” and provides a way for people to represent their beliefs both individually and collectively. Similar to the social aspects of 43 Things, you can create lists of things you believe, add reasons and links that support your point of view, sharing your knowledge to help others make their own decisions, find other people who share your view or debate topics with those that have opposite opinions. It will be interesting to see what knowledge patterns approach over time and whether this will be a new model for gathering opinions and information. As co-founder Justin Smith described, it’s a great forum for debating current events and politics.

Noted: “A social approach to creating a knowledge map.”

The Team
Justin Smith
Gentry Underwood

Licketyship

Licketyship is an online service that delivers office supplies and electronics to customers within 2 hours. Their patent-pending software tracks real-time inventories of stores and a nationwide courier fleet. Customers search for products at the site and the search returns the closest local store that carries the product.

Noted: New features are in development, including a “get it today” button. Retailers can offer this on their own websites for delivery through Standpoint. They’ll also be adding a service for online auctions (when an auction ends and the buyer is within a certain distance from you, they can have their purchase delivered in 2 hours).

The Team
LicketyShip was developed in 2004 by graduate researchers and engineering students at Yale University and the University of Notre Dame. CEO and co-founder Robert Pazornik formerly headed 3BStudios, which was acquired by CCI Interactive in 2003. LicketyShip was recently named a Top 5 Startup of 2005 by Fortune Magazine, 1 month after Pazornik’s 25th birthday.

Flagr

Flagr will be launching in three weeks. With Flagr, you can “share all your favorite venues, broadcast your most recently visited locations, exchange mobile media, plan events, and find new things to do in the real world.” Broadcast your finds and tips via text message or through the site for friends or others to see and discover new activities/places/things for yourself.

Noted: Create topical maps (which can be integrated on your blog) and allow people to add their own flags to the map.

Founding Team
Matt Colyer
David Wurtz
Cole Poelker

PlaceSite

PlaceSite is a strong social concept combining wi-fi access, location awareness and online community. PlaceSite provides “island Internets” at Wi-Fi cafes (or events, offices, communities, campuses). It’s currently running at Cafe Couleur here in San Francisco. I plan to go this week and check it out. PlaceSite includes open source software that’s installed on a router, replacing the default router software. Anyone who surfs on a PlaceSite island can access social services, such as a chat room, message forums, and profiles of other people on the network through the website.

Noted: “Allows the evolution of digital ‘places’ that reflect the cultures and regional flavors of the physical places they’re experienced in.”

The Team
Sean Savage
Damon McCormick
Parker Thompson
Andrew Hoag
Dav Coleman

Box.net

Box.net provides users with low-cost, online storage. Launched in 2005, they have 4,000 paying subscribers and are about to launch a new premium service with both free and pay options.

Noted: There are various uploading functions (flash 8 uploader, email attachments, and a desktop client for synching). Sharing has privacy and unlimited groups. Drag a file/folder to their name and it goes in their account. Set up RSS feeds for groups to stay updated when you add a file.

The Team
Aaron Levie
Dylan Smith

Skobee

Skobee is a planning and scheduling service that is built around the way people socialize with their friends. Rather than depending on email threads to organize group meet ups, dinners, of get togethers, Skobee organizes and tracks the conversation between people involved in making plans.

Noted: The service acts as an email, IM, or mobile organizer by keeping track of iterative changes in you and your friend’s accounts. It’s version control for electronic conversations.

Founding Team
The Skobee team represents some of the earliest employees from Plumtree Software, a publicly traded enterprise software company that
was recently acquired by BEA. This proven team has been working together closely for the past five to eight years, building high quality Web applications deployed to over 10 million licensed seats, including a number of Fortune 500 companies such as Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, and Boeing.

NeuroSky

NeuroSky “has created the “world’s first consumer-minded neural device.” While monitoring biofeedback is not new, NeuroSky’s prototype converts biofeedback (brainwaves and eye movements) into electronic signals for use in interactive entertainment (gaming) and other industries.

Noted: Johnny Liu had a prototype of the neural sensor head piece at E27 and showed a participant his brainwave read out on the laptop screen.

Founder
Johnny Liu is the Chief of Corporate Communications at NeuroSky, a Silicon Valley based start-up focused on consumer brainwave technology. He is also a professional writer of seven years for a mess of different publications, primarily in culture, technology, and gaming. He has produced television, orchestrated photoshoots, and has sat on the other side of the table, with appearances on CNN Headline News, G4TechTV, and KRON4.

Thanks to E27 for the invite and I look forward to seeing how these new applications and companies do in the next year.

Also see:
Entrepreneur27 Technology Symposium Wrap-up and Podcast by Max Kiesler. (Updated 1/29)
Nine Startups at E27 Summit by Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.
Small ideas, big companiesby Robert Scoble.

Please visit the links below for the Japanese versions, and as always, stay tuned for more!

eHub Interviews Netvibes

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051018/1129614139

eHub Interviews Codase

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051019/1129652023

eHub Interviews goowy

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051031/1130736366

eHub Interviews ColorBlender

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051101/1130840600

eHub Interviews Last.fm

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/brazil/20051102/113090100

New interviews will be launching daily at eHub Interviews. Stay tuned for interviews with Netvibes, last.fm, Kiko, Findory, Blinklist, Meta, Openomy, Prodigem, Fundable, Mappr, SiteVista, NetworthIQ, SWiK, eyeOS, Listal, LibraryThing, CommonTimes, Slawesome, CampaignMonitor, Filenice, voo2doo, Feedmarker, Delineate, MapStats, Jambase, Guten Tag, and many more.

eHub Interviews is a project by Emily Chang and Max Kiesler of Ideacodes.