By Laura Sydell (Digital Culture Correspondent, National Public Radio) Bill Reichert, a partner in Garage Technology Ventures, says another reason is that a lot of the female entrepreneurs he sees don’t have the computer science background. “We tend to invest in companies that have very strong core technical teams, and … that population is disproportionately [...]

By Jazmin Hupp (Director of Awesome, Tekserve) “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” – Eric Hoffer Read A New Book Every Month John Spence says that the average business person reads one business book every 5 years. [...]

By Mary Simonds (Blogger, Startup America Partnership) Are you a Startup America Master? Do you have enough startup influence to help us recruit 100,000 startups by March 31, 2012? Prove it. We ended last week with a bang and kicked off our first Master Challenge Throwdown: Brad Feld v. TechStars! As of this morning, Brad [...]

By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) The number of women obtaining patents grew at an accelerated rate in the past 35 years — and in numbers considerably higher than previously reported. Reported by the National Women’s Business Council who commissioned the study, the report demonstrates that the largest spike came in 2010 as [...]

Women 2.0 interviews Candace Klein, Founder & CEO of Bad Girls Ventures — a non-profit, micro-finance organization focused on educating and financing woman-owned startup companies. To date, Bad Girls Ventures has educated over 250 businesses, financed 26 women with $700k and created 154 jobs across Ohio. Here is her heartfelt story of starting up and [...]

Women 2.0 partnered with Blazing Cloud in San Francisco to invite you to learn to program this year! Save 10% with code “women2″: Learn to Program In Ruby Ruby for Programmers Intro To HTML/CSS CSS For Web Applications Rails For Beginners New Programming Classes Learn to Program In Ruby January 12 – February 16, 2012 [...]

By Jolie O’Dell (Writer, VentureBeat) Every now and then, we hear from a female startup founder who says she’s having a hard time raising money. She can’t quite figure out if it’s her idea or her slide deck or — and no one wants to think this — if it’s simply the fact that she’s [...]

By Joanne Lang (Founder & CEO, AboutOne) It’s been an amazing journey to get AboutOne where it is today, and I’ve navigated quite a few hurdles and learned many lessons, juggling all this with my role as mom to my four young boys. As I celebrate the closing of my first series A, I thought [...]

By T.J. Zark (Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer, 955 Dreams) I am co-founder and Chief Design Officer at 955 Dreams, a mobile publishing house with some amazingly successful titles we created last year. How this all happened is a bit unusual. I met a guy in a parking lot. It’s true. I met my co-founder [...]

By Elaine Wherry (Co-Founder, Meebo) It’s a New Year and I’m looking ahead to new beginnings. In 2011, I found myself with a set of Meebo responsibilities that no longer comprised a 40-hour work-week and a nagging feeling that this was the right point to start gracefully unwinding from my formal tasks. In October, I [...]

By Sarah Tavel (Senior Associate, Bessemer Venture Partners) What an exciting time to be in this business. The “post PC era” and cloud computing are colliding to create a perfect storm. First, thanks to the post PC era, demand for software is exploding. Second, thanks to cloud computing, software development is becoming increasingly accessible. There’s [...]

By Eden Godsoe (Co-Founder & CEO, SkinnyScoop) I was not one of those women who always knew she would be an entrepreneur. Around the time I became pregnant with my first child, I began looking into the dynamics of female purchase power and how women influence one another. What I saw was a huge, untapped [...]

By Elizabeth Yin (Co-Founder, LaunchBit) Happy New Year! 2011 was quite a ride for us at LaunchBit. Jennifer and I are so thankful to everyone who’s helped us. We started LaunchBit in January 2011 as a way to help entrepreneurs start and grow their internet businesses. This is a problem I’ve become really passionate about, [...]

By Kaliya Hamlin (Founder, She’s Geeky) From the beginning of human civilization women have been engaged in understanding the science of the natural world. Ada Lovelace was the first programmer ever and women programmed the first vacuum tube computer the ENIAC. The stories of their pioneering and innovation in geeky fields like engineering, chemistry, physics [...]

By Bryce Christiansen (Blogger, YouTern) As I finished reading Tina Fey’s book Bossypants, I came to a realization. We often don’t give comedians enough credit for their business smarts, and Tina Fey is no exception. As I read her “humor/biography” book, I wasn’t expecting to come away with too many things I could apply at [...]

Amazon Elastic MapReduce instances does not have the debian-multimedia sources by default, you can add the below to a bootstrap script to have it installed: sudo sh -c "cat >> /etc/apt/sources.list << EOF deb www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze main non-free deb www.debian-multimedia.org testing main non-free EOF" gpg --keyserver hkp://pgpkeys.mit.edu --recv-keys 07DC563D1F41B907 gpg --armor --export 07DC563D1F41B907 | sudo [...]

We got an ActionView::MissingTemplate exception from a remote site using our embed code. The exception was: ActionView::MissingTemplate: Missing template /embed, application/embed with {:handlers=>[:erb, :builder, :haml], :formats=>["*/*;q=0.01"], :locale=>[:en, :en]}. with these http headers: HTTP_ACCEPT "*/*;q=0.01" HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE "en" HTTP_USER_AGENT "Mozilla/4.0 (PSP (PlayStation Portable); 2.00)" The strange thing is that PSP is sendin... [read more]

The TEDMED conference took place last week in San Diego but it took me this long to digest all of the content and follow up on all the connections I made there. Both TED and TEDMED were founded by Richard...

Groupon may have shelved its IPO, but with Zynga still looking to raise a billion and LinkedIn trading for almost double its IPO price there is once again talk of a tech bubble. Sure, the traffic is heavy again on...

Telemedicine has been a field with a bright future for several decades now. Recently Joseph Ternullo, Associate Director of the Partners’ Center for Connected Health, shared his thoughts on what factors were at play. Joe was speaking at Monday's meeting...

I decided to create Solrsan to use the Apache Solr search server in my various Rails 3 applications. Currently, there are two main ruby gems for using Apache Solr in a ruby project: rsolr: RSolr is a low level layer to Apache Solr. Because it’s meant to be just an access layer, rsolr is missing [...]

Recently Phil McKinney, CTO for Hewlett-Packard's Personal Systems Group, showed the MetaWatch, a concept from Fossil that was inspired by some previous work at HP. Given the lackluster reception granted previous efforts such as the Microsoft SPOT, it's hardly surprising...

I recently had to add basic authentication to an ActiveMQ broker and run into some unexpected issues. I followed the example in ActiveMQ in Action to use the simpleAuthenticationPlugin by adding the below snippet to activemq.xml: You can see the complete file at https://gist.github.com/881965 When I tried to start ActiveMQ with ACTIVEMQ_HOME/bin/activemq start xbean:file:conf/activemq.xml ActiveMQ [...]

During the great debate over health care reform, one recurring question was why the USA spends twice as much per capita on health care as other industrialized nations, yet our life expectancy ranks 28th in the world, behind the UK,...

I’m working on a project where I needed to create and manage database tables. I find that the active_record migration system from Ruby on Rails to be the best system for creating, versioning database changes. The project itself is in Scala so I took a look at scala migrations and c5-db-migration but I found active_record [...]

Even though we aren't quite out of stealth mode yet, SBR Health was voted into this week's Startup Watch: Five you should follow.

Locating SBR Health at the Cambridge Innovation Center has many advantages, such as ready-made infrastructure, a community of entrepreneurial companies, the Venture Cafe, but today brought an unexpected surprise as a construction crew showed up outside my office to saw...

In a brilliant two page article that illustrates why we need investigative reporting, New York Times writer David Segal details how Internet merchant Vitaly Borker (aliases Tony Russo and Stanley Bolds) discovered that complaints from his customers could be good...

Factorie is a toolkit for developing probabilistic modeling. It is scalable and flexible and allows you to create factor graphs and perform inference. It is written by Andrew Mccallum and his research group at UMass. They previously written Mallet, the java package for text mining. I found that being written in Scala made the code [...]

At yesterday's Future Forward retreat, Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae organized a lunch table discussion on Smartphones as Building Blocks, i.e. what kinds of applications transcend the boundaries of an individual phone and become something large of which the phone...

I recently created RMongo, a database access layer to MongoDB in R as an R package. To install RMongo: install.packages(“RMongo”) If that does not work, try downloading it from https://github.com/tc/RMongo/downloads and run: install.packages("~/Downloads/RMongo_0.0.21.tar.gz", repos=NULL, type="source") I tried to mimic the RMySQL commands in RMongo. Below are some example commands. library(RMongo) #ask for help ?RMongo #connect to [...]

Last week Boston was the site of the seventh annual Connected Health Symposium, bringing together 1,000 attendees, 100 speakers and 50 exhibitors to discuss how information technology could enable better health care by improving the communication among patients, caregivers, and...

When you have a long running block of code, you don’t want to run it inside a web application request cycle. A background processing queuing system is a good solution. There are a number of open source queuing systems available(delayed_job, beanstalk, etc) so you don’t need to write your own! This article will go over [...]

When I was a student and later, faculty, at the MIT Architecture Machine Group we did a lot of things that were considered crazy and irresponsible at the time, such as giving powerful computers to mere undergraduates and building displays...

A Pew Research Center survey released today found that 19% of American adults have tried video calling either online or via their cell phones. That's 23% of Internet users and 7% of cell phone users. Usage is much higher among...