Hackathon: A great way to find tech talent

When one who is not from the tech industry hears or reads the word hack it probably brings a number of images to mind.  The more popular Images which come to mind are of caffeine guzzling nerds sitting in a darkly lit room with three or four computer screens surrounding them and attempting to break into some top-secret network and wreak havoc or steal millions from some large financial institution.

Of course these stereotype have an amount of truth associated with them.  But in the real world of hacking there are different types of hackers.  You have White Hat, Black Hat and the newer designation of Grey Hat.

Each have their place in the mythos of hacking.  But for the sake of this article let’s focus on how startups as well as established tech companies are utilising “hackathons” to offer both monetary prizes and recruit new talent.  As these hackathons find their way to the District I will be sure to mention them and provide the details on how to participate.

On Saturday, 2 June and Sunday, 3 June 2012, local DC-based entrepreneurial tech company Study Hall will be hosting a hackathon at their headquarters located at 2428 Wisconsin Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20007. (cont … Examiner.com)

Entrepreneurs Keep HBCUs Afloat

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Despite tough financial odds, black colleges offer ways for students to become job creators.

Sometime in the early ’80s, before I turned 10, my grandmother told me: “You should go to Howard.” In our family, Howard University was this revered place, partly because one of my uncles had been a quarterback there in the late ’70s. But I dismissed the idea, almost as fiercely as I resisted football, having grown up in mostly private, predominantly white schools where everyone, it seemed, aimed for the Ivy League. By the mid-’90s, my parents made clear: If we’re paying for college, you’re going to a black school.

Maybe it was something they’d heard in my voice. Or my preference for Madonna, Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode. Or my rejection of the black Pentecostal church they’d started attending. Here’s what they were really saying: Our middle-class kid is confused and needs to figure out he’s black. So reluctantly, I went to Howard.

Historically black colleges are on the brain partly because two weeks ago, I went to a White House conference on how the schools can be entrepreneurial hubs. It’s an important conversation that reflects the country’s start-up economy: Some schools are, smartly, launching programs to train not only the next generation of employees but also independent job creators.

The conference was notable for its venue, and President Obama himself has said this about HBCUs: “People who say they’ve fulfilled their purpose, that after all the progress we’ve made, their reasons for being are obsolete. It’s because of these schools that the black middle class is filled with black doctors, lawyers and engineers. It’s because of these schools that one of every two wide-eyed freshmen is the first in his or her family to go to college.” Still, I left the White House thinking not only about entrepreneurship but also about the question of HBCU relevance.

It may seem like a strange question, especially for The Root‘s core audience. But consider that budget pressures are forcing state legislatures and the federal government to reconsider financial support for HBCUs. The schools are turning to private financial sources and recruiting nonblack students. The number of black students in college is growing, and nearly 80 percent of them attend non-HBCUs. (cont … The Root)

FOR THE BOOKSHELF: Discovering the Soul of Service

In the spirit of Kwanzaa which should be treated as an year round activity, Ujamaa (cooperative economics) is a central principle. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard for years about Black American owned and operated businesses is the POOR level of customer service, poor quality of product and/or services and last but not least the negative attitudes that plague many Black American owned businesses.

Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard L. Berry is a GREAT book addressing the topic of SERVICE and the importance of it when it comes to having sustainable business success. Cooperative Economics is the theme of the day but you can’t and won’t have it if people feel they can get better service, treatment and products elsewhere even if it means buying outside their owner communities. Let us all work on supporting Black American owned and operated businesses by demanding that those business owners ensure the supporters of their business aka CUSTOMERS are treated properly and offered EXCELLENT QUALITY OF GOODS AND SERVICES!!!

Why “Freemium” Fails for Startups: 3 Business Lessons from the Band New Order

Many would-be Internet entrepreneurs think they’ve got it all figured out. Here’s a common five-step plan:

1. Make something cool
2. Offer that coolness for free
3. Charge for a premium version
4. Profit
5. Sell out and buy an island

It’s called freemium, a portmanteau of “free” and “premium”. The idea is that the free version of your software, game, or web service makes all that icky marketing stuff easy — word gets around, people love it, then people give you money for the premium version that they love even more.

Freemium is fantastic when it works. Problem is, it doesn’t work all that often.

Let me tell you a quick story about the British band New Order that helps explain why.

New Order and The Haçienda

In the early 80s, the members of New Order were involved as partners with Factory Records and Tony Wilson in the hugely popular Haçienda club. Opened 30 years ago this month, the Haçienda was ground zero for the birth of rave culture and the “Madchester” music scene.

Unfortunately, for all its popularity, the Haçienda was a money pit. A complete financial disaster.

New Order bassist Peter Hook claimed that New Order would have been better off if they’d given ten pounds to everyone who ever came to the Haçienda, sent them home, and not bothered with the club at all. The band essentially subsidized the club’s expensive operations out of record sales. (cont…Forbes Magazine)

Accelerating diversity in entrepreneurship with NewME

For the last three months, the NewMe Accelerator class of spring 2012 has been fully immersed in the entrepreneurial process. The NewMe “founders” have been busy working long days at The Hub in San Francisco and living together in a house nearby. The goal: to develop, design and launch new startup companies.

Last week these NewMe founders held their demo day in the Google San Francisco office, where they presented the fruits of their efforts—seven brand new companies—to an audience of more than 100 investors, entrepreneurs and supporters.

This is the second year of NewME, a program designed by founder and CEO Angela Benton to be an accelerator in Silicon Valley for minority-led startups from around the country. We’ve been delighted to participate in and sponsor both seasons.

Some NewME products have already launched in beta and are live in market. Founder Naithan Jones of AgLocal has 20 farms using the beta version of his Local Meat Lovers Service, which is running in his hometown of Kansas City and in the Bay Area. Similarly, Butlr, Ubi, Helpr, Kairos, Citizen Made and PictureMENU have all hit the ground running. In addition, the reach of NewME has gone beyond Silicon Valley. Through NewMe Communities entrepreneurs all across the U.S. have been getting together monthly to share stories and support. (Cont…Google Official Blog)

Why Black America Creates Virtually No Jobs and What We Can Do About It

An unemployment line, courtesy of The Patron Saint

Black Americans are no strangers to entrepreneurship. But sheer numbers of entrepreneurs do not translate into fast-growing companies that create jobs.

Case and point: The Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a 60 percent spike in Black entrepreneurship between 2002 and 2007, equivalent to 1.9 million Black-owned businesses. However, more than 1.8 million of those businesses were sole proprietors with zero employees. Thus, it’s no surprise there’s zero job growth and chronic high unemployment across Black America. According to a 2010 report published by the Kauffman Foundation, nearly all net new job growth in the nation since 1980 has come from “high-growth” growth companies, those whose revenues grow quickly.

To add insult to injury, the nation’s 1.9 million Black-owned businesses combined produced less than 1 percent of the nation’s GDP. And that was at the height of entrepreneurship in Black America … before the economic collapse.

Why do our businesses stagnate? Many reasons have been put forward, but one that is critical —lack of funding — will very soon have a potential solution.

High-growth entrepreneurship often requires the risk of significant capital investment in the beginning of a company, in the seed stage, where the difference between the life and death of an idea depends upon the availability of capital to sustain the business long enough to reach critical milestones. Without enough capital to maintain the startup through the “Valley of Death,” where entrepreneurs start their race against time and depleting cash reserves to reach a sustainable stream of revenue, the vast majority of these risk-taking job creators will watch their ideas die in the incubation or “seed” stage.

Funding is so essential to the process of innovation that Steve Blank, professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford University said in his Secret History of Silicon Valley, “Silicon Valley would still be a bunch of engineers working in their garages without a culture of risk capital.”

There is no “culture of risk capital” in Black America. But this month, President Obama signed into law a bill that could change that.

The JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups), signed into law on April 5, 2012 allows entrepreneurs to raise money — through a process called “crowdfunding” — from people previously ineligible to participate in certain types of investments. For communities and entrepreneurs that have historically been disconnected from investing in private companies, the law is a boon. (Cont… Dominion of New York)

The “Army of One” Entrepreneur

What’s the best strategy to get from having no startup to having one that provides you with income?

Is it to find the best idea you have, focus all your energy on it, and make it work at all costs? This seems to be the standard mode of operation for most new entrepreneurs. They’ll wait until they have an idea that they can pursue and that seems worth pursuing, and then pour all their energies into that idea. If it works, great. If the idea happens to be a stinker, they’ll probably fail. Some might be lucky enough to know that they should validate the idea before pouring a year of development effort into it, and so find out the idea is not so good before all the money is gone.

Once upon a time, it used to be that starting a company and building a new product was a big and all-consuming affair (notice I’m not even talking about cost). If you were Henry Ford and you wanted to try out your new idea about car manufacturing, there was no way to do that without pouring most of your time into that one idea. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had to put their heart and soul into building Apple for it to stand a chance. Granted, Woz also worked at HP at the same time, but it took more than 1 full-time person’s attention to get Apple to the point where its potential for success was validated. Even today, many such businesses are still started. Dropbox, AirBNB or Spotify are not the kind of business that you can start with only part of one person’s attention. You need several people to dedicate all their time to proving the idea, if you want it to stand a chance.

But is that true of all startup ideas? Clearly not. There are many ideas which you can validate very cheaply and without pouring all your time into them over a long period of time. They may not all be great, world-changing, visionary ideas, but they are still ideas that serve a purpose, fulfill a need, and have the potential to create value for both the founders and the customers.

Is that even true of most startup ideas? Do most startup ideas require a large up-front investment in time to validate that they could be good, worthwhile ideas? (cont…swombat.com)