Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Seeking Female Founders In The Tech Startup Scene
Enlarge Lisa Tanner/Courtesy Women Innovate Mobile The founders of startup accelerator Women Innovate Mobile (clockwise from top right: Deborah Jackson, Kelly Hoey and Veronika Sonsev) aim to boost the profile of tech companies founded by women.
Lisa Tanner/Courtesy Women Innovate Mobile The founders of startup accelerator Women Innovate Mobile (clockwise from top right: Deborah Jackson, Kelly Hoey and Veronika Sonsev) aim to boost the profile of tech companies founded by women. More often than not, when we hear about hot tech companies, all the founders are male (see: Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga). But in an effort to change that profile, a new funding source is targeting companies founded by women.
Kelly Hoey thinks a lot of investors may be missing some good business opportunities because they aren't coming from someone who looks like the next Mark Zuckerberg.
"You're looking for a white guy in a hoodie, and that next visionary is ... going to be wearing a skirt and a great pair of shoes," she says. "They're going to look different."
Hoey is one of the three women behind Women Innovate Mobile, a startup accelerator. The group invests small sums of money in startups, gives them an office for three months, and helps them refine their business plan. Hoey says it's like a greenhouse for startups.
"They get mentoring, they are given access to the networks of resources — that may be funding, that may be expertise," she says.
Accelerators are not a new idea. Among the most well-known is Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley, which has nurtured new stars like Dropbox and Reddit. But only 4 percent of Y Combinator's grants went to startups with a female founder.
View a slideshow of women throughout the history of computing.Missing In The Mobile Market
Veronika Sonsev, another of the founders of Women Innovate Mobile, says Silicon Valley may be missing some great opportunities, especially in the mobile space, where the perspective on, say, how to design a phone might be a little different coming from a woman.
"They use phones to plan every aspect of their life, to manage their kids' schedules," she says. "Given the nature of how women use telephones and all of the things that they do in their household, I can only imagine some of the ideas that they may come up with."
The question is, of course, why aren't women already out there turning their ideas into companies? The answer is complex, says Sharon Vosmek, the CEO of a nonprofit called Astia that helps women develop their business ideas. Vosmek says a lot of research indicates that women lack confidence. When a woman gets a C in calculus, for instance, she may figure she's bad at math, but that's not necessarily so for a guy.
"A young man with the same grade will perceive that he's a math whiz," Vosmek says. "He'll use it in the furtherance of his career, to negotiate a higher salary and actually to have higher aspirations."
And starting your own company often requires a big dose of confidence, Vosmek says.
'A Great Problem For You To Solve'
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 male," Reichert says.
But starting an Internet company isn't as technically difficult as it used to be. A female founder can bring an idea or marketing experience.
Women Innovate Mobile's Sonsev, a former executive at AOL who now has her own startup, says women have to stop being shy about their ideas. Sonsev says women can turn their daily challenges into business opportunity that a man might not see, whether it's seeing their child's calendar online, or finding relevant health information.
"How many times have you been in a situation [where] you're like, 'You know, if only someone would start a company to solve that problem, I would be a customer.' Well, that's a great problem for you to solve," she says. "Why don't you start that company and help find other customers who are similar?"
Women Innovate Mobile is taking its first round of applications through Feb. 1. Sonsev notes that the group has already gotten inquiries from women as far away as Ireland and India.
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Monday, 9 January 2012
SCG-DOW Finalize PO Plant Start-up
The Dow Chemical Company (NYSE:DOW - News) announced that the SCG-Dow Group, a joint venture between Dow and The Siam Cement Group (NYSE:SCG - News), has finalized the start-up of its propylene oxide (:PO) facility in Thailand by successfully completing its full capacity performance test.
The ground for the PO facility was broken in June 2008. Propylene oxide, a versatile chemical intermediate, is used in the production of raw materials for a wide range of industrial and commercial products, including polyurethanes, propylene glycol, and glycol ethers.
In October 2011, the SCG-Dow Group reached a key milestone for the new PO facility in Thailand. The group ramped up the plant to stable production levels while preparing for the full capacity run scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2011. The world-scale plant, located within the Asia Industrial Estates (:AIE) site near Map Ta Phut, Thailand will have a name plate capacity of 390 kilotons per annum (:KTA) of PO via the innovative hydrogen peroxide to propylene oxide (:HPPO) technology jointly developed by Dow and BASF.
However, the new facility met the target on time by successfully completing the full capacity run on November 22, 2011, only two months after starting raw material feeds to this new plant. Additionally, the plant exceeded expectations for all quality and yield performance parameters.
In October 2011, Dow earned 69 cents per share in the third quarter of 2011, ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 64 cents as well as last year’s 45 cents. However, including one-time charges, the company earned 62 cents per share compared with 54 cents in the year-ago quarter.
Quarterly revenues jumped 17% year over year to $15.1 billion and were above the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $14.7 billion, driven by double-digit gains in all its operating segments and geographic areas, with the largest growth in Latin America (21%) and Europe, Middle East and Africa (:EMEA) (19%). In the emerging geographies, sales reached $5 billion, a new quarterly record for the company.
Dow did not provide any financial guidance. However, the company expects demand to improve further, especially in Asia with the global economic recovery. The US and European markets have also started showing signs of improvement. Dow is also optimistic on major consumer-markets, including electronics, coatings, automotive and packaging. However, construction markets are expected to remain weak.
DOW faces stiff competition from EI DuPont de Nemours & Co. (NYSE:DD - News).
Currently, Dow has a short-term (1 to 3 months) Zacks #3 Rank (Hold) and a long- term Neutral recommendation.
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