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For once global positive news: UK’s Enterprise Week now in 77 countries
This week is Enterprise Week (17-23 November 2008) that is going global. If you want to know what is going on in this worldwide celebration of enterprise you may want to visit ENTERPRISE WEEK and UNLEASHINGIDEAS. The organisation has asked Thenextwomen.com to write about it, and we are glad to do so. First a couple of facts and some highlights:
- Enterprise Week (17-23 November) has been a big success in the UK, with over half a million people attending over 5,000 events in 2007.
- This success has inspired an international event in 2008 - with 77 countries taking part - and 11,000 events with 5 million participants.
- Called Global Entrepreneurship Week it aims to create the successful businesses of tomorrow by generating ideas that tackle the challenging economic and social issues that we face today.
enterprise week going global
- Global Entrepreneurship Week is supported by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, sponsored by NYSE Euronext, Ernst & Young and IBM and organised by Make Your Mark (founders of the UK’s Enterprise Week) and the Kauffman Foundation
- Make Your Mark is the campaign to give people the confidence, skills and ambition to be enterprising - to make their ideas happen. It was founded by the four leading UK business membership organisations and endorsed by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
Highlights:
- Monday 17 November will see in the UK a flagship event. Can Entrepreneurs Change The World? Numerous interesting speakers. Only to be viewed online
HERSEO helps women website owners get found
Her SEO
HerSEO is a search engine optimization company specializing in women owned businesses. Holy Klaassen, founder of the service has a reason to focus on this group. “With the huge boom in growth of women and mom-owned startups, there are many women looking to increase relevant, qualified traffic to their sites.
“Typically, SEO companies charge high fees, but often these small startups just don’t have the budget for this. We focus on educating business owners about SEO, finding the right keywords for their particular product or service, and giving practical, easy to understand instructions on what they need to do to increase their rankings.” says Holly who became interested in SEO after starting her own website, www.FussyBaby.ca. Remembering that time, she notes: Read more
Startup Event UK East Midlands
Business start-ups and entrepreneurs from the East Midlands in the UK will have their first startup event NEWBUSINESSLIVE! on January 29, 2009. Inspirational speakers talk about their business experiences, and explain how to start your business, how to grow your business and where to find support.
Sponsored by Business Link this free conference will also be an opportunity to hear Emma Jones, the founder of Enterprisenation, UK’s largest website for people starting and growing a business from home. Other speakers include: Read more
Female Heroes Interview: Eileen Gittins
Every week we publish an interview with one of our female internet heroes. MEET interesting women, READ about their WORK, THINK about how they PLAY the internet industry and see how you MATCH them. Be inspired! This week: Eileen Gittins.
Eileen Gittins
Eileen is a serial entrepreneur of the truest kind. She has set up a number of web companies, including Personify, an ecommerce data mining and analytics company and Verb, a context-based search engine company. Her current company Blurb was founded from Eileen’s passion for photography and from the realization that the idea for Blurb was “the idea that doesn’t leave you, that comes back to you while you are under the shower.” The result is a web company that allows anyone to print a book, whether they need ten or a hundred copies. More importantly however, it is a company to which many can relate; artists, families, photography hobbyists, and even Eileen’s mom. Eileen: “My mother used to say: ‘Eileen is in the internet.’ Now she says ‘Eileen runs a company where anyone can make a book.’ There is something very nice about doing something so concrete, something people get.”
Thenextwomen talked to Eileen about why founding a company from a passion is so fulfilling, her success, her mistakes and what she learned from them.
· How did you come to set up Blurb?
’starting your own business’-quiz
CC licensed
Thinking about starting you own business? Have a look at the womenowned.com’s start-up quiz.
With questions like ‘can you handle not knowing here your next paycheck comes from?” or ‘Have you been in the “power position” before? Are you a better leader or loner?’ the site encourages you to know yourself first before starting your business. And maybe even saving yourself a lot of time by discarding the idea of starting your own business if the results show your lack of entrepreneurship. Read more
Launch bikini website Habinki
Habinki Website
Chloe Holding, one of thenextweb and thenextwomen’s mentees, has defied the credit crunch and launched her website HABINKI. The website offers a range of custom-made bikinis and necklaces.
Chloe set up Habinki from a passion she had for travelling to exotic places and buying clothes, translating these interests into designing bikinis and sourcing manufacturing and ultimately setting up her own e- business in sexy, glamorous and flattering swimwear for women. Read more
SHE Programme interviews Marianne Baars
Yesterday, the second SHE programme (in Dutch) went live. In the programme, Marianne Baars of PROPERTYTRADERS, an online marketplace and auction vehicle for commercial real estate is interviewed by Simone Brummelhuis of TheNextWomen. SHE, sponsored by Bizner Bank, features interviews with women entrepreneurs, female internet heroes and discuss marketing to women cases. It is presented by Marianne van Leeuwen of Sisteract and Simone Brummelhuis of TheNextWomen.
Funding 3,6 mio: JS-Kit by Altos through TheFunded
Nancy Cole (with Patrick de Laive of thenextweb)
JS-KIT, with General Manager Nancy Cole, a professional developers of widgets for publishers, has closed a $3.6 financing this week with Altos Ventures. According to Kris Loux: “An important resource for the company was The Funded Connect which made the initial introductions”. TheFunded Connect, founded by Adeo Rossi, is a free service to streamline fundraising, and greatly supported by among others Cathy Belk, CMO of JUMPSTART. For TheFunded is was the first deal after its launch. Read more
Amazee: collaborate on a public goal
Projects ranging from ‘fighting a hotel company’ to ’save the Amazon’, to ‘bringing together students anxious to do well in the Zurich bar exam’, the recently founded forum Amazee brings together such causes and encourages people to join them.
Startup ideas for you
Y Combinator, a US seed-stage venture firm founded by Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham, has issued a list of 30 ideas which according to their gut-feeling would make terrific start-ups. Ventures they might fund and add to their list of 102 funded startups.
These are some of the ideas:
Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you’d trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don’t want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up.
Something your company needs that doesn’t exist. Many of the best startups happened when someone needed something in their work, found it didn’t exist, and quit to build it.
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