Archive for Март, 2011
I am glad to introduce you to the invited speakers of the first international Startup Women Forum that was held in Moscow, Russia on April 4-5th 2011.
Lubov Simonova-Emelyanova, Almaz Capital Partners.
Lubov is Almaz Capital Partners fund expert. In the past she led the department of strategies and expansion of the IT division of FINAM holding, was an operation portfolio manager (Alawar Entertainment, Inc., E-Generator, MoneyMail, MirTesen.ru), took part in prearrangement of business deals for FINAM holding and FINAM-IT fund. She was a member of the committee for investments within FINAM holding. Lubov is a current member of the social council operating as a part of Youth Social Chamber of the Parliament on modernization and innovations. In 1995 Lubov Simonova-Emelyanova graduated from Moscow State Academy For Chemical Technologies in the name of M.V. Lomonosov
Elena Masolova, GrouponRussia, Pixonic.
Elena graduated fromHigh SchoolofEconomics, Economics Faculty in 2006. She was doing her postgraduate programme in the same University and in 2008 was awarded the degree of Master of Science in Economy. Elena Masolova used to be a founder and CFO of the business angels fund AddVenture, a co-founder and a partner of the venture fund RUVENTO, CEO of Smart-Book. Elena founded her first company Smart-book at the age of 22 while being a student ofHigh SchoolofEconomics. She won the HSE-5K – annual competition of business ideas and plans to be held inHigh SchoolofEconomics– with the Smart-book business plan. Elena is a member of executive committee of SVOD (Silicon Valley Open Doors) conference and a member of selection committee of Russian Tech Tour 2009.
Renata Akhunova
Renata Akhunova is a deputy programme leader at the Federal Youth Agency of Russian Federation. The programme Renata is in charge for – Zvorykinsky Project – is aimed at commercialization of the most promising Russian innovative projects (and one third of these projects are led by women by the way). Renata used to be a CEO adviser working for the National Agency for Innovations.
Maria Chernitskaya, CEO of the web advertising agency iConText
Maria is a well known expert in the field of web advertising. In 1997 she headed the Saint-Petersburg branch of the national ISP – CityLink. In 1998-2000 Maria led the marketing and sales department of Mail.ru web portal. In 2000 she was proposed to head marketing and sales department of the Russian branch of Lycos Europe web portal. In 2002 Maria started her own agency for web advertisement – iConText. In 2006 she gained “Internet person of the decade” award established by Rambler Media.
Alena Popova, Starlook.ru and other projects
Alena is a media-consultant, web producer, venture investor, eGovernment consultant, expert in startup business.
Projects portfolio: founder and CEO of Starlook.ru, head of StartUp Afisha, author of the project Gov2Project, Startup Women, founder and CEO of Videosnack, leader of theStartUpSchool, founder of StartUp Women.
Recently I had an interview with Ilya Zheludev — the CFO at newsgrape.com
They are building a central place to share articles, providing a simple way to publish information in a group of people. This is a web-platform that revolutionize the way people share text on the web.
Enough of the common words, read the whole interview and direct introduction of the service below.
First of all, please introduce your project and tell us what it is all about?
Newsgrape is a new type of free social media website which brings readers and writers together in a not-yet seen environment. It allows writers to collaborate on online magazines of their choice, and in any language. Blogging was the first step in online self-publishing, but it is limited in that blogs are not homogeneous in style, and that unless one has a lot of followers, the published articles are not seen by anyone. In other words, unless a blog is popular, nobody is going to read it. This is where Newsgrape differs.
How it differs and excels the other article/news-aggregating projects? What are the main Newsgrape features?
Articles published in magazines on Newsgrape are distributed to our readers in two ways. Firstly, readers can ‘follow’ magazines, authors and genres in their own personalised section of the site called E-Go. Secondly, new articles gain favour throughout the site based on the opinions of readers. A complex patent-pending algorithm promotes articles throughout the site based on users’ opinions of the article. Without going into specific details, this means that a new article, by a new author, in a new magazine, can become the website’s headline in mere hours, attracting thousands of viewers to it — even if the magazine itself is brand new and has no subscribers. This in itself is revolutionary. It means that one doesn’t need millions of existing subscribers in order to make site-leading headlines. Our selection algorithm promotes articles based on users’ opinions of these new articles.
Articles can contain media and photos too — it’s not just about text!
We also have a Twitter equivalent, called Fastnews which will be released shortly. This works on the same principle, i.e., short messages posted on Fastnews can be seen by thousands of viewers, even if the original author of the message has no followers! Twitter doesn’t have this capability — with Twitter, one can only reach a huge audience if one already has a huge list of subscribers. continue reading
In addition to the recent GTS speakers list, here is some more information about William Draper — veteran venture investor and his new book «The Startup Game». He will take part in the Day 3 of the Symposium at Panel VII: The Start-Up Game
The 8th Annual Global Technology Symposium will be held March 23-25, 2011 at the exquisite Rosewood Sand Hotel.
William Draper is one of the West Coast’s first venture capitalists. His passion for helping startups get off the ground runs deep in the family. He is the second of three generations of venture capitalists — his father founded what is recognized as the first venture capital firm in the West. And Draper’s son Tim is founder of the VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
In his just-published book, «The Startup Game» Draper shares his life-stories along with other lessons from his 40-plus years in the venture capital industry. The book arrives during a challenging time for the VC industry — fundraising continued to decline in 2010, hitting its lowest level in seven years.
He founded Sutter Hill Ventures in Palo Alto, backed winners like Activision, LSI Logic, Skype and OpenTable, but missed the boat on Yahoo. Draper also draws from his experiences as president and chairman of the U.S. Export-Import Bank and as head of the United Nations Development Program.
The San Francisco Chronicles recently chatted with Draper, 83, at the Draper Richards LP offices in downtown San Francisco. continue reading
As the official Russia representative of GTS I keep on covering the information about the upcoming eight Global Techonlogical Symposium. Today I’m going to tell you the information about key speakers on the conference. All of them are extremely experienced executives and VC’s . They definitely have a lot of information to share with all of us. All of them are going to take part on the GTS on March, 23-25.
Saeed Amidi, Plug and Play Tech Center
Saeed Amidi is a President and CEO at Plug and Play Tech Center. Plug and Play is a large incubator in Sunnyvale, CA which offers a range of services from full service office space to strategic advice to direct investments to start-up companies. In addition, Amidi is the Founding General Partner of Amidzad which he co-founded in 2000. He is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive with over 23 years of experience in founding, operating and growing successful companies.
Andrey I. Denisov, First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation
Andrey I. Denisov is the First Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation. From 2004 to 2006, he was the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations. Previously, he had been the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs from December 2001 to July 2004, and Russia’s Ambassador to the Arab Republic of Egypt from May 2000 to December 2001.
The Global Technology Symposium is the leading investment conference on venture capital, technology, and entrepreneurship in emerging markets.
The eighth annual Symposium will take place on March 23-25, 2011, at the Rosewood Sand Hotel, California.
Each year since 2004, the Symposium has brought more than 300 selected opinion leaders in business, finance, technology, and policymaking to Silicon Valley, where they share insights into the opportunities and challenges of globalization.
For the first time on conference the Russia Day is going to be held. The first day of the conference is going to be devoted to Russia’s Role in the Global Innovation Ecosystem; Venture Capital and Angel Investment in Russia; Innovations in Russia and Global Investors.
I am one of the official Russia’ representatives on the GTS. We are providing 10 most deserving Russian startups to take part in the GTS
Feel free to contact me at alyona@globaltechsymposium.com, http://alenapopova.ru
and Renata Akhunova — renata@globaltechsymposium.com, http://renataakhunova.ru
I will publish updated information about the speakers and content of the conference in a few days.
Together with Renata we are opening a new series of publications about the Global Technology Symposium. I had an interview with Lorraine Hariton — US Department Special Representative for Commercial and Business Affairs. Lorraine is a very interesting woman with great experience in fundraising, entrepreneurship. So I immediately invited her to our StartUp Women Forum.
On GTS she is going to lead a section about investments in BRIC countries. You can find more information on the forum.
Me and Renata are the GTS representatives in Russia: if you have any questions — feel free to ask.
I»m glad to announce the new initiative on our StartupAfisha page — Recreating Silicon Valley program. We’ll also announce a number of new initiatives soon
At the Communication On Top forum, speaking of myths about Russia, startups, unification and why the Russian market has huge growth prospects.