I’m a mentor for the TechStars Organization located here in Boulder, CO. Sadly to say the Boot camp had no female participants in 2007, the inaugural year. This year TechStars is broadening it’s reach to help recruit women. Read the complete article… http://dailycamera.com/news/2008/mar/04/techstars-woos-women/

Gov. Ritter established the state’s first Innovation Council, bringing together 34 leaders from around Colorado. The Council is composed of experts from large, small, urban and rural technology businesses, as well as leaders in the venture capital, government, academic and nonprofit sectors. The council will have three primary subcommittees that will:

* Assist the state as it reforms and improve its use of information technology;
* Develop a strategy for spurring broadband deployment throughout the state, and;
* Support state government’s economic development efforts for the technology sector.

The council will be co-chaired by venture capitalist Brad Feld, managing director of the Foundry Group; entrepreneur Juan Rodriguez, who founded StorageTek and Exabyte; and national telecommunications policy expert Phil Weiser, who teaches law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is executive director of the Silicon Flatirons Program.

In addition to Feld, Rodriguez and Weiser, three other tech-industry leaders also will serve on the Council’s executive committee: Cathy Fogler of Charter Communications; Su Hawk, president of CSIA; and Lee Kennedy, founder of TriCalyx.

To see the complete article http://www.colorado.gov/cs/Satellite?c=Page&cid=1192091651316&pagename=GovRitter%2FGOVRLayout

As published in the June 22, 2007 Boulder County Business Report
By Hilary Lane

Adding to your company’s bottom line is always challenging, and many business executives believe that blogging attracts clients, loyalty and assistance in making better products and more profits.

For small- to medium-sized companies, blogs can reach a broad spectrum of potential customers, according to Todd Vernon, chief executive of Louisville-based Lijit. His blog - www.lijit.com/blog - has been up and running since 2006.

“Through blogging, you can understand a company’s business. It’s not sterile like a press release. You get news and information from an executive point of view,” Vernon said. “What’s cool is the transparency. You can communicate information you would use as an e-mail outreach, but people don’t want to be bothered with marketing press releases. Blogs communicate what’s interesting about your life and your business.”

New blogging tools make it easy to start writing online. Peers and customers can give their input just as easily through commenting and linking features. This is an unexpected bonus and better than just broadcasting a message.

“It’s a way to disseminate ideas and have conversations. It’s more meaningful to have a conversation than a monologue,” said Amy Gahran, a conversational media consultant in Boulder.

She said customers get a “better sense of where the company is going.”

“You can say why you’re setting certain priorities, and people appreciate it. It helps customers feel like they matter,” Gahran said. “That’s more credible than always showing successes and marketing spins in press releases.”

Vernon agreed and admitted he is “more reachable … It makes for more loyal customers, which helps the bottom line.”

A corporate blogging study conducted in November 2006 by Porter Novelli International, a New York-based public relations and lobbying firm, showed half of all companies with 20 or fewer employees had executive blogs. However, only 8 percent of Fortune 500 company executives are blogging, according to the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki, a collaborative tracking site.

Novelli’s research indicated that large corporations cite a lack of staff and resources for not having corporate blogs.

Jonathan Schwartz, chief executive of Emeryville, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems, is one of the few Fortune 500 CEO bloggers.

“There’s a misconception that it takes time, especially for a CEO of a large corporation,” said Kathy Keating, founder of Louisville-based TriCalyx and author of its blog (www.onlineoptimist.com). “It only takes five to 10 minutes a day.”

Larger corporations, however, have more legal channels to traverse, so it may take extra time, “but it’s worth it to make the commitment. It’s a great channel into people that matter; it builds reputation and captures your vision without a lot of overhead,” Keating said.

However, Terry Gold, chief executive of Boulder-based Gold Systems, said companies can’t use blogs an integral part of their marketing campaign.

“You can’t view it just as a marketing piece - it won’t have credibility,” Gold said. “You must make it valuable with entertaining writing. It’s a commitment to keep it up to date, and you have to think about the people who read it.”

Gold’s blog (www.terrygold.com) started in 2004 and discusses what he’s passionate about. He has actually hired people that commented on his entries and plans on hiring more in the future.

“I occasionally write about speech recognition, and I met a guy through his comments on my blog,” Gold said. “He was well-versed in the topic and knew what he was talking about. We hired him a few months ago.”

Additionally, CEOs read other executive blogs. Gold, Vernon and Keating have links to blogs they read consistently so they know what is going on in their business community. They even talk with other CEOs on each others’ blogs.

“I realize competitors and other companies read my blog, so I have to think about what they’re getting out of it,” Gold said.

Although the chief executive who blogs may humanize his or her company, they have to be careful about what they write.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Department, or SEC, has the Regulation Fair Disclosure rule in regards to public dissemination of investor materials. This requires companies to make announcements about topics, profits, new products and mergers in a filing with the agency or in a press release so that all investors can learn of the news simultaneously.

In 2000 the SEC stated that posting the information on a Web site would “not by itself be considered a sufficient method of public disclosure,” so as not to give advantage to certain investors.

John Heine, an SEC spokesman, said that Web and blog access makes it difficult to change this rule without going through a legal vetting process.

“There are situations involving mergers and takeovers, about what people say and how they say it that is not limited to blogs. If you’re involved in a public company, you must be careful. Information affects markets. It’s a matter of ease of access,” Heine said.

Lijit’s Vernon agreed. “From an intelligence point of view, if you can’t talk about it at a cocktail party, you shouldn’t talk about it in your blog. It’s just smart business.”

As published in the June 8, 2007 Boulder County Business Report.
By Jeff James
LOUISVILLE - If you’re a small business owner with a company Web site, you may think your online presence is established, and you can go back to dealing with real-world management and administrative issues.

While launching a Web site for your business may have been a significant accomplishment in the 1990s, today’s Internet is driven by a number of factors, mainly the rise of search engines like Google and Yahoo. Most users may turn to these search tools to find your business, but how do you stand out from the millions of other Web sites on the Internet?

That’s where search engine optimization, or SEO, comes in. It’s one of the many services that Tricalyx - a new Louisville-based business founded by former Webroot Software executives Lee Kennedy, Kathy Keating and Trina Blazek - plans to offer its clients.

The importance of a solid SEO strategy for any corporate Web site is something that Kennedy and the Tricalyx team strongly believes, noting that demographic changes and technology usage patterns are having a huge impact on how businesses attract customers.

“As our society has gotten older, there are millions of people under the age of 35 who don’t know what Yellow Pages are or what a phone book looks like,” Kennedy said. “It’s so much easier to sit down in front of the computer, type in a name and find what you’re looking for. Companies that aren’t coming up on Internet searches simply aren’t being found.”

Shar VanBoskirk, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, said SEO is becoming a vital component of any corporate Web strategy.

“Search marketing overall represents the lion’s share of the online marketing budget (about 40 percent today), and it stands to grow to over half of the online budget by 2010,” VanBoskirk said. “This means significant opportunity for any provider who wants to get into the space.”

In addition to SEO, Tricalyx provides consulting services, software tools and other development services to help companies maximize the reach and effectiveness of their Internet presence. Tricalyx also provides basic Web site development services (starting at $695), site development with e-commerce (beginning at $1695), as well as custom site development and unique solutions designed to maximize Web traffic to selected sites.

If a company is looking to upgrade its existing Web presence, Kennedy has some advice that can help make the upcoming revamp more effective.

“(You’ll want to offer) great content that they can’t find in other places,” Kennedy said. “Make your Web site a destination that people want to go to for interesting and relevant information and that other sites want to link to … Google and Yahoo have gotten really smart about the algorithms they use for search engine results. They can weed out most of the tricks that some sites use to artificially inflate their search rankings. What you’ll need is good, relevant content on your keywords, links to great outbound content and good inbound links from other sites.”

According to Kennedy, the entire Tricalyx team has developed a philosophy that sets them apart from their competitors, namely an intense focus on helping customers derive real financial value from their Web sites.

“People don’t need just a pretty Web site,” Kennedy said. “They need Web sites that are SEO-focused and designed to improve revenue and decrease costs.”

As a small-business owner herself, Kennedy and her partners faced the same challenges that entrepreneurs throughout Colorado have when starting a business. Kennedy used her own company as an example for those who want to start their own businesses. “Decide what you are going to do and just do it. Don’t let anyone discourage you, make a plan and follow it.”

As published May 6, 2007 in the Denver Post.

Lee Kennedy, Kathy Keating and Trina Blazek, formerly senior executives at Webroot Software, have co-founded TriCalyx, a Web services company that helps Internet retailers.