President Barack Obama, one day after holding a very personal interview on Google+ Hangouts, has stayed true to his word and sent an official Startup America Legislative agenda to Congress to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive in the US.

Among the items President Obama proposed as part of the program include tax breaks for small businesses as well as reform around allowing immigrants to stay in the US by handling the current backlog of visa requests.

Here’s what the President had to say about the dedication to startups in America:

One year ago today, I called for an all hands on deck effort to ensure that America remains the best place on Earth to turn a great idea into a successful business. The private sector responded, with the Startup America Partnership launching new entrepreneurial networks all across the country. Today, we’re taking new steps that build on that progress, and I urge Congress to send me a common-sense bipartisan bill that does even more to expand access to capital and cut taxes for America’s entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Along with cutting taxes for small businesses, the President is supporting new ways of funding for startups, such as “crowdfunding”, and is calling for a national framework to be built to support the micro-donation avenue of funding.

Clearly the President has recognized that the United States is a leader in small businesses, and making it easier to start these companies in the US will not only keep the talent in the country, it will also attract talent and funding from outside of the country. During the State of the Union last week, Obama said that “Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed.” This appears to be exactly what he was referring to.

In addition to the agenda items sent to Congress, the President would like to see more involvement from schools and is introducing programs like the “National Education Startup Challenge”, which invites those in 6th grade and all the way up to college to come up with solutions to solve education and non-profit issues the US is currently facing.

Some may say that this is merely a part of Obama’s plan to get re-elected but of all of the things that he could support, startups aren’t the worst thing. Once Facebook goes public, many will be watching to see how the company does and it could set the tone for tech companies to come over the next twenty years.

One of the most brilliant minds in consumer internet today is Bing Gordon, partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He joined the firm in 2008, and watches over the sFund, which is dedicated to all things social.

Gordon currently serves on the board for Zynga and Klout, and draws from many years of experience as an executive at Electronic Arts (EA). He was the driving force behind the branding of EA Sports, which is arguably the company’s best known brand.

In the video below, Bing Gordon discusses his thoughts on how to be a CEO in the era of the “consumer internet”, which is a completely different era than the first big Dot Com boom. Everything is social these days by default, and Bing Gordon is a master in the field. This is a keynote address from the 2011 Endeavor Entrepreneur Summit.

Listen and learn.

Over $15,000 dollars worth of prizes were given out to startups created at the 24-hour hackathon Angelhack this weekend. The hackathon was organized by Greg Gopman who arrived in Silicon Valley just four months ago from Miami. Gopman had the idea for a new kind of  hackathon where instead of being lumped in an unknown team, hackers were networked and ‘speed dated’ for the first few hours of the event.

Adobe sponsored the event by giving hackers access to their office space in SOMA. Over 300 people took part in the event, hacking together over 30 startups in teams from two to eight people and yours truly judged and moderated the final pitches where entrepreneurs had two minutes to pitch and one minute’s feedback from judges.

Below are some of the startups that emerged from Angelhack 2011.

GoonBuggy – your liver’s best friend. An app that helps keep track of alcohol consumption.

D2020 – an initiative to help people learn to make games, through games.

SwingDaddy – an app giving you professional golfing advice through video

Blogging is huge in South Korea, where most of the population go online everyday — through their phone, tablet device or personal computer — and local firm TNM is very much a major player in the space.

Strong community

The startup has built a 300 blogger strong platform of news and analysis based on partnering with some of the country’s most influential “power bloggers”, whose audiences are vast and dedicated. The company, which was founded in 2009 by Seung-eun Myung and Young Han, selects its contributors based on their levels of traffic and quality of content, with an emphasis on recruiting enthusiasts with expertise in their field.

TNM also helps foster a sense of community between bloggers with frequent events, workshops and parties that enable its partners to meet face to face.

Making money

The firm generates revenue in a number of ways, including the provision of content from its network to traditional media outlets which, for bloggers, can mean the negotiation of contracts that would be difficult to gain off their own back. Ads on the site are delivered through its own advertising network, which operates in a similar way to Federated Media in the US, while TNM provides social media and blog consultancy to clients through which it draws additional income.

Monetisation is not limited to the site itself however, and the company creates and sells mobile software and web platforms that are designed by its team of developers. In the past, its projects have included All That, a series of apps to promote operator SK Telecom’s flagship T-Store service, and its web development activities have produced more than 100 different apps, which have seen a total of 4,500,000 downloads.

Diverse activities and interests

Its diverse range of activities and interests have led to TNM being mistaken for a marketing company, but it is, in fact, a registered media organisation as well as a content provider. Its latest project has seen it partner with Yonhap, Korea’s largest news agency, to develop a crowdsourced news site which runs articles and photos from bloggers, whilst managing copyright issues.

The site is called Kurry – a mix of three Korean words, which mean ‘material’, ‘market place of ideas’, and ‘mixture of content’ – and it is designed to be simple and easy to use, a combination that TNM believes will make it a go-to resource for Koreans seeking breaking news and expert analysis.

Going mobile and beyond

TNM’s latest move in the mobile space saw it release TNM Reader, an app for both the iPhone and Android, which gives mobile users an optimised platform on which to read content from across its network. Articles can be perused by category, app users can create their own reading list to keep up with their favourite blogs and all content is easily shared thanks to in-built support for a range of social media sites.

TNM also has international plans as the firm is aiming to translate and distribute content from its Nanoomi network outside of Korea. English-language audiences are a prime target for the international push, as The Korea Herald reports.

You can find more information about TNM and its activity through the links below.

➤ TNM | On Twitter

Imagine what life would be like if all public trash cans automatically compressed the trash inside them. If the compressors were powered using solar energy? And the units could let city services know when they were full and ready to be collected?

That vision of the future is not so far away from South Korea where local startup Ecube Labs is working hard to turn its ideas into reality for trash cans around the country.

Soon-beom Kwon, who founded the environment-focused startup with a group of fellow students, came up with the idea after noticing bins overflowing with trash everyday. Figuring that the answer was to reduce the volume of trash in the bin, he investigating the possibility of using a solar-powered compressor.

During the market research stage of developing the idea, the team was surprised to find that a similar concept existed in the US. However, they continued with plan and refined their idea into a product that could bring the concept to reality.

The “smart bins” are equipped with solar panels and batteries which can operate for up to five days once fully charged. Waste is compressed to a fifth of its original size which allows the bin to hold a lot more than its usual capacity.

As it utilises space more efficiently, a smart bin need to be emptied less often which reduces the pollution created by garbage trucks that come to collect it. Each bin is equipped with a 3G transmitter which provides sanitation workers with a real time alert when it is full through a smartphone application that also displays its location.

Commenting on the product and benefits of the technology, Ecube Labs said:

If waste removal operations decrease by 10%, carbon emissions decrease by approximately 1,000 tons. If the 5,000 bins around Seoul are replaced with these bins, waste removal will decrease by over 20%. This is the same as planting 150,000 trees around Seoul.

The company is currently preparing a prototype model and plans to start trial operations within this month near Gangnam Station, the busiest subway station in Korea. The smart bins are expected to cost around $1,300-$1,700 but, as Kwon says, over time they have the potential to pay for themselves:

After three years the bins will actually end up reducing costs. We intend to offer a range of purchasing options for local governments who find the initial cost too much.

If the venture proves to be successful there is no doubt that everyday citizens will benefit from the system. While the situation has recently improved, Korea is well known for its lack of trash cans in public places due to commercial dumping and terrorism concerns.

➤ Ecube Labs

[Image courtesy of Huguette Roe / Shutterstock.com]

Last night, I attended a gathering of some of the smartest technology minds focusing on Education for grades K-12. I didn’t know what to expect, other than Newark Mayor Cory Booker and LinkedIn‘s Founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman being there to listen to seven companies from the ImagineK12 startup incubator in Palo Alto.

In a small office within the Palo Alto aol building, teams with big hearts (and sometimes very nervously) discussed their views on the future of Education for children all over the world.

I’m going to be doing a few interviews with some of the companies in the near future, which include Goalbook, educreations, and Eduvant. This is a space that I’m very passionate about.

Each team had one thing in common, their belief in the importance of technology to make change happen in a system that hasn’t changed in decades.

That change could very well come out of the ImagineK12 incubator, which says this about itself:

We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded.

Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision. Over a three-month period, we will draw on our extensive entrepreneurial experience, understanding of the Silicon Valley ecosystem, and knowledge of the education industry to help bring your idea to life, get your company funded, and to get your company on the road to success.

Last night wasn’t a pitch session for funding, although I’m sure most of the startups hoped that Reid Hoffman would take interest, as he is an extremely prolific VC now. Most of the nearly three hours were spent on presentation of the products, and Q&A by Mayor Booker on the nuts and bolts of education, and business advice and guidance from Reid Hoffman. For these companies, this type of audience is nearly unheard of, and each one took notes and paid full attention. And of course, vice versa.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker shared that he can no longer watch the way school systems have worked, there has to be change. Technology, he believes, can bring that change.

The theme of the night appeared to be data. Educational institutions have a huge flow of data, some not even digitized, and have no way to pour through it to make smart decisions for their schools or more importantly for their students. Some of the companies have come up with ways to use data to incentive students with behavioral issues, make better use of a Principal’s time by giving them a dashboard of student and financial data in real-time, as well as share lesson plans all over the world.

A few of these companies seemed to intrigue both Booker and Hoffman, causing Booker to set up meetings between the companies and schools in Newark immediately.

Why isn’t there more of a focus on technology in education? Lack of money. Schools are notorious for having financial issues, even though technology can help with that, and there isn’t a steady flow of VC funds for those who want to focus their efforts on the education space. It seems as if ImagineK12 is set to change all of that, and having Booker and Hoffman involved certainly doesn’t hurt its cause.

Let’s also not forget that if we put more technology in schools, we’ll have more technologists like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for years to come.

You can view more photos from last night below:

The police were called outside Microsoft’s SharePoint conference at the Anaheim Convention Center today when collaborative cloud sharing software startup Huddle pulled a PR stunt in the form of marching a 120 person band, plus ten cheerleaders accompanying American footballers, into the conference center’s entrance.

In full disclosure; I was doing some video work for Hudddle via my production company Newspepper, but I felt blogging about the incident necessary when the drama unfolded and police were called by organizers at the Sharepoint conference.

The band was told to stop playing the music and leave the property, a few minutes later the police arrived and told Huddle’s founder Andy Mcloughlin the conference center was private property and out of bounds.

Huddle, a five-year-old startup based in London and San Francisco was trying to demonstrate to SharePoint customers there are other, (and in Huddle’s opinion better) options when it comes to choosing cloud based collaborative workspaces and wanted to get the attention of its biggest competitor in the market.

Huddle has been using Microsoft’s .net and business solutions through the Bizspark program for years, but it seems Huddle felt it was time to cut the cord from Microsoft’s program: “We appreciate the relationship we’ve built with Bizspark, but at the end of the day they have a product which is a competitor and just like in the early days when Salesforce used to disrupt Oracle and  SAP conferences, we need to show we are thinking big,” said Mcloughlin.

Keep up with all the latest Microsoft news at TNW Microsoft.

The Girl 2.0 Expo, held in Shanghai over the weekend and run by Girls in Tech China, pulled in some big name speakers like Dave McCLure, Venture Capitalist and founder of ’500 startups’ and Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment TV.

Girl 2.0 was originally founded to empower women in technology but has grown in stature, “building an ecosystem that is changing the way women work with and support one another”.

“It’s the century of women. I’m in the right place at the right time. women in China.” Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment TV at Girl 2.0 China.

The conference included ‘Gone in 30 Seconds’. a competition for 5 startups to give a 30 second ‘elevator’ pitch to 5 judges led by Silicon Valley VC and Angel investor Dave McClure. Surprisingly, given the nature of the conference, it was an all male judging panel.

Other talks and panels at the conference included discussions on learning from China and learning from the USA about setting up cross border ecosystems to encourage entrepreneurial collaboration between Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley and China.

Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) has setup a non-profit entity ‘IIMB Innovations’ which aims to support promising startups. With 1.24Cr INR as the initial backing from department of Information technology (IT), IIMB could raise grants from other agencies as well.

This new entity would help strengthen the NSR Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning which was set up in 2002 with a grant from Infosys honchos. NSRCEL has a history for supporting many now successful startups.

NSRCEL Chief Operating Officer A Suryanarayanan said, “The new vehicle will allow us to take stakes and raise funds. We will now be able to seed-fund some of the companies. Since it is a not-for-profit model, it will not function like your typical VC. Incubation and early stage investing has a high risk element. But, with our vast faculty experience and partnership connect to startups, we hope to improve their chances of survival.”

Any startup with a slant towards technological development could have chances to be backed up by NSRCEL. It has already seed-funded three new startups Metaome (a bioinformatics company), Redforce Labs ( building authentication systems for financial institutions) and Radifinity (asset tracking solutions).

Besides, the brand name IIM-B helps many of these startups when they announce their talent and scout for potential customers.

At a subsidized cost, incubates have access to office space that can seat four to 12 persons, communication links, access to business angels who are part of NSRCEL network and other services like IT hosting, logistics, marketing, statutory compliance, finance and legal support.

IIMB Innovations would typically benefit the incubating startups by giving them the support, the campus and infrastructure  feel and the guidance from the faculty of the top notch B Schools in India.

Every week we publish an interview with an Asian based start-up. We ask five questions, hoping the answers will give you inspiration and new views.

This time we’re interviewing CEO and co-founder Thorben Linneberg of OrSiSo, a Singapore based startup.

OrSiSo is an Adobe AIR based application, allowing you to organize your friends, update your status, connect, and merge social information. They have rapidly been adding social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Friendster, Twitter, AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo messenger.

To be fair, I wasn’t that excited to be reviewing another social activity spider, as there seem to be many out there. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the original and useful concept of this application, and great execution of it.

Besides smooth setup, I’ve had a first time experience to get an overview of all friends from my networks, and I could rank them from “inner circle” to “outer circle”. Besides well executed overview of friends, the status update is compelling too. Although I’ve never actually felt ‘home’ in any AIR program (missing a decent menu bar items and high CPU usage of the Adobe platform), I am tempted to use this application in the future to avoid a cluttered desktop full with social media application. Find out for yourself. Read more about the OrSiRo application and the company behind it:

How did you come up with the idea of OrSiSo?

“The inspiration behind OrSiSo came from my growing frustration in trying to keep up with all the different Social Networks, managing memberships, interacting with the same friends on different networks. Many times, I missed events, simply because i forgot to log into that particular network.

At the same time, the amount of mails, pokes, zombie wars and other notifications and requests in my inbox became overwhelming.

The idea of a tool where all this information would be centralized and prioritized grew in my mind, and in October 2007 I decided to put these ideas into a business plan and present it to a group of experienced angel investors and close friends in Asia Pacific.

Remember at the time… Open Social API’s didn’t exist, and almost all networks were stuck in the “walled garden” approach to growth.

Today the industry has moved towards openess and this has helped our progress greatly.”

What was your biggest challenge during the development process?

“The biggest challenge during development was to translate the vision of OrSiSo into a cool application that everyone loves to use everyday. We have been working very hard on this, and we believe that OrSiSo already has a lot of unique features that are very appealing to Social Network Power Users. Like intelligent filtering, sorting by closeness, uploading albums from OrSiSo to Facebook”

Can you describe the Singapore start-up culture compared to Silicon Valley?

“The start-up culture of Singapore is evolving very fast. There are a lot of great tech and internet start-ups in singapore now… and the investment climate is getting better all the time. Due to our location and proximity to India & China, Singapore based startups have an advantage in creating innovative solutions for these huge markets. The only disadvantages of not being in SV is the lack of visibility to Valley based investors and partners. So far we are getting support from government initiatives to fund our growth and we have been able to raise some seed funding from a few experienced angels in the Asia Pacific region. No other country i know of, has so much to offer to statups. Having said that, it is important to be present in the eco system of the Vallley, and we are planning to set up at least one of our business developement offices in the Valley after this next investment round. We may however keep our main development office in Singapore, as we can develop at very competitive rates as compared to the US.”

What will be the influence of your start-up on the next web?

“We are witnessing a shift in how the web is used. No industry, no business, and no individual is untouched by the proliferation of social networking usage.
It is true that Social Media is enabling us to share and communicate in new and revolutionary ways, but its also true that it’s pulling us apart into a fragmented mess of communication systems that are incompatible with each other!

We build OrSiSo to pull it all back together, to free users so they can get back to the fun of socializing, without having to spend more time on organization.
Just like search engines became necessary to navigate and find pretty much anything on the Web, Something is needed to help “guide” users to make sense of all the Social Networks data and activity.”

How are you going to monetize OrSiSo, what partners are you intending to work with?

“We have several revenue streams for Orsiso: highly targeted advertising, subscribtions (pro version, Mobile versions) for example.

Also we are in the process of building a client for TV. We are launching Orsiso with partners that offer internet, mobile, and TV services… covering the big 3 screens. Our backend intelligence SocialCraftTM will log behavioral patterns cross platforms and cross devices, giving our industry partners a totally new and fresh look at how effective their services are. At the same time we will wrap social networking around their offerings in a way that blends the brand delivery into users social stream in a seamless way.”

Give it a try

Go to OrSiSoand try it for yourself