Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Women dominate social networks, according to the latest Nielsen report. This is not news. Women have been ruling social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and social gaming platforms for the past few years. Women also bring in half or more of the income in 55% of U.S. households. And women ages 50 and older control a net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth, according to MassMutual Financial Group. Simply put, women are influential and drive the economy.

Yet when it comes to the boards of directors of companies like Adobe, Facebook, Zynga, and Pandora, women have been excluded, despite the fact that a significant segment of these companies’ user base is women. While some companies don’t think that diversifying their all white-dude boards will make a difference on fostering innovation, a business case can be made as to why having women at the boardroom table or as executives can significantly increase companies’ profits.

Facebook has become much more profitable and innovative since Mark Zuckerberg brought COO Sheryl Sandberg on board. Sandberg brings a diverse perspective outside of the all white-dude mind frame that previously dominated Facebook’s senior leadership. Despite Sandberg’s successes as COO, Zuckerberg has chosen to exclude women from Facebook’s board. So the questions stands: Will Facebook be able to continue to innovate with zero women at the boardroom table, when its demographics are composed of 55% women?

According to the Catalyst report, The Bottom Line, Corporate Performance and Women’s Representation on boards, Fortune 500 companies that had at least three women boards of directors saw on average:

• Return on equity increase by at least 53%.

• Return on sales increase by at least 42%.

• Return on invested capital increase by at least 66%. Diversifying boards also brings different perspectives to companies’ big picture objectives, product development, and problem solving. Companies can’t continue to innovate without diverse leaders at the table.

And yet, the boards of one in 10 Fortune 500 companies include no women.

“Beyond that well-worn statistic that women control household spending on everything from cleansers to cars to computers, it’s incumbent on tech companies to remember that women also make up more than half of Internet users and drive the majority of engagement and activity for social media and networking apps/sites/tools,” said Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder of BlogHer, who will be speaking at the virtual Women Who Tech Telesummit on May 23rd. “That certainly speaks to the need for diversity on development and user experience teams, but since the data also shows that companies with more diversity at the very top achieve better financial results, it’s just as important to bring diverse perspectives to the entire chain of command. It’s good business from every angle.”

While Facebook and other tech/social media companies’ decisions to exclude women from the boardroom is disappointing and a setback, take a look again at the stats cited above. Women rule not just on social networks, but are highly influential in business’ bottom lines. They fuel the economy. And while we certainly haven’t reached gender parity in the tech and startup world yet (not to mention other sectors), we’ve got some wins to celebrate.

“Last year, fewer women sought angel financing than the previous year (12% vs. 21% respectively), but a much high percentage of them actually received financing (20.5% vs. 13%),” said Geri Stengel over on Forbes.

But just because fewer women are going out for angel funding, that doesn’t mean fewer women are launching businesses and startups.

Kay Koplovitz, who chairs Springboard Enterprises, says, “with lower costs of technology, many women entrepreneurs in digital media and e-commerce prefer to self-fund. Companies can start up with a minimal investment and wait longer until they need to seek outside funding.”

Check out the infographic below showing how women are breaking down some doors. Key highlights include:

Over 400 women-led companies in the Springboard portfolio:

• Have raised $5 billion in equity financing.
• 10 are IPOs.
• 80% are still in business, generating $4 billion in revenues and creating tens of thousands of new jobs.

The fourth-largest angel investment group in the U.S. is Golden Seeds, which supports women-led startups.

Women are starting businesses at a rate of 1.5 times the national average, which is a 20% increase over the last decade. 187 million women worldwide are currently starting or running a business enterprise (although a recent look a the 2012 Fortune 500 list shows that only 3.6% of Fortune 500 companies are led by female CEOs).

Bottom line? Women dominate the social media markets, drive the economy, and women at the table increase business profits. If companies want to succeed, the Zuckerbergs of the world should start taking these facts more seriously.

Allyson Kapin is the founder of Rad Campaign, a web agency that provides web design, web development online marketing, and social media strategy to nonprofit organizations and political campaigns. She is also the founder of Women Who Tech.

Image: Flickr user Hector Parayuelos

Urban-farming innovators such as Detroit and Cleveland offer an object lesson in how cities can transform disused land into tomorrow’s (healthy) dinner.

UNITED STATES
OF INNOVATION

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

All around the country, Americans are dreaming big. Their boldest ideas are changing their communities–and having a ripple effect throughout the world.

CLICK HERE to read about unexpected pockets of innovation in other cities.

Consider this paradox: 49 million Americans live with daily food insecurity, 23 million live in urban food deserts, and collectively we’re all getting fatter. Simultaneously vacant lots, concrete grooves, and other desolate, empty spots dot urban landscapes, while a quarter of traditional agricultural land is severely degraded according to the UN.

Enter the urban farm: a fast, smart, cheap way to bring healthy food closer to those who need it, transform ugly vacant spaces into lush gardens, and promote a healthier, greener, more connected urban community.

A recently released video by the American Society of Landscape Architects uses case studies from edible-city innovators, such as Cleveland and Detroit, to offer practical advice for bringing urban farms to your backyard (or corner lot or rooftop). Here are four helpful tips:

Plant a garden in your own yard (or farm the job out to someone else).

Acres of perfect green grass are both a hassle to maintain and, nutritionally speaking, useless. Inhabitants with yards in D.C. and Portland can even lease their yard to those with greener thumbs–and take a cut of the produce they yield.

Populate empty lots with crops.

Cities like Cleveland and Detroit are leasing abandoned lots to urban farmers for practically nothing–provided the lessees are committed to filling those spots with edible greenery.

If your lot’s soil is poisoned with lead or other contaminants, simply truck in new soil in raised beds. Even cheaper: Plant your veggies in burlap bags filled with clean soil. Roll the sacks up and fill with more soil as the plants grow, and you can transport them indoors when winter hits.

Use your roof.

ASLA’s video suggests restaurants harness their roofs to grow ingredients for their own meals. Big-box stores can lease or farm their own vast roofs and sell the proceeds in-store or via local greenmarkets. Rooftop farms use wasted space and lower your utility bill, too.

Fill up your food trucks.

Mobile trucks sell prepared foods–often unhealthy at that. Why not use them as fresh-fruit stands? Food truck legislation in many cities has relaxed in recent years. Opportunity knocks, suburban farmers: Coordinate with a food truck owner to sell your produce wherever there’s a need in your city–not just at the Saturday greenmarket. Hook the kids on juicy berries or watermelon in summer, and you may make a confirmed veggie fan year-round.

Image: Flickr user Joel Carranza

Maurice Sendak passed away this morning at the age of 83. He’ll be celebrated by millions of fans, and has already been memorialized with great writing all over the internet.

We wanted to take a minute to reflect on the example Sendak set for other creatives of all ilks. He was a fearlessly honest writer. He was a talented artist who illustrated over a hundred books, and designed opera sets, musicals, and television shows. His cultural commentary on pretty much any topic–from publishing and mental health to being a young gay Brooklynite in the 1960s–cut to the quick of human experience. He came of age during a period of cultural sanitization, and was often criticized for being “too” honest in his books, which spoke frankly to the sometimes-terrifying experience of being a child. Some of his best quotes on creativity, publishing, and children are collected below.

The Sanitization of Children’s Literature

Sendak, the child of two Holocaust survivors, refused to shy away from the realities of childhood; nightmares, monsters, rebellion, and arguments make frequent appearances in his work. Talking to Maus author Art Spiegelman in 1993, he described unsavory parental praise thusly: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotic vomiting in your mouth! I say, ‘You are in touch, lady–you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… That is your childhood self!”

Though he was routinely criticized by conservative groups for portraying what they saw as “adult” themes, he stood his ground, maintaining that parents (and authors) need to be honest with children. In his acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal in 1964, he had this to say about how adults misrepresent childhood:

“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions – fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

The City

Sendak was fascinated by the city he grew up in, and portrayed it often as a sometimes hellish, often wonderful riddle. Though he’s obviously most famous for Where the Wild Things Are, he wrote frequently about his native Brooklyn. As the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson notes today, In the Night Kitchen is one of his most mesmerizing books, telling the story of Micky, a little boy dreaming over Brooklyn (taking cues from the classic turn-of-the-century Little Nemo comics).

Davidson writes that Sendak was unceasingly honest in his portrayal of life in the city: “he found the images and words to let children know that he recognized that their lives had cryptic alleyways.”

On Creative Success

Sendak was honest about struggling to succeed early in his career. He took a job at FAO Schwartz doing window installations, telling NPR’s Terri Gross that eventually he ran out of steam. “I was too frightened. I just lost it.” A friend paid for his first therapy session, and he made it a fixture in his life. He talked often about feeling pressure from his parents and peers: “Everyone said, ‘Oh, you’re so talented and you’re going to get a book and you’re’ — and, of course, nothing happened as soon as I wanted it to.”

Talking to the AP, he described his sucess as mundane, saying “I didn’t sleep with famous people or movie stars or anything like that. It’s a common story: Brooklyn boy grows up and succeeds in his profession, period.”

A Book is a Book is a Book

Sendak was a firm believer in the universality of stories. He laughed at the idea that children’s literature is a separate genre from literature in general. In the same 1993 New Yorker piece with Art Spiegelman, he said “Kids books… Grownup books… That’s just marketing.”

In an era of iPads and Nooks, he dismissed the digital readers an ultimately unimportant fad, telling the Guardian in 2011, “I hate ebooks. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”

On Living and Dying

In 2011, he talked about being preoccupied by death (his long-term partner passed away in 2007): “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

One last quote from this 2011 interview speaks to both his life and work: “I can’t believe I’ve turned into a typical old man. I can’t believe it. I was young just minutes ago.”

What was the last thing you made out of papier-mâché? A model of the solar system? A pinata? An embarrassing halloween costume? Brooklynite Lauren Clay is using the humble medium to create raucous hallucinatory art that pokes fun at the history of modernism.

Beginning with a simple wood frame, Clay meticulously crafts her pieces out of wire, paint, and papier-mâché. After many rounds of painting, sanding, and re-sanding, the objects evolve into sculptures whose provenance is, well, unclear. Both Sides in Equal Parts (2010) looks like an alien cornucopia, dripping globs of teal paint; Granny Takes a Trip (2011) explodes with clusters of geodes and unidentifiable fruit. The pieces jump off the gallery wall, inviting viewers to cross that ever-present line between art and audience.

Clay sees her work as a way of critiquing modern art using humor. Using the basic language of modernism (the grid, the plinth, the monochromatic plane) in repetition, she creates lushly detailed pieces that seem wildly unlike anything that came out of the heavily masculine modernist canon. The pieces draw on ’60s psychedelia, Taoist philosophy, and traditional decorative arts, remixing historical eras and symbols with ease.

“I think it’s impossible to ignore the awkward, fumbling feeling that comes along with any philosophical pursuit,” she told Nastia Voynovskoya last fall. “I think it’s healthy to admit how silly and awkward it feels to address the infinite or our own history.”

The default to emotion is part of the human condition.

To better appreciate the role of emotion and what it allows an audience to do, we need to take a brief detour into evolutionary biology. The human brain can be understood as three separate brains working in tandem, if not completely integrated with each other.

The primitive brain and the limbic brain collectively make up the limbic system, which governs emotion. Within the limbic system, there is a structure called the amygdala, which leaders need to understand.

When faced with a stimulus, the amygdala turns our emotions on. It does so instantaneously, without our having to think about it. We find ourselves responding to a threat even before we’re consciously aware of it. Think of jumping back when we see a sudden movement in front of us, or being startled by the sound of a loud bang. We also respond instantaneously to positive stimulus without thinking about it: Note how we tend to smile back when someone smiles at us; how we are immediately distracted when something we consider beautiful enters our line of sight.

The amygdala is the key to understanding an audience’s emotional response, and to connecting with an audience. It plays an important role in salience, what grabs and keeps our attention. In other words, attention is an emotion-driven phenomenon. If we want to get and hold an audience’s attention, we need to trigger the amygdala to our advantage. Only when we have an audience’s attention can we then move them to rational argument.

I have become somewhat notorious in the programs I teach at NYU for the way I start each class. I teach all-day sessions on Saturdays, and as the 9 a.m. start time approaches, most students are still milling about, getting settled, and chatting with each other. At precisely 9 a.m. I touch a button on my remote mouse and play a sudden blast of very loud music. Most of the time it’s the chorus of “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black Eyed Peas, but to keep the element of surprise I sometimes vary the selection. After a 10-second burst of very loud music, I have every student’s undivided attention. I then lock in the connection: I smile, welcome them, thank them for investing a full Saturday in developing their careers. Only then do I begin the class. I have hijacked their amygdalas. We need audiences to feel first, and then to think.

Five Strategies for Audience Engagement

When leaders are speaking to audiences that are under stress–even if the audience is merely tired or distracted–the leader can take the amygdala into account in determining how the content is structured and how the audience is engaged. Here are five ways to engage effectively:

1. Establish connection before saying anything substantive. And remember that the connection is physical. Techniques to connect include asking for the audience’s attention, if only with a powerful and warm greeting, followed by silence and eye contact. The key is to make sure the audience isn’t doing something else so that they pay attention.
2. Say the most important thing first once you have their attention. The most important thing should be a powerful framing statement that will control the meaning of all that follows. Remember that frames have to precede facts.
3. Close with a recapitulation of the powerful framing statement that opened the presentation.
4. Make it easy to remember. Keep in mind how hard it is for people to listen, hear, and remember. One way is to repeat key points. I often hear from clients, “But I’ve already said this. I don’t need to say it again.” Or, “I don’t want to say it again.” Or, “If I have to say this again, I’ll throw up. I’m tired of repeating myself.” But leaders need to constantly repeat the key themes, within any given presentation, and in general as a matter of organizational strategy. It doesn’t matter if they’re bored with saying it. The audience needs to hear it, again and again. And again. As a general principle, people need to hear things three times if they are to even pay attention to it. And because any given audience member at any time may be distracted or inattentive, he or she is unlikely to hear or attend to everything that is said. So leaders need to repeat key points far more than three times to be sure that everyone has heard it at least three times. One of the burdens of leadership is to have a very high tolerance for repetition.
5. Follow the rule of threes. Have three main points. But no more than three main points; no more than three topics; no more than three examples per topic. Group thoughts in threes; words in threes; actions in threes. (See how I just used the Rule of Threes in that sentence?) Think of Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address: “We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.”

The default to emotion is part of the human condition. The amygdala governs the fight-or-flight impulse, the triggering of powerful emotions, and the release of chemicals that put humans in a heightened state of arousal. Humans are not thinking machines. We’re feeling machines who also think. We feel first, and then we think. As a result, leaders need to meet emotion with emotion before they can move audiences with reason.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Power of Communication: Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty, and Lead Effectively by Helio Fred Garcia, printed with permission from FT Press, a publishing imprint of Pearson.

Image: Flickr user Howie Le

This is a big deal, as the firm’s philosophy is to focus on only the 10 or 15 companies it thinks are going to matter in the long run. (See: Facebook, Airbnb, and Groupon, among others.)

Back in December, we told you about Belly, a Chicago startup that created a new digital-based loyalty program for small businesses. At the time, it was just one of a jumble of startups crowding into the local commerce space. Today, though, Andreessen Horowitz is announcing it’s putting $10 million into the company. That’s notable since the firm’s philosophy is to focus on only the ten or 15 companies it thinks are going to matter in the long run. (Facebook, Airbnb, and Groupon are all in its portfolio.)

All of which leads to an important question: How did a startup, that’s barely a year old, that only has 1,400 customers, and whose founder is a first-timer become in a mere 12 months a company that the experienced hands at Andreessen Horowitz not only believe is going to be a game changer, but will be a leader in its class?

Would-be super startups, listen up:

Choose a big problem

Local stores are in a quandry. Customers can walk into their stores today, take a look at what they’ve got, and then, thanks to smartphones, figure out if someone else has their stuff for cheaper. “The Internet has enabled incredible transparency on pricing,” Andreessen Horowitz partner, Jeff Jordan, who’s joining Belly’s board, tells Fast Company. “There are a whole bunch of models that are providing pricing pressure, particularly to small merchants.”

If stores can no longer compete on price, they have to compete on something else. Both Belly and Andreessen Horowitz believes that means relationships–giving people a reason, other than price, to keep choosing particular merchants over cheaper alternatives elsewhere.

Don’t boil the ocean

There are myriad ways of strengthening the merchant-customer relationship, but Belly founder Logan LaHive, who started working on the business a year ago, didn’t try to tackle everything at once. Instead, he chose to focus on just one aspect: loyalty programs.

He’s come up with a system where merchants can get creative with the kinds of rewards they offer. It’s no longer the generic “buy 10, get one free.” Rather, merchants can choose to offer something unusual they think their customers would actually like. Some actual examples: A sandwich store will name a sandwich after you. A grocery store will let you cut in line. And a comic book store will let customers who make 50 purchases punch a store employee in the gut. (We’re assuming that’s been cleared with OSHA.)

But build in the foundation for a wider play

The Belly service is powered digitally–through an iPad in the merchant’s store and iPhone and Android apps for customers. (Customers without smartphones can track their purchases on a paper card.) That means Belly has a built-in launching pad for adding more services later that can further fuel the merchant-customer relationship–and further solidify its appeal to merchants.

“A by-product of what Belly is doing is putting a connected computer into soon-to-be tens of thousands of small merchants,” Jordan says. “We think that has very interesting potentials for strategic applications down the road.” (He declines to elaborate, though, saying, “We don’t want to telegraph where we’re going.”)

Gain traction quickly

Once investors bet on you, they’re going to expect you to be able to scale faster than you ever expected. A lot of the technology and ideas that are being developed today aren’t defensible on their own. It just doesn’t take that long to build a lot of the apps coming into the world today.

So investors are looking for other indicators that you’re going to be able to own your market. Getting rapid uptake is one slice of evidence that you’re the person they’re looking for. It means that you’ve developed an offering that’s appealing (as opposed to one that’s just OK or, worse, doesn’t actually work very well) and that you’ve figured out how to get people to adopt it rapidly.

Belly has 1,400 merchants using its system so far in six cities, with two more being added today. That’s impressive considering, again, that the system was barely a flicker of an idea 12 months ago. “We think the most important thing in this market is to be the first mover and to get out there fast,” Jordan says. “These guys probably added more merchants last month than any of the competitors have in aggregate.”

Take up residence with some of the hottest investor-operators of this generation

LaHive, who previously was in charge of new business at Redbox, got himself hired as a Founder-in-Residence at Lightbank, the venture firm belonging to Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, the original investors in Groupon and former entrepreneurs themseles. As part of the deal, he got to move into their offices and hammer out his idea while sitting mere feet away from Keywell.

LaHive says that helped him move faster. There were various things about getting a startup off the ground that he didn’t have to figure out on his own. He could just ask.

Plus, his proximity to Keywell and Lefkofsky gave Andreessen Horowitz confidence to invest in the otherwise unproven first-time entrepreneur. “Brad and Eric grew Groupon out to hundreds of thousands of merchants incredibly quickly,” Jordan says. “That DNA is critical in this model.”

Image: Flickr user Oregon State University

E.B. Boyd is FastCompany.com’s Silicon Valley reporter. Twitter | Google+ | Email

After a hard day’s driving, a sauna is the ideal place to relax and take away the strain on the muscles – which is why one Russian decided to create a rolling hot box he can take with him wherever he goes.

Embedded in Russian tradition, saunas sit alongside vodka as the staple means of keeping warm in the sub-zero winters most typically experienced by the inhabitants of this giant nation.

The majority are permanent structures with giant fires feeding individual wooden cabins, but on a snowy lay-by next to the main road into Moscow we came across a rather more mobile one, built neatly into the back of a 1976 Zil army truck.

This is a very different type of truck stop.

Parked in a forested outcrop, the solid green metal machine sat atop the snow on large tundra tires, hiding its dark military history under a fresh new look with a giant side sticker depicting the wooden slats of a traditional sauna and a telltale rough steel opening that emitted a flickering glow.

Since the truck chugged its way out of Moscow, this onboard fire has been slowly building up the heat inside, puffing smoke from the twee little chimney in its roof.

Beckoned over by a man wearing a heavyweight winter jacket topped with a bizarre beige Tyrolean-style hat, we were ushered to a door where another gentleman with significantly fewer clothes and an altogether steamier look welcomed us in.

But while it may have seemed like we were in a bizarre slapstick comedy sketch, this was a very serious piece of physical conditioning, Russian style.

Inside, there was very strict protocol. First came the initial sweating to get the body acclimatized to the heat. Once boiled to within an inch of our lives, we then cooled down in the sauna-truck’s ‘chill out room’ before braving the heat once more.

Then came the oak branches. Bunched and brandished by Nikolai, the sauna’s owner, creator and operator, we were beaten with these to boost circulation. With the sauna’s coals repeatedly watered and bunched leaves wafting the fast-soaring heat through the tiny space by the fire, we were soon cooked to perfection.

We thought we were done, but Nikolai had other plans. With a yell of “Russia extreme!” he urged us to the sauna door and out into the frozen snow beyond, where he proceeded to cover us in snow.

And as we finally slipped back into our vehicles’ soft leather seats to continue our journey, the whip-lashed sores began to soften. They don’t do things by halves, these Russians.

Jeremy was travelling on Land Rover’s Journey of Discovery.

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: Doodle.ly

Quick Pitch: Doodle.ly is a creative social platform for doodlers. Hand-drawn masterpieces created on Doodle.ly can be shared to social networks.

Genius Idea: Doodle.ly artists can draw straight on the website or sketch using the Doodle.ly iPad app.

For Doodle.ly co-creators Evan Vogel and Darren Paul, the social platform they dreamed up and launched in July 2011 — is the place for innovation, creativity and inspiration on the web.

The latest user-submitted drawings include doodles of bright flowers, dinosaurs and detailed sketches paying homage to Beastie Boys Rapper MCA, who died last Friday. The current number of doodles on the site stands at 32,000 — and counting.

Doodle.ly is a web application and iPad app that lets users draw whatever they want and effortlessly share creations to the web. It takes under a minute for someone with a Twitter and Facebook to sign into Doodle.ly as a new user. That’s when the magic happens. There are different pen tools and colors, all free to use, so the boundaries are endless.

Once the drawing, sketch or scribble is complete, doodles are shared on Twitter or Facebook automatically. The Doodle.ly team is working on building untethered account log-ins — to stop forced sharing. But for now, the world gets to experience all doodles created on Doodle.ly.

Vogel and Paul say they see most of the doodles that come through. These startup guys have high standards for their “highly skilled” userbase.

“We want to see the next Radiohead album or Time magazine cover created by doodlers,” Vogel told Mashable.

An application update released on Tuesday is intended to make the social platform more interactive. New features include a “like button” on every doodle. Plus, a resulting “popular section” for trending images.

These social features were inspired by Instagram’s internal system of “likes” and comments for the app’s filtered square images. There’s instant gratification in “likes,” Paul says.

“This is really meant to be fun,” Paul says. “The new features we are launching are socialization features. What the ‘like’ button does is take the app to the next level. You can like the doodle either by clicking the ‘like’ button or by double tapping the doodle. This allows the cream to rise to the top.”

The social platform is meant to be playful and positive. The hand-drawn aspect of this medium is special, says the creators.

“We can see people around the world using this as a way to share a love note to a loved one, wish someone condolences or just to doodle a creative idea,” Paul says.

Marketing teams are taking advantage of Doodle.ly’s simple drawing interface and sharing aspects. NHL team, the New Jersey Devils, recently used Doodle.ly on Fan Appreciation Night as a crowd-sourcing device. Hockey fans were asked to sketch a team-inspired doodle to feature on 17,000 Rally Rags for the first home game of the playoffs. After 10,000 votes were cast, the fan-submitted doodle was announced.

The Doodle.ly team says the social platform of doodles is opening up new avenues of marketing and reaching consumers.

The team, however, says they are currently not focused on monetization or partnerships. For now, the team is busy beefing up its product and working on releasing its API. Projects they have seen come out of their privately released API include a tool for collaborative doodles and a screen saver app.

“We really want this to be a worldwide platform that is ubiquitous and can live out potential we believe it has,” Paul said.

Are you a fan of web-based doodling? Tell us in the comments if this is a social platform you would use.

Images courtesy of Doodle.ly

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

The state of Nevada has issued a first license for one of Google’s self-driving cars — provided there are two people inside the car at all times, the Associated Press reports.

Nevada’s DMV has issued the license after conducting demonstrations that the car is safe for testing on public streets.

Google’s self-driving cars use a laser radar on the roof of the vehicle to detect obstacles, pedestrians and other cars. With the help of GPS and a bit of artificial intelligence, the car can drive itself with very little or no intervention from the human sitting inside.

That said, Nevada’s regulations require two people in the test cars: one in the driver’s seat, and other monitoring a computer screen that shows the car’s planned route as well as traffic lights and other potential hazards on the road.

As soon as the “driver” touches the brake or the wheel, he takes control of the vehicle.

We had a chance to test out one of Google’s self-driving cars in March 2011, and the results were good: no glitches, no unwanted close encounters with walls or other obstacles.

However, in August 2011 one of Google’s cars caused an accident on the road.

What are your thoughts on self-driving cars? Are they the future of transportation or an accident waiting to happen? Let us know in the comments.