URBAN TxT’s Secret Sauce Turns Teens Into Tech Entrepreneurs

“I guess we’re used to a teacher coming in and telling us what to do. When it was just us, nobody really knew what to do.” This answer resonated with everyone of the 31 teens accepted into URBAN Teens eXploring Technology (URBAN TxT) summer program, also known as the Summer Hackaneer Academy. The new participant was explaining why some teens stepped up to the plate and others did not during a teambuilding activity that happened earlier in the day.

URBAN TxT students during first program activity.

Creating an environment that allows young adults to explore their talents, insecurities, attitude towards leadership, reflect on daily achievements and failures, and openly discuss these amongst the entire team takes a lot of work. Interestingly enough, South Los Angeles’ URBAN TxT has that environment. More importantly, the organization is using computer programming to develop the best and brightest minds in the inner city into technology entrepreneurs.

Founder, Oscar Menjivar, and Bagel, URBAN TxT mascot.

This unique environment comes out of a curriculum based on peer-to-peer and projectbased learning. Oscar Menjivar, co-founder of URBAN TxT, has been perfecting the curriculum for more than a decade. The program’s secret sauce needs many ingredients. The ability to teach technology concept without technology is key. For the first few weeks it’s all about team and leadership building. On the first day of the 2013 Hackaneer Academy the teens were given a problem. It was up to them to find the solution. The only rule was no verbal communication. Along the way students learned about communication, trial and error, troubleshooting, the frustration that small errors bring about and the satisfaction a coder gets after finishing a perfectly crafted project.

As students and staff get to know each other, basics of computer programming are incorporated into the activities that make URBAN TxT the only South LA technology organization that does leadership development. URBAN TxT’s secret sauce also needs personal investment from every member of the leadership team. None of the directors, coaches or volunteers are in it for a paycheck. They put in their time, creativity and commitment because they believe in the organization and, more importantly, the teens that are in it. This “students first” mentality helps the leadership team overcome obstacles, grow their own leadership and technological skills and push the boundaries of creativity.

Now, don’t think you know all there is to URBAN TxT, though. After all, the secret sauce remains secret for a reason. If you get to know the organization enough you might learn a little about the other ingredients, like a talking duck, furry hat, foam ninja or the pup named Bagel.

Blog written by Juan Vasquez, Communications Coach for URBAN Teens eXploring Technology. URBAN TxT is a nonprofit organization that encourages inner city teen males to become catalysts of change in urban communities. The organization develops teens from South LA and Watts into a new generation of leaders through technology. To learn more about URBAN TxT visit www.urbantxt.com. Follow Juan on Twitter at @JuanSVas and URBAN TxT at @URBANTxT.

Meet Cíbola: South Side Chicago's Innovation Center Fueling Diversity in Tech Innovation

Fresh off 54 hours of startup ideation via Startup Weekend Santa Maria, the excitement and energy still remains. Questions arise as to how we can keep the momentum going in the area of moving viable ideas forward. Enter Cíbola, a prime example of a focused collective effort aimed at helping drive the number of everyday innovators. The Rainforest by Victor W. Hwang and Greg Horowitt identifies several important aspects of the 'Innovation Funnel' including:

• Ideas
• People
• Entrepreneurs
• Organizations
• Coordinating Infrastructure

Cíbola, founded by Mahrinah von Schlegel and Emile Cambry, Jr., is an interesting example of coordinating infrastructure focused on launching new ideas and lasting companies of all kinds in South Side Chicago.

Cíbola is a hub for startups innovation, collaboration and creativity in Pilsen. Our mission is to help Chicagoans become everyday innovators, solve complex challenges, promote diversity and create a community of support for all of us to build our dreams. Cíbola is dedicated to building companies of all kinds, with a focus on tech entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and growing both Pilsen and Chicago's entrepreneur communities.

About Pilsen
Just three miles from downtown, Pilsen has been a port-of-entry community for more than 130 years. The eastern section of Pilsen has attracted been home to artists and galleries for more than 20 years. This arts district, along with the expansion of the nearby University of Illinois at Chicago and is less than five minutes from the Illinois Institute of Technology and Depaul University’s downtown campus.

Why Now?
The Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) reports that less than one percent of venture capital dollars invested annually has been directed to the country’s 5.8 million minority business owners, who represent 29 percent of all businesses in America. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of minority-owned firms increased 46 percent, compared to 18 percent for all U.S. firms. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2002 and 2007, the number of people employed at minority-owned businesses jumped 27 percent, while job growth for non-minority-owned firms increased less than one percent. The MBDA asserts that closing the funding gap between minority-and non-minority-owned startups, based on the share of the adult minority population, would add $2.5 trillion to the economic output of the U.S. and create 11.8 million new jobs.

Cíbola, a coworking space, aims to create an intimate, engaging environment for entrepreneurs to learn actual lessons from actual experiences. It’s hard to do that with 3,000 people spread out in a giant auditorium at a keynote full of theory and fluff. What we need is an environment of accelerated and directed effort towards product and idea development.

Starting in the mid to late 2000s, hackathons became significantly more widespread, and began to be increasingly viewed by companies and venture capitalists as a way to quickly develop new software technologies, and to locate new areas for innovation and funding. Some major companies were born from these hackathons, such as GroupMe, which began as a project at a hackathon at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 conference; in 2011 it was acquired by Skype for $85 million. The software PhoneGap began as a project at the iPhoneDevCamp (later renamed iOSDevCamp) in 2008; the company whose engineers developed PhoneGap, Nitobi, refocused itself around PhoneGap, and Nitobi was bought by Adobe in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

We need more spaces like Cíbola and innovators to help set the tone for ongoing ideation and exciting entrepreneurship.

Learn more by supporting Cíbola on Facebook and Twitter.

NORTEC Collective and Interesante.com Composing New Technology Tune.

NORTEC collective and Interesante.com composing new technology tune.

Mexico is experiencing an economic renaissance. The country's explosive growth has fueled a new wave of technology startups that are betting on the Mexican market. Interesante.com is one that has been able to fuse culture and technology into a service that allows users to publish, share and discover millions of interests in Spanish and English.

Interesante users are a highly mobile crowd. To support this, we are regularly releasing improved versions of Interesante for iPhone and Interesante for mobile web. Our users can explore different categories, create collections and get recommendations.

Colors, sounds, location, content and type, play a crucial role in the recommendations we serve users and our highly sophisticated algorithms are making this happen. The algorithms work diligently in the background and simplify the user’s actions.  We show our users the best content as fast as we possibly can.

Discovering new musical tastes through video

NORTEC Collective, a collective of avant-garde artists in electronic music lead by Ramón Amezcua (Bostich) and Pepe Mogt (Fussible) and twice Grammy nominated artists, are now part of the group of advisors to Interesante. NORTEC collective provides the artistic point of view and opens the doors for up and coming artists to be a crucial part of the discovery engines of the future, where the crowd discovers the hidden gems in platforms like Interesante. Video is key in the discovery of new artists and music and we are committed to taking video discovery to a new level. Interesante has integrated YouTube’s API, enabling video content recommendations

NORTEC and Interesante are working to understand the needs of musicians and solve the problem of how to be discovered among a sea of noise.  Interesante wants to let artists and musicians find their core audience and increase the initial engagement by bringing their music directly to them.

Interesante, Inc.
Menlo Park, CA
(650)-799-1592
prensa@interesante.com