The Green Frog from Silicon Valley

From educated entrepreneur to innovating in education: do you know Geoff Ralston?

The word “education” in California is usually associated with teacher unions who supported the election of Jerry Brown against the former CEO of eBay, Meg Whitman.   Innovation in education seems to be an oxymoron. Actually, the most viewed TED Talk today with 10 million hits is from Sir Ken Robinson who contends that schools kill creativity.

A number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are trying to help schools do the contrary. And the trend is starting to hit the media with the recent inclusion of Salman Khan among Time’s 100 most influential people. Geoff Ralston (picture above) is a business angel who would like to see more education start-ups popping out of garages. After he sold his last company to Apple in 2009, he launched Imagine K12 along with two other start-up veterans who believe that technology can transform education.

Angels to women: do you know Brigitte Baumann and Stephanie Hanbury-Brown?

Despite the rise of women executives at the head of some of the largest US corporations and most powerful foreign countries, there are still few women entrepreneurs in high-tech. There are even fewer women investing in early-stage companies. Not that they lack the smarts or the courage to start a business; we all have experienced these qualities in many women in our lives. The difficult choices needed to balance family life and a career, as well as the limited vocations in the scientific field, are the most common explanations.

For the International Day of Women, we decided to talk to two women who started a business angel network. Brigitte Baumann is the founder of Go Beyond in Geneva, and she is the President of the Board of EBAN, the European trade association for Business Angels and Seed Funds. Stephanie Hanbury-Brown has been a Managing Director at Golden Seeds since its inception in the New York City in 2004. They accepted to share their experience, and allowed us to go beyond stereotypes. They are, in the true sense of the word, angels to other women.

From social justice to lighting society: do you know Warner Philips?

Lemnis Lighting made news again this week by announcing the first LED bulb light under $5. The company was started in 2006 by a new kind of cleantech incubator in the Netherlands called Tendris. It was the first company to go after the consumer lighting market with an LED replacement bulb available then for $50. It got quickly kuddos from governmental organizations in the Netherlands and the Clinton Foundation, and Lemnis has since shipped more than 5 million Pharox lights. I sat down on wednesday with the co-founder of Lemnis Lighting and Managing Director of its US operations, Warner Philips.

As many media outlets often pick up, Warner is the great grand-son of the co-founder of the electronic consumer giant Philips. I was expecting to hear the story of the Philips family offspring seeking fortune with cleantech innovation. What I got was much more interesting: the journey of a lawyer hungry for social justice, who later reconciled his passion for design with his high-tech heritage to make the world a better place.