Helping to Launch Startup America with $150M Investment!

Today in Washington DC, IBM is unveiling a commitment to invest $150M to help fuel entrepreneurship and new business opportunities in the United States, as part of the White House-led Startup America campaign.  The investment will be used to:

• Coach and mentor startup businesses throughout the United States initiative
• Expand education, build skills and mentorship programs in collaboration with the academic and venture capital communities
• Provide skills and business opportunities to the growing community of software developers who collaborate on emerging technologies

These investments continue to the growth of our IBM Global Entrepreneur program that our team launched in 2010 and has helped thousands of startups around the globe get started in taking on the world’s toughest challenges.

As part of the Startup America program, we will collaborate with other participants to expand our ecosystem of more than 100,000 partners, more than 8 million developers and nearly 6,000 universities in programs to help develop new technologies and prepare students and developers with the skills to succeed in a global market. Additionally, we will be utilizing our five IBM Innovations Centers in the United States to provide free access to technology, education and hands-on assistance to help business partners and startups design, build, market and deliver new technologies and solutions to the country’s most difficult problems.  The 5 US IIC’s are located in Austin, Dallas, Chicago, Waltham, Mass., and San Mateo, Calif.

We are also today are launching our 2011 Skills Tour that will visit 15 college communities and universities in 10 states over the next 100 days.  Each event brings together students and professors with business, government, venture capital and non-profit leaders from the area to discuss the skills needed for leadership jobs in the 21st century.

Back to Socializing…

In light of the fact that Lotusphere is this week in Orlando, and IBM continues to see more success than ever with our social media and social business platforms from Lotus Software – it seemed like a worthy time to restart some postings for 2011!  Special thanks to my good friend Stephen Nold for pushing me along  over the holidays to get back online – he correctly guessed that my lack of posting and tweeting was due in part to trying to better balance family, work, and online time over the past few months!

Some great announcements are coming for clients and partners this week at Lotusphere – and the event kicks off with Kevin Spacey this morning – you can see him here via live broadcast!

I”ll post more as the announcements continue!  We have some exciting news coming from the White House this week too – stay tuned!