Tamale Lady Needs Crowdsourcing for Restaurant

The Tamale Lady is fundraising to get her very own restaurant open.

The Tamale Lady isn’t a bar hopper anymore.

Instead, she’s looking for the public to help her turn her business into a brick-and-mortar operation.

Virginia Ramos was the Mission District tamale-seller extraordinaire whose late-night visits to watering holes, pubs and bars bearing the cornhusks filled with food were a San Francisco staple — right up until she was forced to stop selling her tamales from an insulated cooler due to health regulations.

That ended a 20-year run for Ramos, 60, who started selling tamales in an effort to make extra money for her seven children, SF Weekly reported.

Ramos needed a commercial kitchen to continue her tamale trade, the Department of Public Health ruled, which means an honest-to-goodness restaurant location.

Now she needs $155,000 — and your help. She’s launched an Indiegogo.com account and is taking donations.

No tamales included — for now.

Crowdfunding Raises $1 Million for Asteroid Miners’ Public Space Telescope

More than 11,000 supporters donated to Planetary Resources’ asteroid-hunting, publicly accessible telescope program

The world’s first selfie-snapping, asteroid-hunting, public space telescope is $1 million closer to its launch into Earth orbit, having surpassed its initial crowdfunding goal.

Planetary Resources’ online fundraising campaign soared past the seven-figure mark Wednesday evening (June 19), green-lighting the asteroid-mining company’s plans to deploy a publicly accessible space telescope in 2015.

More than 11,000 people pledged at least $10 to the project, which promises to not only capture images of its supporters’ selected astronomical targets with the Arkyd space telescope, but also photograph their submitted self-portraits (“Space Selfies”) on a digital screen mounted on the outside of the small satellite.

“Thank you everyone who pushed it over the $1 million mark!” Peter Diamandis, Planetary Resources’ co-founder, wrote on Kickstarter, the website that is hosting the crowdfunding campaign.

It took 20 days to raise the $1 million. Pledges can still be made for another 10 days, until 10 p.m. EDT on June 30 (0200 GMT July 1).

Planetary Resources intends to mine near-Earth asteroids for resources such as water and precious metals, with the ultimate goal of helping expand humanity’s footprint out into the solar system. The company has designed its Arkyd-100 space telescope to search for potential target space rocks.

“Our primary goal has been to build technology enabling us to prospect and mine asteroids,” the company wrote on its website promoting the funding campaign. “We’ve spent the last year making great leaps in the development of these technologies. These advancements have presented us with the opportunity to engage in another passion of our team: to make space exploration accessible to everyone.”

Path to $1 million

Planetary Resources launched the crowdfunding drive on May 29 during an event held at The Museum in Flight in Seattle.

For just $25, the company offered to upload a photo of the backer’s choice to the Arkyd, display it on a small digital screen mounted on the exterior of the satellite and then capture it in a photo with the Earth’s horizon looming in the background. The “Space Selfie” promises to be the first orbital “photo booth,” delivering digital images (or prints at higher pledge levels) to the supporters.

For pledges beginning at $99, supporters’ funds contribute to students’ and scientists’ research using the Arkyd. For $200, backers can opt to point the telescope at an astronomical target of their choosing. A $5,000 pledge buys the chance to identify a school, university or museum to receive observation time.

At the top level of support, $10,000 or more, backers are offered tours of Planetary Resources’ facilities, invitations to the Arkyd launch, the opportunity to etch their name on the space telescope and the chance to name one of the asteroids that the Arkyd is expected to discover.

Planetary Resources also lists “add-ons” to the pledges, including T-shirts and greeting cards printed with supporters’ astronomical or “Space Selfie” images, an Arkyd embroidered mission patch and a half-scale model of the space telescope.

Bolstered by media reports, endorsements by “Star Trek” actors and by museum directors, as well as the support of about 70 social-media evangelists who the company calls “Vanguards,” Planetary Resources’ Kickstarter campaign raised more than $200,000 on its first day.

Crowdfunded babies, hashtags for blizzards, watching Game of Thrones on your iPhone

The Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit, a two-day conference to showcase the latest and greatest in entrepreneurial ventures and technological innovation, kicked off Monday in Half Moon Bay. The conference, which goes through Tuesday, is one of those rare events that bring the big Silicon Valley players, including executives from Facebook and Twitter, together with political leaders such as Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, mathematicians and startup founders. They explore the big ideas and companies of the day that are reshaping retail, media, mobile, science and technology industries — and potentially our lives.

Here’s a rundown of a few of those next big things:

• GitHub – the open-source software site and code-sharing service from San Francisco could be the opposite of Yahoo, in that its office of Fourth Street is often a lonely place. About 70 percent of GitHub employees don’t live in the Bay Area, and those who do live in the neighborhood aren’t required to come to the office, said GitHub Chief Information Officer Scott Chacon. Flexibility, he said, is part of being a great entrepreneur. (Yahoo, by comparison, recently banned working from home.)

GitHub landed a whopping $100 million investment last year from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz . Already, GitHub has earned the reputation as the go-to resource for coding and one of the most powerful social networks for developers.

• Crowdfunding – online and social fundraising has been used to fund the creative pursuits artists and musicians, provide the seed funding for a company and raise money for a noble cause. But did you know that crowdfunding helped make a baby? So said Slava Rubin, founder and CEO of Indiegogo, an international crowdfunding site with headquarters in San Francisco. Rubin told the audience that one enterprising couple raised thousands of dollars on the site to pay for fertility treatments. The procedure was successful, and they recently had the first crowdfunded baby.

• HBO GO – Launched in 2011, HBO GO lets viewers watch the network’s shows on their laptops, tablets, smartphones and Xbox . The service, provided through an app, has a hefty monthly subscription fee (while Hulu and other internet TV providers offer free streaming) but media experts said on Monday that HBO’s move to the app store could help the company avoid the fate of obsolescence that awaits most other cable networks.

• Aereo TV – The internet TV provider may face ongoing legal hurdles, but Aereo satisfies consumers’ growing need to watch whatever TV they want, whenever they want.  Cable companies, watch out.  Aereo is poised to upend the TV industry as we know it.

• Mobile ticketing – StubHub, the online ticketing marketplace owned by eBay, is pushing for more venues to accept mobile ticketing. Most consumers want to keep their tickets on their smartphone, but because the technology at concert halls and sporting stadiums hasn’t caught up, many consumers have to make an extra trip to FedEx to print their tickets, said StubHub president Chris Tsakalakis.

Technology in stadiums across the globe is lacking – there are only about five stadiums in the world with decent wireless, said Oliver Slipper, CEO of Perform Group. But Silicon Valley is about to lead the pack. The new 49ers stadium in Santa Clara will have a terabyte of bandwidth, making it one of the most wired venues in the world.

• Weather – real-time data from social networks about weather and road conditions could help prevent accidents and keep people safe during storms. Companies such as The Weather Company are figuring this out. CEO David Kenny said he was pushing for earlier naming of blizzards so that Twitter users could hashtag the name of the snowstorm in a tweet. The hashtags (#) could then be used to track the storm’s progress.

• Cybersecurity – If you think your social security number and credit card information hasn’t already been compromised, you’re living a lie, said Mark McLaughlin, chairman CEO of Palo Alto Networks. Companies are trying to play defense from not only a troublemaking teenage hacker, but also potential threats from foreign governments and terrorist organizations. Basically, everyone is worried, no one has the answer.

“The anxiety is very high about the threats out there,” McLaughlin said.