Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual conferences, BlogHer is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential customers.

The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.

It has empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and Jen Yates from CakeWrecks, to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.

"I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country."

What's most impressive about the enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million. They're expecting to turn a profit this year.

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By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Bringing together a network of 21 million women for its annual conferences, BlogHer is an online community of female bloggers who are fixing to translate their niche posts into income by connecting advertisers with potential customers.

The site draws in 20 million unique visitors a month, and its articles, culled from a network of more than 2,500 blogs, are syndicated on sites from iVillage to Yahoo! to BravoTV.com.

It has empowered some women, like Elise Bauer of Simply Recipes and Jen Yates from CakeWrecks, to turn their once-hobbies into a legitimate profession. One of the company's biggest gets was when Michelle Obama penned a blog post for them in 2008 during the presidential campaign.

"I’m excited to be posting on BlogHer," the first lady-to-be wrote. "Not only because blogging is something I’ve actually been able to beat my daughters to, but because it gives me the opportunity to tell you a little bit about them, my husband, myself, and our experiences traveling all over this great country."

What's most impressive about the enterprise is that after two years of bootstrapping, Stone, Page, and Des Jardins are one of the few women-founded teams to have secured three rounds of venture funding, totaling $15.5 million. They're expecting to turn a profit this year.

Click here for the full story:
By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

A fresh graduate of the University of Minnesota in 2006, Leah Culver wanted to use her computer-science degree to forge a career in programming.

With empty pockets, this future entrepreneur drew upon her creativity instead: Culver decided to sell ad space on her yet-to-be-realized laptop.

The idea worked, and at $50 per square inch of ad space, Culver got her shiny new MacBook, onto which she laser etched all the ads for the real estate she sold. Culver’s self-starter attitude led her to become co-founder and lead developer of Pownce, a blogging and social-networking site that was shut down in November 2008 when it was acquired by Six Apart, the company behind a handful of popular blogging platforms.

"Starting a business was more about the freedom to create my own software than about being an entrepreneur," says Culver. "The idea for Pownce came from wanting to make it easier to share fun stuff with friends."

She's trying that again with her newest project, building LeafyChat.com, an Internet chatting application.

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By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast

Everyone enjoys a little bit of food porn, which is why Foodspotting makes so much sense.

The company is the brainchild of Alexa Andrzejewski, who, upon returning from trips to Japan and Korea, wanted a way to discover where to find the dishes she had enjoyed abroad, like okonomiyaki and tteokbokki.

"My initial idea was actually not Internet-based—I wanted to create a book—a Field Guide to Food, that would essentially be like a bird guide, but with pictures of food and basic facts about the foods." 

If influence can be measured in Twitter followers, Soraya Darabi's is certainly on the rise. The 26-year-old spearheaded The New York Times' push into social-media marketing.

Times columnist Nicholas Kristof credits Darabi with his impressive count of Twitter followers and Facebook friends. And after winning the Gray Lady a top prize at the INMA awards in 2009, Darabi recently made the cover of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in business, falling between the likes of Lada Gaga (No. 1) and Andrey Ternovskiy (No. 100), the teen founder of Chatroulette.

Darabi left the Times in late 2009 to become product lead at drop.io, a real-time online project-sharing, collaboration, and presentation service. Darabi graduated from Georgetown in 2005 with a degree in English literature, but says she'd "give anything to go back to college and double major in computer science." "Women are simply not taught to think technology and programming are cool and worth exploring until it may be too late," she says.

So how does this savvy non-engineer get a leg up in the Internet world? By harnessing the power of her social network, of course. "It's all a game of online telephone, and I'm tapped into a network that probably hears the message first."

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By Joyce C. Tang
The Daily Beast