There is something to be said to striking when the opportunity is there. For startups and new companies, the best way to get noticed is by doing something daring and bold that everyone will want to pay attention to. In the technology industry, that means getting on stage and demoing your product to the audience in the hopes that there’s some appeal to the masses. And quite frankly, one of the best places to get your product involved with has to be anything TechCrunch is involved in. Over the past few years, the events put on by one of the industry’s leading publications has promote some of the most popular startups that are used in the world today: Mint.com (acquired by Intuit), Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), RedBeacon (acquired by Home Depot), GetAround, Shaker, and now Uberconference.

It seems that one of the most known things about winning at a TechCrunch event is that it will grant any company instant celebrity status–almost like the publication is a “king-maker” where mere-minutes after touting the success and accolades of a startup, the company goes into overdrive and reaps instant benefits to the news. The track record speaks for itself…after all that notoriety (in a good way), companies are stepping out into the world and entering their beta phase much wiser and with more interest in being funded. And for the lucky few that have successfully navigated their ways through the maze of competition at a TechCrunch event, the future rewards are immeasurable. But don’t take my word for it…let’s look at one recent winner: Uberconference.

As a regular attendee to the ZURBSoapBox speaker series, I had a special kind of curiosity around last Friday’s guests: the Winklevoss twins–made famous or perhaps infamous through their historic interaction around the founding of Facebook. Having seen the likes of Ron Conway, Ev Williams, Aaron Levie among others, I have to admit the Winklevoss’ did not exactly bring the same kind of cachet, but still attracted an overflowing audience eager to hear the straight scoop.

At first, you can’t help notice just how huge these guys are. Think Michelangelo’s statue of David and you get the idea of the kind of imposing figure these guys cut. But when I first met them and shook their hands, they really came off as genuine, regular guys, easily approachable and generally happy to be in front of their first Silicon Valley crowd for an informal chat.

Brace yourselves Charlotte…the world is coming to you this week in honor of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. Election season is in full swing and the Republicans have already nominated their choices: former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan accepted the nominations just last week at the Republican National Convention. And it was definitely a rather interesting convention…perhaps one of the strangest thing that could have emerged from there was when renowned and celebrated actor and director Clint Eastwood took the stage to introduce the Republican nominee and addressed an empty chair with an imaginary figure befitting President Obama. That  itself wound up creating a brand new meme called #Eastwooding, and even got Obama involved in the whole thing. So now that the Republicans have had their say, this coming week is the Democrat’s turn and people must wonder what will take place–just how will the Democrats one-up the GOP?

Well, if social media has their way, the Democrats could potentially have a megastar walking into Charlotte and the Bank of America stadium where 70,000 will witness the president accept his party’s nomination. Just who could potentially overshadow the leader of the free world? Why, the Golden Girl herself: Betty White. A petition is already circulating on Change.org in order to garner enough signatures that the Democratic National Committee will see it and follow through on the request.

HerHighway.com is taking some of todays most influential women in the online communities, placing them into some of today’s top vehicles, and letting them roam the country from Los Angeles to New York to raise money for Breast Cancer awareness.

You can attend a TweetUP in one of many stops across the country and meet all the amazing women who have volunteered their time to do the drive; Race-car drivers,  Social Media GURU’s, Automotive Experts,  Foodies and Fashionistas.

The schedule is as follows:

Starting Line September 25th leave Los Angeles CA – Vegas, NV – Salt Lake City UT

September 26th leave  Salt Lake City UT – Grand Junction CO – Denver CO

September 27th leave Denver CO – Colby KS – Salina KS

September 28th Salina KS – Kansas City MO – St. Louis MO

September 29th St. Louis MO – Bloomington IL- Chicago IL

September 30th Chicago IL – Indianapolis IN (special event)

October 1st Indianapolis IN – Columbus OH – Pittsburgh PA

October 2nd Pittsburgh PA – Philadelphia PA – NYC, NY Finish Line

Here’s a glimpse at just a few of the handful of Featured Ladies for this trip:

Social Media Advisers
Ann Tran
Misty Belardo
Zipporah Sandler
Joyce Cherrier

Automotive Journalists
Christina Selter, Editor HerHighway & Host
BJ Killeen, Drivers Talk
Cathy Droz, Two for the Road
Nina Russin, Carspondent

Motorsports
Judy Stropus, Retired Indy Crew Member/JVS Enterprises
Anne Proffit, Motorsports and Automotive Journalist
Shea Holbrook, Sports Car Racing
Ashley Van Dyke, AVD Motorsports

This September, make sure you start following the hashtag #HerHighway to follow along on what these amazing women are doing.

And hey, you may even see me (Krystyl) along the way!

Make sure to follow @HerHighWay on Twitter for updates on whats going on, and even a chance to win a seat for this roadtrip!

2012 has brought the tech community a lot of surprises and news. There have been quite a few companies that have gone public in recent history, including Pandora, LinkedIn, Zynga, Facebook, and even Groupon. In Groupon’s case, the stock seemed to start off decently well, but has shockingly sputtered out of control and is now 75% down year-to-date. For the once-proud leader of the daily deals, this has been one bad case after another. With the current Groupon stock price (at the time of this writing) hovering slightly over $4.50 a share, is there any way to save the company? And since the IPO essentially failed, what does this mean to company morale and investor relations? Well with the latter, many of the early investors (pre-IPO) seemed to have already jumped ship and cut their losses. In addition to this, news broke yesterday that one of the company’s best salespeople, Jayna Cooke, just left the company to seek out a new adventure. She had been with the company since its early days in 2008 and had a tremendous impact on helping get the company to where it is today as their top producer and senior sales leader.

So what’s next in store for Ms. Cooke? Well it’s quite simple…announcing today, she’s going to be joining the team at Los Angeles-based startup, Eventup, where she’s going to be a big part of the early stage startup helping to set revenue, sales, and business development opportunities. Certainly her skills at Groupon will serve her and the team at Eventup quite well. This year alone, Eventup has made some great attempts at branching out their business nationally. The “Airbnb of event space” startup has set up their service in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, and Miami–most undoubtedly they’re going to be branching out a bit further over the next few months and they need a steady hand at the helm to really get their business plan into motion. Ms. Cooke looks to be the one that they’re going with to help lead that charge. This is the first big acquisition by Eventup since they raised $1.8 million in seed funding from a group of investors, which, ironically, included the founders of Groupon.