Congratulations to Frank Bien and Lloyd Tabb, from Looker on being awarded the Men of the Year at the 2019 Santa Cruz County Chamber Awards.

Congratulation to Stephen Blum on being awarded the Community Impact Award at the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership’s 5th Annual State of the Region event on Oct 25th, 2019.

Drew Meyer is almost certainly the only Amazon executive who got his start in tech after being laid low by an illness in the Amazon Rainforest. Here he tells that story, and a better one about the role the seminal Unix company Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) played in bringing him to town.

To view Men of the Year, go to: Men of the Year (sorry for the redirect!)

Over the next 6 weeks, we will produce a series of articles comparing the cost of starting and growing a business in Santa Cruz versus the Silicon Valley, or San Francisco. 

UCSC’s Student Creativity and Entrepreneurial Empowerment aka SCEE was awarded a 5 digit grant from the Board of Opportunity Fund to expand its programs. SCEE was founded by a diverse group of students who are passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship. Their mission is to bring more students into the world of entrepreneurship.

Nina Simon, the long-time Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History has been awarded the world renowned Ashoka Fellows Social Innovators Award. This prestigious award goes to a select few social entrepreneurs for their innovative ideas that transform society.

Capital One announced on Tuesday, October 22, new limited-time welcome bonus offers for Capital One® Spark® Cash Credit Card and Capital One® Spark® Miles Credit Card holders. Plus Capital One customers with travel rewards cards can earn elevated rewards on hotel and rental cars booked through Capital One Travel℠.

Thank you to Mayor Martine Watkins for coming to the Santa Cruz Works New Tech: The Impossible Possible event earlier this month.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Santa Cruz Works Company Spotlight Breakfast at Looker. And thank you to Looker of course for hosting us. What a great morning of networking and connecting the Santa Cruz tech community

Doug Harr will present at the November 6th Santa Cruz Works New Tech: Demystifying the Cloud and Big Data. But wait, Halloween is just around the corner. A special Halloween treat for all.

Among countless software tools that claim to make life easier for businesses, only few are both easy to use and deliver concrete results. Hubspot’s CRM, offered with a SCW Partnership at an unprecedented 90% discount, at $400 opposed to $4000, is true to its claims and enables you, a business owner to optimize your processes and grow your business.

SANTA CRUZ, CA - October 17, 2019 - Today Santa Cruz Works announces a new board member: Tonée Picard. Picard is the EVP/Chief Development Officer at Bay Federal Credit Union. She has been involved in the Santa Cruz community for over 30-years, including a long stint in the technology industry. Picard has direct responsibility for the credit union’s strategic planning, information technology, marketing, human resources, and facilities business units.

On October 2, Marc Randolph (1st CEO of Netflix) came to our Santa Cruz Works New Tech: The Impossible Possible event to talk about his new book - That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea. This fireside chat was hosted by Drew Myer from Amazon.

U.S. antitrust enforcers have started an in-depth review of Google’s $2.6 billion planned acquisition of a data analytics company, a further sign of greater scrutiny on big technology companies, according to people familiar with the situation.

Paystand, the fastest growing commercial payments platform, today announced it has appointed four globally recognized Fintech Pioneers from Fiserv, PayPal, and Visa to its Fintech Advisory Council. The new council comes on the heels of a record-breaking year for Paystand

Musician’s BASS, the startup providing digital tools for musician's careers has gained more and more momentum. As funding pours in and the beta launch date approaches, founder Aliza Hava provides an update.

In 2014, TalentLMS conducted a gamification survey to examine how gamified elements change the state of training. In 2018, our gamification stats focused on productivity, motivation, and gamification for employee engagement. This year, the TalentLMS survey has covered both topics.

Last week, we asked readers if they had knew the backstory on the tragic loss of Bump: a smartphone app that allowed iOS and Android users to exchange virtual business cards by simply bumping their phones together. And we offered a free pass to Startup Grind Global Conference 2020 to the person who had the answer. David Kim rose to the challenge...

There are some facts about Santa Cruz that many folks still find surprising: that the first words spoken from the moon were spoken into Plantronics’ Santa Cruz-built headset; that Felipe Kahn invented the cellphone camera here; that this is a capital of the digital biotech revolution. Read full details about the historic merger…

UC Santa Cruz has received an anonymous gift of $8.5 million to support the Genomics Institute’s pioneering interdisciplinary research. The gift, which will be made in annual installments over the next ten years, establishes the Healthier World Fund for the UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute.