As announced yesterday in Mashable, the Teens in Tech Incubator program will take place over the course of eight and a half weeks during the summer of 2011.

Teens ages 13 to 19 are encouraged to participate in what I think of as summer camp for learning entrepreneurship and building products.  You must be local to the San Francisco Bay Area to apply (for now) and teams must have at least one developer who can code the project at hand.  Finding kids to participate in the program might sound daunting, but Teens in Tech has existed for 3 years now and has the ability to draw young entrepreneurs.

The application deadline for the program is March 18th, so if you know a young aspiring entrepreneur make sure to pass it on so they can register in time.  The program runs June 20th through August 10th, and culminates with a demo day.

Remember when Twitter was taking off, and there was a lot of debate about the importance of following back some % of your followers… and not following disproportionately more or less than were following you? It was an interesting way of gauging influence, or desperation for followers in a lot of cases. It also became a useful way for identifying spammers.

Are Quora Answers the New Twitter Followers?

With Quora taking off (yes I’m addict), I’ve been getting a huge influx of followers and I’ve been trying to figure out how to follow people back. On each peson’s profile you get a little bit of data about how they’re using Quora – including three things that are really useful:

1. # of Answers
2. # of Mentions
3. # of Questions

I listed those in the order of which are most important to me.  The way I think about it, answering a question is the most time consuming thing you can do on Quora and suggests real engagement.  Mentions aren’t much work on the part of the user, but are harder to come by (mostly famous people seem to have these right now). Number of questions is least important to me, afterall it is easy to ask a question.  You also don’t get much “credit” for asking good questions in Quora (yet).

I wonder how long until Klout is using this metric to help evaluate how influential various people are in social media.

Oh and btw, check out my ANSWERS on Quora, some of them could easily be a blog post.

Now that the holidays are over, I’ve got a whole lot going on at work.  Today our newest developer evangelist @rahims started, so now we’re up to 6 on my team and I’ve still got open headcount for another developer evangelist and a marketing manager.  If you or someone you know would be a good fit, please apply!

I spent the past two weeks up in the Pacific Northwest at my parent’s house in Kingston most of the time, and in Woodinville to see my inlaws as well.  We spent most of the time getting my parents up to speed on their new Mac products (Dad got an iPad and iPod, Mom got an iMac) as well as watching FOX News, fitting puzzles, reading, and eating at the local bar.  It was a very relaxing vacation, I got through hundreds of emails and worked quite a bit.

In other happy family news, my brother and sister-in-law few to Ethiopia on New Year’s Eve to finally get their adopted baby girl Isabella.

Upcoming Goodness

Seattle 1/6 – 1/9

Thursday night I fly up to Seattle to spend Friday meeting with folks I’ve been missing, Saturday is the board meeting with Startup Weekend, and Sunday is brunch at my favorite spot Lola with the wonderful Jennifer Cabala before heading home.

Speaking to Code for America Fellows 1/10

I’ll be sharing my experiences with building community among developers for the Twilio cloud communications platform.  The mission of Code for America (from their website):

Code for America helps city governments become more transparent, connected and efficient by connecting the talents of cutting-edge web developers with people who deliver city services and want to embrace the transformative power of the web to achieve more impact with less money.

500Startups + Startup2Startup Holiday Party 1/13

Yep, gonna be fun to see everyone again.

Hosting Lean Startup Machine @ Twilio HQ 1/14 – 1/16

That’s right, the Lean Startup Machine is taking place at Twilio, so we’ll be around all weekend hanging out and learning about how to apply the lean startup methodology to building a business.  If you’ve attended Startup Weekend you might recognize the format.  Pitches on Friday, along with networking and speakers.  After that, a weekend of working on you MVP (minimum viable product) followed by presentations and judging on Sunday afternoon.  It’s a fun time, and we’d love to see you there.

1/19 – USV Portfolio Companies Holiday Party @ Twilio HQ

Should be fun, we’re hosting.

Wordcamp PHX 2011 – Phoenix, AZ 1/28 – 1/30

I’ll be speaking at Wordcamp Phoenix about engagement in online communities.

A few more pictures from my parent’s house – the sky there is beautiful in the winter with the low angle sunlight.  I still can’t believe I took these with my iPhone.

While we were in Woodinville to visit my inlaws, we drove by our house. Our tenants must be loving it, because they did an incredible job decorating it for Christmas.