MaRS

A fight for a piece of the booming cupcake industry?

Sugar and spice and everything nice might describe cupcakes themselves, but the exploding cupcake industry is anything but.  Just in time for holiday baking madness, the New York Times profiles cutthroat cupcake entrepreneurs, who won’t even disclose their profitability for fear of giving an edge to rival enterprises.

Just how big is the cupcake business?  One market research firm foresees a 20% increase in US cupcake sales over the next five years.  Here in Canada, food and beverage processing is the country’s third-largest industry, with bakeries representing the largest sub-sector.

Here’s the round-up of the week in the newsfeeds. Below I highlight my favourite articles of the week from each category.

Today’s Top Pick – “Congress Agrees to Fund All $50m of Social Innovation Fund“.  Find out more under Social Innovation and entrepreneurship.

Here’s the round-up of the week in the newsfeeds. Below I highlight my favourite articles of the week from each category.

Today’s Top Pick – “Canada reaches milestone as wind energy now produced in every province“. Find out more under Cleantech.

The INDEX:Award claims to be the world’s “biggest design award” program with a total annual prize value of 500,000 euros.  Sponsored by the Denmark-based INDEX: organization, the award recognizes excellence in “design to improve life” – in five categories: body, home, work, play and community.

For my first degree, I majored in marketing, so I figured I was well equipped for the challenges that lay ahead when I joined a software start-up as a product manager for a portfolio of financial software products. However, I quickly discovered that marketing software is something entirely different than marketing soap and detergent – which is what they taught at my business school.

So when I was asked by MaRS to lecture on technology marketing for “CIBC presents Entrepreneurship 101″ on November 25th, I immediately thought about the things I wish I’d known about technology marketing when I first started out in the field of technology.