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Whatever entrepreneurial renaissance is happening, there is still a need to encourage more women and minorities to climb on the bandwagon.

Tamar-Melissa Huggins decided to tackle this issue first-hand after watching an episode of the Black in America television show that featured the NewME Accelerator, which supports minority entrepreneurs in the United States.

Inspired, Ms. Huggins created the Toronto-based Driven Accelerator Group, a digital startup accelerator for businesses led by minorities women, African-Canadians and South Asians.

Driven Accelerator was created to bridge the gap we see in the tech community when it comes to minority founders, said its founder and chief executive officer in an interview.

I feel we are offering something unique and different because we are trying to provide exposure to minority founders, and encourage minorities to start the next Facebook or the next Twitter. I have always had a passion to help other people when it comes to business, and I felt starting the accelerator was the best thing to do.

Driven will operate a 12-week program that will provide five companies with guidance on business and prototype development and the preparation of a pitch for a demo day that will cap things off.

Ms. Huggins said she is interested in people who have created mobile computing, Web-based and cloud computing startups. Driven will take a 4-per-cent equity stake in each company that is part of the program.

These are people who understand their specific market and have a prototype, but need the assistance on the business end of it, said Ms. Huggins, who has a public relations and digital background.

Each company will also receive assistance from a team of mentors that includes Ceridian Dayforce president David Ossip, technology journalist Amber MacArthur, Social Media Group founder Maggie Fox and marketing executive April Dunford. A mentor will make a presentation to a company about a particular topic, as well as participate in an informal dinner series during which entrepreneurs will have the chance to ask questions and share their opinions.

Driven, which will be housed at the Foundery co-working space in downtown Toronto, has not raised money yet to provide financial help to companies that join the accelerator.

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Digital startup accelerator targets minorities, women

Read the second in this series here.

Razorfish founders Jeffrey Dachis (right), who studied ballet, and his childhood friend Craig Kanarick (left), a tech whiz who had recently graduated from MIT Media Lab, plucked the digital agency name out of the dictionary. (Yes, its a real fish.)

In four years, Razorfish exploded from a pair of 27-year-olds laboring in a New York apartment in 1995, to more than 2,000 employees and about $250 million in revenue. More than just a hive of techies, Razorfish and its Silicon Alley digs were considered cool and urban. Kanarick remembers the office as a place you could stay up late and rollerblade around while inventing the future. The hip agency and outspoken CEO Dachis quickly became lightning rods for both fans and foes of the Web "revolution."

Razorfish relished the attention, opening offices across the U.S. and snapping up other interactive agencies, including Spray in Scandinavia. In 1997, Omnicom bought a large minority stake. And during 1999, the agency went public, raising $48 million at $16 a share.

When revenue fell off the cliff in 2000-2001, the pair - not yet 35 - was forced to resign.

Kanarick later co-founded a retail marketing studio and digital design lab for architecture firm Rockwell Group. This year, he unveiled New York Mouth, an online store for local artisanal foods. For his part, Dachis, 45, established the Dachis Group in 2008. The Austin-based social media marketing agency is hosting a social business summit in Shanghai in mid-April.

Photo: Jeffrey Dachis and Craig Kanarick (center left and center right) at the Razorfish/Plastic merger party (with Shane Ginsberg, left, and Len Sellers, right) in San Francisco, 1998.

ClickZ: What in the zeitgeist of the '90s moved you to start a Web services outfit?

Dachis: I was all about the expression of ideas through the arts, like dance, theater, photography and magazines. But distribution of these expressions was controlled by a few wealthy institutions. We saw that digital changed all that, distribution became cheap and it was democratized. Frankly, I sucked at creating those [art] forms. But I saw how I could be part of distributing them digitally.

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Digital Mad Men: Razorfish Co-founder Jeffery Dachis

The 30-second pre-roll is the blink tag of our era. It's the ad format that drives users crazy, and it's just not right for Web or mobile. Here's how to fix video advertising and make online video profitable for everyone.

Don't hate them because they're 30 seconds long.

Video is moving to the Web in enormous leaps; the promise of online video seems to be at our doorstep. Millions are cutting the cord, beloved television shows are returning through the seemingly divine intervention of online distribution, and people are consuming Web and mobile video in increasingly staggering numbers.

But all that video consumption is saddled with a burden that's keeping it from reaching its full potential: the ads just haven't caught up.

You all know the problem I'm talking about, and yes, you've seen it on our own site -- on videos hosted by me, and probably even the video embedded in this blog post. You want to watch a video on the Web, and before you can get to that video, you're faced with a 30-second ad that you can't fast-forward or skip.

In some cases, the content itself may be only a couple of minutes long, so the ad represents a huge time commitment relative to the length of the clip. And before you can move on to the next two-minute video, you might have to watch the same ad all over again. Result: you're angry at the publisher, you're angry at the advertiser, and everyone's brand takes a hit. The publisher and the advertiser haven't made an ad "impression" -- they've made an enemy.

We used to refuse to take 30-second ads in the earliest days of CNET TV, but even with 15-second ads, there are issues: the biggest one is repetition. If you watch three or four videos online, or watch a day of live programming like our CES coverage or the Holiday Help Desk marathons we used to do, you'll see the same ad three or four or 20 times. The result: brand rage.

I've been producing and hosting digital video for almost seven years now, and in that time, our feedback inboxes have constantly been full of complaints about the duration, frequency, and redundancy of ads, and believe me, I feel your pain daily. I'm a consumer, too -- in fact, I probably consume a lot more CNET TV than most people, and it's not like we have a magical in-house mechanism for skipping ads! I feel it when I watch YouTube, Hulu, video on other sites like Yahoo and CNN; virtually everywhere video appears online.

The question of digital video advertising is especially relevant now. According to Comscore, Americans watched an all-time high of more than 8.3 billion video ads in March, as they consumed almost 37 billion videos--some 21 hours per month of online video content.

The issue will only get more acute as video goes mobile -- and it is going mobile, and quickly. Cisco estimates that 70 percent of the world's mobile data traffic will be video by 2016, and it was already 52 percent of traffic at the end of 2011.

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For digital video to live, the 30-second pre-roll ad must die

By Glenys Roberts

PUBLISHED: 17:57 EST, 22 April 2012 | UPDATED: 19:50 EST, 22 April 2012

As a unit of currency it may not be worth much, but do we really want to bid it farewell? Weve long since seen the demise of the farthing and the much-loved 12-sided threepenny bit, but now theres a campaign to consign the penny to history, too.

No matter that there are more than 11billion in circulation, a growing number of Britons think we can do without one of the oldest coins in our history.

Canada has already ditched its cent (known as a penny) following similar moves in Australia and New Zealand to abolish their low-denomination coins. The Canadian finance minister said: The penny is a currency without any currency. Financial institutions face increasing costs for handling, storing and transporting pennies. Over time, the pennys burden to the economy has grown relative to its value as a means of payment.

Treasure the penny: The biggest argument for keeping the penny is financial. Its existence helps to keep prices down

With the U.S. and Russia toying with the idea of doing away with fiddly cents and kopeks (one-hundredth of a rouble and the equivalent of our penny), should we follow suit?

Battle has already joined between the modernisers and the traditionalists.

On one side of this great currency divide is the Federation of Small Businesses, which claims shopkeepers hate the penny. They say it clutters up tills and forces staff to make unnecessary trips to bank bags of low-value coins.

They point out that the pennies clogging up our purses and wallets and rubbing holes in our pockets are worth less than one-twelfth of their value when they were introduced in 1971 (then, they bought the equivalent of 12p).

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They¿re fiddly, virtually worthless and weigh down your pockets. Now a radical idea is gaining currency: Should we the ...