[Limor Fried] (Adafruit) Up For Entrepreneur Of 2012 Award

[Limor Fried], the brains behind Adafruit is one of the five finalists for the Entrepreneur of 2012 award in Entrepreneur magazine. We’ve always been big fans of how she chooses to run her business. Adafruit supplies open source hardware and compiles tons of great tutorials on the pieces. Not only that but they have pushed very hard to build a community that shares information and encourages others to build things, with their “ask an educator” series and the community “show and tell” that we hope to emulate at some point.

You’ll notice she’s the only engineer in the list. Not only would your vote go toward getting an engineer to win, it would also be shedding light on the open source hardware movement.

Unfortunately, the voting is being done through facebook. We know many of you will opt not to participate due to this fact. It is unfortunate that this is becoming so common. I’ll be voting though. We could use more companies like Adafruit.

56 thoughts on “[Limor Fried] (Adafruit) Up For Entrepreneur Of 2012 Award

    1. Unfortunate that these voting systems permit logins from just one source. If they allowed you to authorize from Twitter, Google and, say, LinkedIn logins too then I’m fairly certain there would be fewer complaints. Plus they would have the added benefit of tweeting (etc.) activity which is a big plus for drawing attention to the campaign.

  1. What’s on the lips of all the health conscious moms around the country? Justins Nut Butter.

    I’m sorry, i hear the product is great but couldn’t they come up with.. well something else? :)

      1. I still have an unopened container of Ben & Jerry’s homage to that in my freezer… bought it when it was available at Christmastime and the use-by date is still a ways off, so I’m saving it for a rainy day. Hope they bring it back again this Christmas. Of course, they could just make a Justin’s Nut Butter flavor instead…

    1. For me, it was when they started changing the security settings without telling anyone, AND automatically resetting options during these changes. I deleted my account during Zuck’s 60 Minutes interview.

      Good luck, [Limur]! I’d vote for ya if I could.

      1. I did. I would absolutely love to have the data they collect. I have gone so far as to create a simple webcrawler that interfaces with facebook and dumps the data into a MySQL backend.

        It isn’t even close to all the aggregated info they have on my friends and family, yet they got so mad when I told them about the project.

        The only useful thing that I have done with is is make a interconnected chart of people that eat similar foods over time and see how it trends through my tiny social network.

        Survey say: PB & J is very contagious. A close No. 2 is Olive garden. Fast food is of middling speed but dies quickly and anything cooked at home brings lots of comments but almost no action.

  2. Seriously? “Justins nut butter”? “Justin produces the most delicious nut butters”

    That’s fucking stupid as hell, I’m definitely giving my vote to adafruit.

    Nut butters, how douchey can a guy get.

  3. Not only is Ladyada the only engineer on the list, she’s the only woman in the whole contest. The ‘College Entrepreneur of the Year’ category is completely full of young men, which is pretty fluxing unbelievable if you consider how many women there are in business and science programs.

    I call sexist bullshit on Entrepreneur magazine.

  4. No disrespect to any of the finalists – but I couldnt see how they were they selected and without understanding the selection criteria I can think of many more deserving cases…

  5. Wow… a guy with a proprietary way of grinding nuts to make butter is on the same list as a biotech company researching ways to cure blinding eye diseases… and then a guy makes money ‘certifying’ fair trade? I need to start a damn non-profit, or start certifying that dust particles are in fact dust, and jump on the milk it for all its worth bandwagon.

    1. although a good idea, i’d rather call then on a 1-800 number from an anon public pay phone and tell them how i feel

      giving them my email just means they make money off of me the same as the facebook kickback and is only rewarding them the same way(money).

      and anyone that believes that “this guy” does not sell email addresses is naieve, or ignorant

      the more money they make from our private lives, the more they will do it. i will not feed them any money or help them in any way. facebook is NOT my partner and never will be. NOT ONE FRIGING CENT

      oh and i’d have to delete more spam, thus giving my email provider more ad-clicks/money.

      im not a slave, unless i get a *&$*&^%*&%* CASH cheque. so unless your going to offer me CASH, i will not follow any trails of
      “i HAVE to click this link in order to make some random company richer”

      spam might be okay if it was something i like.
      but advertisments for fake, illegal, and potentally FATAL drugs is not something i enjoy reading. and i take offence to anyone telling me i should “just get them”

      PS: any email with a fraudulent “FROM:” field in it, OR an incorrect “TO:” field is illegal in most countries and that includes this one. take note.

  6. yo yahoo! err wait, now H.A.D. is doing this too?
    will this be an everyday thing?
    stop posting nonstop articles advertising facebook!

    adafruit,
    you just lost my trust, along with redbull.
    not that i ever purchased anything from you.

    anyone accepting donations or kickbacks from facebook in exchange for every customer being tricked into signing up for facebook is not a company i will do buisness with.

    hackers hack, kit-buyers buy,
    and facebookers get booked into… facebook

    too bad this article will probably be “pinned” at the top of the page for like, days? oh its so important we couldnt be bothered to click “next page” just to read it (again?)

    whata ya gonna do in 6 months when facebook doesnt even exist? IPO fraud usually results in the servers going down permenantly.

    UNLESS CONGRESS CREATES A NEW LAW THAT MANDATES EVERYONE USE FACEBOOK MINIMUM ONCE A DAY OR RISK JAIL TIME…

    1. Uhm – why exactly did *adafruit* lose your trust over this? Limor’s not the one pushing facebook. She merely got nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year.

      If you want to be pissed of at someone, be pissed off about Entrepreneur Magazine requiring FB to vote on their poll. HAD and Limor have nothing to do with that.

      1. 1) EDIT: my bad, its that magazine i MEANT to referr to!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sorry my bad!!!
        PS: i already dont trust ANY “magazine” so ditto

        2) im also a little ticked off at HAD just for making YET ANOTHER article about the joys of facebook.

        3) i know, its “only” two facebook articles in a row(week?), but soon enough it will be everyday. just like the rest of the web. and it HAS stop!

        4) THE WEB WAS CREATED BY PEOPLE LIKE US,
        WE SHOULD DAMM WELL BE ABLE TO USE IT!!!
        (without brother-book)

    2. I fully agree that Limor deserves to win this.

      I’m just wondering – why this year, exactly? Has she been doing something recently that makes her even more awesome than last year? Or is it just that the rest of the world is only just now catching on?

    3. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot does this article have to do with the joys of facebook???

      Lady Ada and the folks at Adafruit are frigging folk heros to hackers. When they get good press, we’re all happy. In this case Entrepreneur magazine is giving her loads of good press by featuring her like this. So, HAD takes the time to point it out, and to encourage HAD-ers to vote for her. Not only would it be huge for her & her company, it would be huge for the open source cause.

      It’s Entrepreneur’s fault (and solely their fault) for running their voting through facebook. I gave it up in January and won’t have anything further to do with it, so I can’t vote. But that’s ONLY Entrepreneur’s fault. Blame them, then contact them directly. They’re not gonna spam you into oblivion just for contacting them about the way they’re running a poll.

      Take a breath dude/dudette… it’s gonna be OK.

  7. well said Vonskippy.

    I have sent an email as you advised:

    I would have liked to place my vote for Limor Fried for Entrepreneur of the year 2012, but it appears the voting is only open to those saps who believe in FB. I am not a user of facebook, and it is banned on my machines at home, so I would appreciate it if you could open a proper voting booth to allow a fair and unbiased voting arena, or alternatively place a vote for me to count for Limor Fried.
    Regards
    Jason

  8. Yeah, the FB requirement will definitely be a detriment to Limor. Especially if it requires a “facebook app” with all its attendant privacy concerns to vote.

    My work has consistently won the “Best company to work for [in my state]” when the voting was through some website built specifically for the purpose. This year however, the voting was through Facebook, and all the techies at my work were too turned off(read: didn’t want to install another FB app, if they had FB at all) to vote.

    Yeah, we didn’t win.

  9. I find it odd that people on here are so anti facebook. Adafruit, Sparkfun, Evil Mad Science, Ben Heck, Jeri Ellsworth, and most of the biggest names in the maker / hacker movement all utilize facebook to it’s fullest extent. Hell even HaD has a facebook page. So what if facebook changes settings, just pay attention and keep your stuff up to date. If you are worried about your data being stored, Google stores far more information on you than facebook ever could.

    1. “Google stores far more information on you than facebook ever could”

      Disease kills more people than murderers ever could, so we should not avoid murderers?

    2. I find it odd that people on here are so anti facebook. Adafruit, Sparkfun, Evil Mad Science, Ben Heck, Jeri Ellsworth, and most of the biggest names in the maker / hacker movement all utilize facebook to it’s fullest extent. Hell even HaD has a facebook page.

      It’s not odd that people with something to sell make use of all the free marketing tools they can. In the case of Facebook, they go with it because it increases sales or readership or eyeballs or whatever is paying the most for them.

      And if you think Google is bad, then do what any responsible person does: avoid them. Don’t use Google search as your primary engine. Employ their do-not-track cookie on any machine you have no other option on. Don’t permit google-analytics.js to load on your machines. Matter of fact there are over one thousand tracking sites I don’t allow to load; Google and Facebook are just two of them.

      An increase in sales due to Facebook doesn’t mean they get 100% coverage of their readership, though. I didn’t even realize any of those sites had Facebook anything until you mentioned them, as the tracker killers also prevent their little [f] graphics from loading.

      It is kind, however, to at least view a few ads on the sites you frequent. Slashdot has a “pay the ads away” subscriber model that I really like. I’d use that on more sites if they offered such a deal.

      1. As a part time web developer and website owner I quite like Google Analytics and as a consumer, I like google and amazon’s custom adds. It shows me things that I actually might be interested in purchasing. It is much better than the old days where we had adds for horse hoof conditioner and montana car dealerships popping up in google adsense.

  10. yall sound like a bunch of hipsters with your “hating facebook for no good reason” ways. hate to tell you, its only going to become more of a prominently used forum throughout the next few years. if you dont like it, dont use it. but dont flood HD with your whining. some of us come here for genuine comments, not just “wah wah wah facebook wah wah wah security settings wah wah wah”

    1. You’re clueless if you think there isn’t dozens of good reasons to hate facebook.

      Facebook is bleeding users by the hundreds of thousands, and advertisers have learned their lesson and are leaving in droves, so I wouldn’t bet on FB being around let along dominant after a few years.

      And talk about “wah wah wah”, if you don’t like the comments, don’t read’m.

      1. Can you substantiate any of those claims with valid metrics? I only see statistics showing that facebook is growing and I have half of the online marking world contacts who send me releases on new products every day. I literally get 1000+ emails a day to my marketing account and I have yet to see one marketer say “Were leaving facebook”. 1 billion users and counting is not a metric any company in the world should shy away from. That is 1/6 the population of the earth you can reach for FREE.

      2. @ Charles Gnatt. Your lack of critical thought continues to confound. Here we go:

        http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-ads-80-percent-bots-20120730,0,1602559.story

        http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57485745-93/questions-mount-as-facebook-advertisers-lose-to-clickbots/

        https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/FtvmE7xGyTA

        http://marketday.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/05/12069407-facebooks-problem-ads-arent-grabbing-users-analysts-say?lite

        There is plenty more. The general consensus is that over 60% of facebook accounts are bots.
        Which makes sense considering 1.4 billion people have any access to the internet in the world and facebook has 1b accounts yet having a facebook account is rare in asia, the middle east, eastern Europe and Russia.

        Many companies are scaling back or leaving outright. What benefit would it be to announce it?

  11. Limor [Adafruit] gets my vote simply for the “Community Contribution” section. Entrepreneur sums it up well in the last paragraph:

    “Limor’s goal is to make the world a better place by creating great products and showing how they’re made so others can learn and share. Adafruit has discovered the more we all give and share, the more we all get back.”

    I keep my FB to look and keep track of what a few friends and favored businesses are doing (if I can avoid “Friending” them) but I almost never participate in anything. On signup and ever since, FB was given the bare minimum of my info… some true, some not-so-true.

    Now I can definitely put my membership to good use!

    Best wishes & Best of Luck to Limor Fried, a.k.a. ADAFRUIT!!

  12. don’t worry about that certain social networking site. their share value is dropping like a feather in a vacuum. it’s game over for them sooner rather than later.
    why not just sign up, vote for Limor then never use that account again, and be happy knowing you have wasted a tiny amount FB disk space.
    win win, no?

    1. I would prefer to create a fake FB account than using my cell phone number…
      BTW : does this numbers works outside US? Anyway, that’s another crappy move from entrepreneur magazine.

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