Announced earlier today via the White House Google+ account, people are invited to join Gene Sperling (Director of the National Economic Council), Steve Case (Chairman of the Startup America Partnership), and Aneesh Chopra (U.S. Chief Technology Office) tomorrow for a live conversation about Startup America. People are encouraged to submit questions via the White House Google+ page and then join the Hangout on Thursday, February 2 (that’s tomorrow!) at 5:30PM EST on either the White House’s official YouTube channel, the White House’s website, or the White House Google+ page. The three partipants will be talking about some of the questions posed by users and how Startup America can enable small businesses.

Steve Case has actually worked with President Obama to draft the legislature for Startup America and just released a statement yesterday extolling Obama’s commitment to small businesses. One reason you might be hearing the Obama Administration promote Startup America lately is because yesterday marked the one year anniversary since the initiative started. However, if you’re still not an initiate to this whole Startup America program, check out these videos below in which Case talks about his early days at AOL as well as some testimonials from small business entrepreneurs.

For those not familiar with it, the Startup America initiative is an agenda developed by President Obama with Case that began one year ago today. The legislation intends, as Case put it, to “make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses,” most likely through the benefit of small business tax cuts. In a statement, Case said that he believes this legislative agenda will “help to create jobs, boost our economy and ensure [the United States'] competitiveness” within the global economy.

Exactly a year ago, President Obama introduced Startup America and made a call to government officials and the private sector to support entrepreneurs working to succeed in a struggling economy:

Case’s full statement is below:

“The President’s proposed Startup America legislative agenda will make it easier for entrepreneurs to start and grow businesses and help us remain the world’s most entrepreneurial nation. I’m thrilled to see the President follow-up on his strong pro-entrepreneur message in last week’s State of the Union with this specific proposal for Congress. Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced legislation in recent months to improve access to capital, reduce regulations, and ensure we win the global battle for talent. I’m grateful that our nation’s leaders are now focused on entrepreneurship and coming together in a bipartisan fashion to help entrepreneurs start and scale businesses more quickly and effectively. Quick passage of the Startup America agenda will help to create jobs, boost our economy and ensure our competitiveness. On behalf of entrepreneurs all across the country, I urge Congress to make passage of this pro-entrepreneurship legislation a top priority, and get a bill on the President’s desk to be signed into law.”

Will you be a part of Obama and Case’s Startup American initiative? How will it affect your business? Share your experience in the comments below.

Partners will contribute funds to "existing proven models or develop new programs and efforts to help entrepreneurs." Partners include Google, Facebook, Intel, HP, and IBM (see full list here). 

Facebook will host 12 "Startup Days" this year aimed at providing early-staged companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook platform. These are monthly events for building apps and sites that incorporate social technologies. 

"In addition, we plan to stay active within open source communities and are proud of what we’ve contributed in the past," says Facebook’s Doug Purdy. "Open source technologies continue to be important to startups that are scaling and growing quickly. They allow entrepreneurs to spend more time working on their products."

"Over the past few years we’ve been contributing to a wide range of existing projects, from PHP to memcached to Varnish and many others," adds Purdy. "We also open source our own projects, ranging from major pieces of infrastructure (most recently HipHop for PHP) to small tools that make developing all sorts of software faster and easier (such as XHP and Three20)."

Intel is committing $200M of new investment in U.S. companies for the project, and is serving on the board. IBM is investing $150 million to fund programs that promote entrepreneurs. HP is investing $4 million. Google’s contributions have yet to be revealed.

"America’s story has been forged in large part by entrepreneurs who have against great odds created innovative products and services that have changed the world – and created millions of jobs," said Steve Case. "Our nation once again looks to these creative risk-takers to unleash the next wave of American innovation, and I am pleased that President Obama has made supporting and celebrating entrepreneurs a major priority of his economic strategy. I am honored to chair the Startup America Partnership, and look forward to working with the White House to champion the creation of new start-ups, and help accelerate the growth of speed-ups."

The partnership will not target specific entrepreneurs, but will spotlight and connect programs and institutions that directly target entrepreneurs. So says this FAQ page.

 

Now the company has secured an additional $42 million from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others who have previously invested.

"In one of the toughest funding environments in history, this investment is a big endorsement of Revolution Money’s business model," said Jason Hogg, founder and CEO of Revolution Money. "As merchants and consumers search for savings at every turn, Revolution Money is seen as a welcome alternative to the traditional high-cost credit card companies and PayPal."

Essentially, Revolution Money is PayPal meets major credit card, only with lower fees for everyone. Merchants are charged less to accept their cards than Visa or Mastercard, and users can transfer payments through the online system for free unlike the industry’s big boy, PayPal.

The RevolutionCard is a general-use credit card that is accepted at over 650,000 locations, and 85% of ATMS around the US. Some places that accept the card include: Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, Bloomingdale’s, Buy.com, CVS, KOHL’s, Macy’s, Marshalls, Walgreen’s, Nordstrom, Office Depot, Office Max, T.J. Maxx, and Whole Foods.

The Revolution MoneyExchange (the PayPal-like part) currently has over 400,000 users. It’s a free online P2P payments service that enables users to exchange money for free. Users can access their online funds at all merchants and ATMs on the RevolutionCard Network.

The new funding will be used for the continued development of the company’s core technology. That’s as specific as the company gets.

The deal is reportedly valued at $300 million, and would give the two companies enough unique visitors to directly take on WebMD. Combined the deal would give Everyday Health, operated by Waterfront Media and Revolution Health Network 20 million unique visitors per month according to com Score.

Waterfront Media CEO and co-founder Benjamin Wolin will remain chief executive officer of the new company. Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution Health Group, and an additional member of Revolution Health’s board of directors to be named later, will join the Waterfront Media board of directors.

The company will keep the name Waterfront Media, and will operate all sites under the Everyday Health Network, which includes WhatToExpect.com, SouthBeachDiet.com, and JillianMichaels.com. The company will remain headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.

"When we entered the health care market we knew one of the areas we wanted to focus on was using the Internet to empower consumers and give them more choice, control and convenience," said Case.

"The merger of Waterfront Media and Revolution Health Network builds on each company’s complementary strengths to create a new industry powerhouse — thus enabling us to accelerate our efforts to reach the largest, most engaged audience and help people stay healthy, manage chronic disease and deal with serious illness."

Hitwise analyst LeeAnn Prescott cited Case’s recent turn at the podium at the just-concluded D Conference. The high-profile talk has been matched by sky-high traffic to Revolution Health.

“Revolution Health is setting out to be far more than just a health information source on the web, but it is already succeeding on that front,” Prescott wrote. “For the week ending May 26, 2007, Revolution Health was ranked #11 in the Health & Medical – Information category, and traffic increased by 113% since the week ending April 28, 2007, when it was ranked #23.”

A lot of traffic to health sites comes from search engines; Revolution Health saw 49 percent of its traffic for the week ending May 26 arrive that way. Google unsurprisingly sent the site 65 percent of search engine traffic.

Prescott was surprised to see Ask ticking along behind Google, with 16 percent of sent traffic to Revolution Health. Another 15 percent came from Yahoo Search, leaving 4 percent to come from sites like MSN/Live Search and other engines.

As to the merits of Revolution Health, a query for ‘heel pain’ told us plenty. Two of the top three results were for products from the Revolution Health Store, which partners with Drugstore.com. The fourth and fifth results appeared to be responses to a quiz on heel pain, without references to the original source questions.

Below the Revolution Health results, the site displayed additional results from Kosmix, a health site we have profiled previously. Those answers were more informative, and in the case of one answer from the American Podiatric Medical Association, much more authoritative.

As for the geotargeting in the ubiquitous Google ads alongside the Revolution Health results, it needs some work. Our search brought out one ad for a specialist in Cincinnati. A 90-minute drive to the Queen City on a bad heel is not something your humble WebProNews writers want to try.

We aren’t sold on Revolution Health yet. Anyone trying them out also should give Kosmix or Healthline a test as well, to get a broad picture of the information available for a given query. Naturally one’s doctor should be part of any attempts to diagnose a medical issue.

Case attached the same qualifications to the statement as he did in the past, though, which is something many news outlets seem not to have noticed. The comments were made during an interview with award-winning journalist Charlie Rose. “Yes, I’m sorry I did it,” Case admitted, referring to the merger.

Reuters reported that he still believed the merger was “a good idea,” though. “I’m disappointed and frustrated that it hasn’t developed in the way that we all hoped at the time it could,” Case continued.

The comments following a Techdirt article on the subject were varied. No one openly attacked Case, although there were more than a few AOL detractors. A couple of people, including Michael Brooks, even appeared to offer support. “I’d bring back Case,” Brooks wrote.

One person even gave Case credit for what he perceived as a Machiavellian business play. “The AOL / Time Warner merger was a brilliant move by Steve case which hugely benefited the AOL shareholders,” according to Joe Smith. “You have to recognize that the merger was an exit strategy for AOL.

“They used vastly over priced shares in a dot com bubble company to buy a substantial stake in real company with real assets,” Smith continued. “That the company could have been better run after the merger than it was does not take awary [sic] from the brilliance of the original move.”

Assuming Case isn’t just trying to cover up such a scheme, he appears to be really, really, sorry about the merger.

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Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.