UPDATED 11:19 EDT / APRIL 20 2011

Tech Giants Support White House Startup Initiative

In an effort to revive the US economy, President Barack Obama announced an initiative to promote entrepreneurship by funding startups.  The effort, dubbed Startup America, is headed by AOL co-founder Steve Case, acting as chairman. Google, Cisco Systems, and American Express are among those who showed great support for the cause, funding $100 million worth of advertisement for the companies, $125 million worth of purchasing discounts and business services, and training 6,000 entrepreneurs, respectively.

“These new partnerships will go a long way toward ensuring that startups have every best chance to succeed,” the group’s chief executive officer, Priceline.com Inc. (PCLN) co-founder Scott Case, said in the statement.

Aside from the three major sponsors mentioned above, several others have also committed. This includes First Data Corp., Ernst & Young, Microsoft, Intuit Inc., Facebook Inc., Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard and International Business Machines Corp., as well as LinkedIn, Salesforce and Silicon Valley Bank.

President Obama was also reported to be travelling to the Palo Alto, California-based Facebook HQ for a town hall meeting in an effort to cut-back budget deficit, as well as address government outlays.  The Startup initiative comes the same week as the official White House Android app was released, delivering more transparency between President Obama’s administration, and leveraging important technology services, including Facebook and YouTube, to do so.

Several other cloud companies getting their hands on tech startups include Elance, the world’s leading platform for online employment to help businesses hire and manage in the cloud, in partnership with The Founder Institute, is introducing Startup Cloud, a new onramp resource that provides proven tactics, best practice strategies and advice to power startups tapping into the human cloud.

Citrix is also working on an initiative helping select Cambridge mobile and cloud computing startups get a seed funding of up to $400,000. Huge cloud companies backing startups get benefits from doing what they do since “Startup firms are the fastest adopters of cloud computing technologies,” says Ezhil Arasan B, director — CSS Corp Labs. “Many of them are ready to experiment with the technologies as they give them the liberty to pay as they go.”


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