Girls In Tech

Vator invites you to pitch Silicon Valley at Vator Splash May
When: May 13, 2010
Time: 4:30 pm to 12 midnight
Where: Cafe du Nord, San Francisco
Cost: $150 (Girls in Tech get a 20% discount using “Vatorgirls”)

Vator Splash II will be held on the evening of May 13, 2010 at Cafe du Nord in San Francisco and will showcase 10 up-and-coming startups across the high-tech industry, as well as Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, serial entrepreneur Gurbaksh Chahal (founder of ClickAgents, Blue Lithium and gWallet), Founders Fund VC Dave McClure, August Capital VC Howard Hartenbaum, Mayfield VC Raj Kappor and many more. Once again, Robert Scoble will be on hand to emcee the presentations. About 400 people, consisting of industry peers, investors and media are expected to attend.

Submit an early-stage company to pitch below:
http://vator.tv/competition/vator-splash

Reserve a discount ticket or pitch table (discount code: Vatorgirls):
http://vatorsplashmay.eventbrite.com/

What we planned to do: publicize an event to girls in Silicon Valley, an iPhone app store competition in which they, grouped into teams, were to design and storyboard a brand new iPhone app.  They would have to think through a quick and dirty business plan and pitch it in 60 seconds. And the winners would take home brand new iPod Touches!

We hoped that by hosting a fun, enticing, and engaging competition, we could show the participating girls that careers in engineering and science weren’t limited to the stereotypical images of pocker protectors and protractors we see on TV.

What we did do: exactly that, and more.

As I walked around the room while the girls and their mentors were chattering excitedly about their ideas, I knew we had done it– we had clusters of girls at each table from all different schools in Silicon Valley, including a group of girls who traveled to Cupertino all the way from San Francisco that had already completed high school but were now participating in a program which prepares them for particular trades that require a certification program or two year degree. Everybody was talking to each other freely, shooting off ideas with confidence and finesse. Nobody cared that the tables were mixed up with girls of different ages (14-17) or that they hadn’t ever met before. Likewise they were interacting with each mentor with enthusiasm and respect. These mentors were women who had technical and engineering backgrounds who worked at Apple, Virgin America, and Admob and volunteered their time as resources for the inspiration and guidance of this group of girls during the competition. And everyone had a blast!

The feedback from the post-event survey was wonderfully positive. The girls said things like:

“I learned that there is a lot more to engineering than sitting behind a computer and [that] science and math really help.” “”I thought the mentors were cool and had a lot of variety of careers and I learned that a positive team-work attitude was cool.” “I learned that engineering is an option for girls and that I wouldn’t be alone.”

Ultimately, the winning app, titled “Stop, Shop and Go!” had most of the elements of a real iPhone app people clamor to use on a daily basis– the melding of geographic data, coupon codes, and (duh!) a shopping guide. All of the apps that were dreamt up that day were feasible– now if we could only create them all! The presentations, while limited to 60 seconds, were vivid, engaging, amusing, and fearless. These girls rocked it.

I would say, without hesitation, that the Girls in Tech mentorshorship debut was a resounding success. I would also say, this raises the bar so high on what’s still to come!

In the spring, we’re taking the involvement to a whole new level. We are partnering with Iridescent again to put on the Technovation Challenge 2010! This time, it won’t be one evening, but several months of teamwork, leadership, and engineering. The girls will learn, with the guidance of professional women in the tech industry, how to design and program cool mobile apps using App Inventor for Android, a new programming language developed by Google. Once created, these apps will be presented to a real team of venture capitalists for prizes, feedback, and the chance to be recruited into summer internships at some of the coolest local startups. Don’t you wish you were still in high school?

We can’t make this level of awesomeness happen, however, without help. If you are a female professional in the Silicon  Valley area, I hope that you will think about joining us for our program in February.  We will be working with the students twice a week for 8 weeks (Tuesdays and Thursdays 5pm – 7pm beginning on February 23rd).  The girls and their mentors (looking at you!…hopefully) will work in teams to learn how to program mobile apps for Android and they will develop working prototypes.  The teams will also get coaching from VCs and entrepreneurs on writing a business plan for their app ideas.  We are building an exciting team of VCs, entrepreneurs, and speakers that will focus on teaching various parts of the program, so it promises to be a great learning experience for students and mentors alike.  If you have ever done any kind of programming before or are interested in learning how to program in this new language, the girls would greatly benefit from working with you, so please consider joining.

We even had a fellow GIT pro photographer hook it up! Thanks Elizabeth McGinnis!

One of the things that we learned from our experience on Friday is that it works much better to have two mentors per team, since mentors often have other commitments and may have to step out from time to time.  So if you’re interested in mentoring in the Spring, but are not sure if you can make it to every meeting, let us know and we can either pair you up with another mentor or you can sign up with a friend!

Thanks E McG for capturing these ladies' true essence!

Girls in Tech and Iridescent made something really cool happen for a group of enthusiastic girls this past Friday. We want to do it again, on a much bigger and hopefully even more impacting scale. Will you help us?

Communications Manager, Multiple Focus Areas – Mountain View

The area: Communications

It’s our job to help inform and educate consumers, partners and opinion formers about the benefits of Google’s products, our distinctive business ethos and approach to the big public policy issues of the day. We are looking for quick witted, entrepreneurial and intellectually curious people to join the team. To succeed here you’ll need to be able to combine creativity with the organizational skills to manage numerous different projects to tight deadlines all at once, as well enjoy pitching to all kinds of journalists, bloggers and commentators (we find it hard too!). Things happen quickly at Google and to get stuff done here you need to be an enthusiastic team player – a self-starter who can work cross-functionally and isn’t frightened to take risks or try out new ways of doing things.

The role: Communications Manager, Multiple Focus

As a member of the Communications team based at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California you will work cross functionally (and with our team) to help communicate Google’s developer products and programs, devise specific campaigns that establish solid contacts with journalists, face-to-face meetings with commentators and other opinion formers and develop print and web-based materials targeted at a range of different audiences, and counter misinformation and mitigate negative media coverage that might lead to unnecessary regulation or interfere with our business and ability to serve our users in other ways. Managers are very strong writers who can process complex technology issues – through blog posts, FAQs, video scripts and more – and explain them in clear language internally and externally.

To apply for this job or to learn about other job openings, please email Arne at arne@google.com

SGN’s Global Communications/Marketing Intern will assist with media relations, blogging, media research, preparing presentations, and producingreports/analytics/audits. All tasks will be managed by our Director of Global communication with the objective of producing a positive public image of SGN products and industry presence. Qualified candidates possess strong writing skills, enthusiasm for the tech industry, and a natural journalistic curiosity. Ultimately, the Intern may be empowered to take action on behalf of SGN as deemed appropriate by his or her mentor.

All candidates must submit the following to HR@SGN.com: 
Letter of inquiry
 Resume/CV
. Please use the subject line “PR Intern”.
 Applicants who fail to use the correct subject heading or provide the required materials will not be considered for the position.

Yesterday, Orange Silicon Valley released the results of a study that is both a cause for concern as well as celebration on the topic of women and technology.  While women are taking on more high-profile roles in technology and are increasingly immersed with the web and social media, there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed.  The challenges noted in the study include:

- The decrease in the percentage of women obtaining Computer Science degrees. (In 2006 women made up 12% of Computer Science degrees, compared to 1993 when the number was at 18%. )

- The low percentage of women in leadership roles. (Only 3% of venture-backed companies are run by women, and only 8.5% of Silicon Valley companies have a female board director)

The good news is that the evolution of the web from a place where people go to get information, to a place where people go to connect, communicate and express themselves, is giving more women a deeper level of interaction with web technology. This is exemplified by the fact that females make up the majority of every age category on Facebook.

Another cause for celebration cited in the study is “the new network”, which points to the establishment of organizations geared towards helping women collaborate and grow professionally to become a stronger force in technology. Girls in Tech is specifically called out in the research report as an example of an organization that focuses on the engagement, education and empowerment of women in technology.

Below is an excerpt from Orange’s report with key findings:

- Women are demonstrating new influence at the executive suites of all of the major technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Google, Intel, Cisco, Adobe, Yahoo! and Oracle.

- The traditional under-representation of women in the technology sector is being reversed with the next generation of Girls in Tech, who are prolific users of and contributors to social media platforms invented in Silicon Valley and now in use all over the world.

- This ‘third generation’ of Women in Tech – coinciding with the emergence of Generation Y as a profound influence on the workforce – is already demonstrating a complete lack of intimidation about being in the technology workforce.

- The content creation tools that come built into new devices and the social web, on sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and now the iPhone, are creating a new paradigm for producing computer ‘code’, making Girls in Tech a powerful source of world-changing innovation.

-  Women in Silicon Valley are rethinking what Work/Life Balance means and redefining how companies approach the needs, of women in particular, at different stages of their careers and personal life.

Research for Her Code: Engendering Change in Silicon Valley, was conducted in the first half of 2009, and included interviews with women from a range of ages and disciplines, including academia, engineering, management, finance and marketing.  For the full pdf report, click here.

Have you heard of it? The world’s first Freelance Camp was held August 16th 2008  in the amazing coastal city of Santa Cruz, California! The event was to explore and promote the synergy that independent contractors can bring to business today.

Freelance Camp is a place to discuss and explore the different approaches to running a successful freelance business / service company. Events have been based on the Barcamp format, which is a network of user generated participatory events whose content is fully provided by the participants. Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join. Some of the events are free (thanks to sponsors) while other charge a token fee to help cover overhead. Each camp is run by a local team of volunteers and is put on for the benefit of the community (not profit). Any left over proceeds are donated to the organizer’s charity of choice. All the events to date have included breakfast, lunch and an after party.

Who should come? If you sell your services (or are considering it), you are a perfect fit: developer, designer, accountant, blogger / journalist, realtor, lawyer, carpenter, engineer, financial adviser, marketer, sales, musician, artist, inventor… Historically, the bulk of attendees are from the hi-tech industry but Freelance Camp organizers encourage all types of owners to come to provide a balanced perspective to business.

* Get experience based answers to your questions.
* Network and meet people running successful freelance businesses.
* Form partnership and collaborate.
* Find clients.
* Help others and be a person of influence.

Has your curiosity been peaked? Here are details on the next event:

Venue: Rittenhouse Building, Downtown Santa Cruz, CA
Date: Saturday August 15, 2009
Time: 8am – 6pm + after party
Cost: $25 or free if you are a student
Schwag: Klean Kanteen 27oz bottles
Register: http://freelancecamp3.eventbrite.com/

The Santa Cruz Chapter of Girls in Tech is proud to announce our next event:

The Road to Development: Women Leading the Charge

Join us for a panel of female developers, an evening of networking and refreshments!

We are bringing together a few women in the software development community who come from different backgrounds to discuss how they found themselves to be women in development, why they love what they do, barriers they have broken, etc.

The speakers for this event include:
*Margaret Rosas, Founder & Chief Strategist at Quiddities Dev, Inc
*Lila Tretikov, CIO at SugarCRM
*Lynn LaVallee, Front End Engineer at Outspark
*Andrea Mangini, Senior Experience Design Lead, Adobe Creative Suites & Web Services
*Dietlind L Gerloff, PhD, Asst Prof Biomolecular Engineering, UCSC School of Engineering

The event will be held from 7 – 9 PM on Tuesday, July 28th at NextSpace.

Please RSVP here: http://gitsc.eventbrite.com/

Last Thursday I was lucky enough to attend SDForum’s 12th Annual Visionary Awards in Atherton and I have never been in a crowd of such distinguished people. Between past years award recipients, top tier press and this years winners, it was a group of people who have molded and shaped our world as we know it.

For the first time ever, this years Visionary recipients included two Girls in Tech, Judith L. Estrin, CEO, JLabs LLC, and Kay Koplovitz, Founder of USA Network, as well as James H. Clark, Co-Founder, Silicon Graphics and Netscape and Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems.

It was such a privilege to sit and listen to the speeches and stories these four phenomenal individuals shared with the audience. Kay’s story was about the first live satellite television broadcast, the “Rumble in the Jungle,” George Foreman versus former world champion and challenger Muhammad Ali. Vinod reflected on being called a ‘visionary’ and saying he believed what is recognized as “vision” is “bumbling around long enough” to finally get something right. Jim gave us all a good chuckle when he said his first ‘vision’ was getting out of Plainview, Texas, which lead him into the Navy and then his “next visionary step was getting out the Navy.” Judy did a wonderful job of bringing us all back to college by recalling how she was “not completely sober” when she first discussed Ethernet with Bob Metcalfe.

Included is an excerpt of Judy Estrin’s acceptance speech captured by Tom Foremski:

Judy Estrin at SDForum's Visionaries

Read the rest of this entry »

O’Reilly Open Source Convention - OSCON
July 20-24, 2009
San Jose McEnery Convention Center
San Jose, CA
http://conferences.oreilly.com/oscon

What Does Open Source Mean for You and Your Business? Find Out at OSCON 2009, July 20-24 in San Jose, CA.

Registration for the 11th annual O’Reilly Open Source Convention is open, and registrants are responding quickly, eager to meet the challenges and opportunities of current economic conditions, which invite the open source community to sustain, apply, and expand open source to change the world. At the core of so many emerging technologies, open source is driving the innovation engine, offering ways to save technology costs in your organization and to keep your business moving forward in tough times. Join us in San Jose, as we redefine the future of open source, including the savings and the profit it can mean for all of us. 

More than 200 sessions will focus on how open source can save money, save the day, and spread the word. Seventeen tracks include: Administration, Business, Databases, Desktop Applications, Design & Usability, Emerging Topics, Java, Linux, Mobile, People, Perl, PHP, Programming, Python, Ruby, Security, and Web Applications. More than enough to satisfy the 3,000 or so conference participants, many looking for new opportunities to regroup, retrain, and rebuild.

Some 3,000 developers and programmers, designers, sys admins, hackers and geeks, enterprise developers and managers, IT managers and CxOs, entrepreneurs, activists, trainers and educators will gather to confront the realities of open source in today’s environment–how to stay competitive, how to open up new avenues for open source, and how to find better ways to use open source in every aspect of business and life. Open source continues to thrive and grow because better ways to increase ease of use and lower the cost of deployment continue to be found. 

Save an additional 20% using discount code: 0s09git at: https://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/register

Susan Su blogs about everyday entrepreneurship and life in the Valley at Ask The Entrepreneurs.

I love engineers. But, I’m not one.

I’m a Murakami-devouring, French-speaking, fuzzy techie. That is, I took a total of two non-humanities courses at Stanford: Intro to Statistics, whose only textbook was “Cartoon Statistics,” and Search For Life in the Solar System, a freshman course about alien life between the Sun and Neptune.

How then, did I end up as a web product manager at an engineering-driven tech start-up?

I learned, after a few early failures, how to talk to engineers.

Here are the THREE things to remember when talking to engineers:

1.    Bring value to the table. The simplest way to gain anybody’s respect, especially members of the ‘ruling’ class of your company or organization, whether they’re engineers in a tech start-up or male analysts at Goldman, is to know something that they don’t know but might like to know.

The HR Director at my old company was a smart young woman who could easily have been pigeonholed into being another one of those “HR girls.”

She never let this happen because she had lots of valuable workplace and HR information that EVERYONE – even engineers – needed to know. And, she wasn’t afraid to make it clear in her (highly articulate) conversations with developers.

2.    Do ALL Your Homework. There’s nothing more annoying than when you’re busy fixing bugs for an afternoon release, and some product manager comes up to you with a bunch of easily answerable questions. You’re an engineer, and you’re in a time-crunch, so you respond gruffly.

The PM may or may not find the answers she needs through this frustrating, waste-of-time conversation, but either way the relationship between the ‘fuzzie’ PM and the ‘techie’ developer is strained.

When you have something important to say or ask an engineer, or anybody with major time constraints, make sure you do ALL your homework and bring in to the conversation the most critical things that can’t be answered any other way.

Is there any way your question could be answered by a Webopedia search? If so, then answer it that way.

3.    Talk less, act more. When I see an email thread that’s 17 messages long, where each message is heavy with multiple, 10-line paragraphs, my eyes glaze. I’ve been on email threads attempting to coordinate a picnic in Dolores Park that ends up being 19 messages long.

This type of communication will even drive friends away from your picnic, not to mention grouchy, overworked engineers from your project.

Always punctuate your request by placing it at the end of your email, rather than burying it at the beginning or, worse yet, somewhere in the middle of your message.

Always create a separate email for each request so that your recipient can respond to your email right away when that request is fulfilled, rather than having to wait for a bunch of them to show progress before sending an update.

Why should you go to so much trouble to talk to engineers? Isn’t communication a two-way street?

The lessons I’ve learned from communicating, and mis-communicating, with my engineer colleagues apply to all kinds of audiences that you really care about.

Want to reach out to a famous blogger to get publishing tips, or a potential mentor for career advice?

Bring value to the table, do ALL your homework, and talk less, act more.

You’ll save precious time for people whose respect you want and need, and your preparation and togetherness will raise eyebrows in the best possible way.