Girls In Tech

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? If this intrigues you, then you want to come and check out LA’s first Ignite event.

Girls in Tech LA along with LA Geek Dinner are sponsoring the first Ignite event in LA. Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from The Best Way to Buy a Car to Hacking Chocolate. Imagine that you’re on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet deal with this situation.

Started by Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, and Bre Pettis of Etsy.com, formerly of MAKE Magazine, Ignite was inspired by Pecha Kucha Nights, where speakers are given 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds, giving each speaker 6 minutes and 40 seconds of fame. The first Ignite took place in Seattle in 2006, and since then the event has become an international phenomenon, with gatherings in Helsinki, Finland; Paris, France; New York, New York; and many other locations.

LA Geek Dinner was kind enough to open up their dinner event to have Ignite host their first LA event. LA Geek Dinner, founded by Heathervescent brings people with a passion for technology and the internet together over a meal where conversations happen, friendships form, and collaborations on various projects occur.

So, come join us on Tuesday, July 21st at Cinespace. The event is free, please RSVP at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/2473026/

Tags: Cinespace, ignite, LA geek dinner
Posted in Los Angeles | 1 Comment »

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Ann Mulcahy, chair and former CEO of Xerox, encourages women to be themselves and contribute their natural strengths to roles and endeavors. She believes if you try to act like someone else it diminishes your authenticity, and that it’s more important to showcase your individual strengths than to emulate others.

I can see how it might be easy to fall into the trap of having great respect for someone and wanting to be like them.  But instead of following in their footsteps completely, it’s better to learn from them, while adding your own personal style of delivering results.   It’s important to keep things fresh, take note of changes that are ocurring in the environment around you, and be nimble and creative as you strike forth, all the while keeping in mind the lessons you’ve learned from others.

See what else Ann has to say in this WashingtonPost.com On Leadership video.

Tags: Ann Mulcahy, Authenticity, Leadership, Tina Tran, Xerox
Posted in All Chapters | No Comments »

We Hear About Success, but We Learn From Failure

SNAP Summit – one of the first conferences for social web startups – has announced the topic for their fall event: Failure. They’ve dubbed it “FailCon.” It takes place on October 27th at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco. Girls in Tech discount tickets can be purchased at:

FailCon Girls in Tech Tickets

The lead organizer, Cassie Phillipps, writes:
“FailCon’s been developing in my head for the last year; but I wondered if people would really be interested in a day focused on entrepreneurial mistakes.

As I spoke with fellow founders, however, it became clear: failure’s an important topic that people crave to understand and speakers regularly avoid. Many think that failure is the defining moment for an entrepreneur: overcoming it proves that you’re inventive, tenacious, and prepared.

So I’ve decided to host FailCon on October 27th – peak conference season – and keep it incredibly affordable. Like our prior events, I expect 250 – 400 founders, developers, investors, marketers, and bloggers from the web 2.0/social-web sphere to attend. With help from GraffitiPR, we’re also reaching out to a diverse range of entrepreneurial organizations and news stations for some fresh faces.

Some of the topics scheduled include:
The Importance of Team: What variable make a successful founding team? What disagreements should be expected and how do you talk through them? If all else fails, how do you let someone go?
How VCs Handle Failure: What are the early signs of failure that VCs watch for? How do they handle a failing investment, preserve good relations, and protect their assets?

How NOT to Build Social Apps: Why do some viral campaigns flop, and how do you regain trust with your client? What are some things to avoid when designing for the social web? How can you recover a failing app?
Founder Frak-ups: A number of social web entrepreneurs will give short talks about their early mistakes and how they recovered. Invited speakers include:

Max Levchin; Slide (discussing Slide and PayPal)
Mark Pinkus; Zynga (discussing Tribe.net)
Lane Becker and Thor Mullen; GetSatisfaction
Seth Sternberg, Sandy Jen, and Elain Wherry; Meebo
Rashmi Sinha; SlideShare
and more!

I’m still looking for volunteers, sponsors, and companies to demo! More information on the event is at www.snapsummit.com. Email Cassie at cep@rfop.biz with questions and suggestions.

Tags: Adriana Gascoigne, Cassie Phillips, conference, FailCon, girls in tech, Snap Summit, Tech Conference
Posted in San Francisco | No Comments »

In this day and age, words like ‘geek’ and ‘techie’ are thrown around as part of regular everyday conversation quite often. We’ve come a long way from the days of these terms being attached to images of boys with greased comb-overs, braces, thick rimmed prescription glasses and pocket protectors. Geek is chic, and Tech is sexy. But just what makes you a ‘geek’ or ‘techie’ exactly? I believe to find the answer to that, you need look no further than your own enthusiasm and passion in something technology related.

When someone talks about Twitter or Facebook, or shows off their new install of the latest operating system from Microsoft, do you groan and go back to whatever you were doing? Or, are you someone like myself who gets excited to hear about the latest iPhone apps (Yes, I even stood in line to get the new 3GS on the first day), or that awesome new version of Rock Band to play with your friends on Friday night? Being a “techie” is no longer about writing programs or fixing computers, (though these things still count too), but having a genuine passion and drive for the technology around you every day. Whether it’s what’s powering your mobile device, your car, your laptop, your gaming experiences, or your social life. If you’re curious to have, play with, or learn about the latest toys and technologies, and even if you know you might not ‘get it’ right away and have to spend some time with the instruction manual.

We interact with many forms of technology all around us in our daily lives. Do you ever find yourself captivated by it all sometimes, or does it make you feel like you’re in a foreign country? The next time you think you might not be qualified enough to fit into the role of ‘techie’ or ‘geek’, look at the tech around you and in your life and what it means to you and it’s effect on you. If you find it brings a slight smile to your face….be sure to let your ‘Techie’ flag fly!

Tags: Geek, iphone, Rock Band, Techie
Posted in Los Angeles | 1 Comment »

Have you ever thought about writing a book? The traditional $40B book publishing industry can be very hard to navigate on your own.

Today we launched FastPencil. FastPencil (www.fastpencil.com) strips out the cost and complexity of the publishing process and allows anyone to write and publish a book regardless of the topic or their experience level.

FastPencil makes the book-writing process painless – from concept to printed book or e-book. Writers now have a single service to create and write a book, easily share their work with trusted friends and publish instantly as traditionally bound books or paperless e-books. Through a process called Guided Collaboration, FastPencilers can connect with like-minded people, pool resources, chat, gather feedback from reviewers and collaborate with other authors.

For the first time, writers can use a single service to create, share and publish their original works, convert their blogs to books and modify one of the many FastPencil Classics to make it their own. After signing up for the service, FastPencilers can select a book template and begin writing, paste in text from previously saved work or upload their blog, which is automatically formatted into chapters. They can also add photos and illustrations to help make the content more engaging.

At any time during the creative process writers can invite their social network, fellow authors and FastPencil experts to review and provide comments on the book. Once the book is complete, the FastPencil self-publishing wizard steps the authors through the process of having their book delivered to their doorsteps, formatted for e-books or listed at leading online bookstores, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This write-once and publish anywhere approach ensures the book can be read anywhere today and in the future.

FastPencil Features:
- Hosted self-publishing platform: online writing and collaboration tools
- Select from a variety of book templates
- Enhance chapters and front and back covers with images
- Blog to Book: easily import your blog into a book
- Author services including consulting, design services and formatting
- Integrated self-publishing wizard for step by step assistance
- Publish to e-book formats
- Online book distribution at Amazon and Barnes & Noble
- FastPencil Classics: access to many royalty free titles including Tarzan of the Apes and Cinderella

Check it out!

Posted in santa cruz | 1 Comment »

If content goes up on the internet, and nobody is there to share it, does it really exist? When you’re creating a  website featuring user-generated content, the answer is no.  Why? Because, when it comes to content-based sites, unless something’s going viral, it’s probably not going very far. And the best way to make sure your content is as exposed as Britney’s behind on a bad day, is to make sharing simple and intuitive for your users. At Ranker.com, the site I product manage, we went through a wide variety of options before settling on our current sharing solution — the AddThis button. As the Product Manager, it was my job to evaluate all the options and come up with one that worked for our needs — a process that I’m hoping I can help you alleviate by sharing it here.

In a nutshell, Ranker is a database of over 5 million items that users can drag and drop to quickly create complex lists, which they can then filter, aggregate, share, widgetize, etc. The beauty (and the bane) of our site is the combination of the metadata about each list item that gets dragged into user’s lists right along with the item itself, and the Ajax-heavy interface that makes the whole complicated process seem easy as pie from the user’s perspective. With our users already making lists about everything from “Scary Skinny Actresses I’d Like To Give A Sandwich To” to “The Best Electronics Companies To Get Free Parts From,” providing powerful ways for them to share their creative content has always been a paramount priority for us. So, why did it take us weeks to hook up? Well, because of that darned aforementioned Ajax-heavy UI.

Turns out that Ajax URLs structured like ours don’t like to make friends with Facebook, Twitter, etc. So, when we first implemented both the ShareThis and AddThis buttons to test which free feature-set would be better for our needs, we quickly found out that neither of them were going to work without some tinkering. We briefly toyed with the idea of building our own system, but scrapped that because the off-the-shelf services provided all sorts of analytics that we would have to hook up ourselves in addition to the sharing functionality. Instead, our engineers dove in to both sharing services’ APIs. And, when they finally came up for air, it was AddThis which proved to be the most pliable when it came to putting our permalink in place of our regular URL. The result? A simple sharing interface that allows our users to show off their lists without ever worrying about whether or not a link will work on whatever site they want to share with.

Now, I promise AddThis isn’t paying me to promote them (although, since our site is a startup, I wouldn’t object if they offered). But, I do think that more sharing services should start structuring themselves to handle the anomalies of an Ajax-heavy site. After all, we can’t be the only interactive consumer-facing website out there that’s trying to make the most of the magic of Ajax. Of course, this could lead to my whole rant about how the internet industry in general could seriously use some standardization, but that’s a whole other long-winded post. So, instead, I leave you with the hope that my experiences might help if you’re facing a similar sharing situation. And the promise that I’ll let you know how it turns out when we start tackling Facebook Connect next week.

Tags: AddThis, Facebook Connect, Los Angeles, Product Management, Ranker, ShareThis, Sharing
Posted in Los Angeles | No Comments »

These days everyone wants something for nothing. It’s a vicious cycle that we find ourselves in, needing services such as business, legal and financial planning, but being afraid to spend our hard earned (and fewer and farther between) dollars on it.

In the last 3 months I have gotten more requests from friends and family members to look over papers, help re-work legal documents they have drafted themselves, or just give advice. It’s a real challenge. On the one hand we all know the financial struggles being faced by a majority of the population these days, but we also have the need to make a living ourselves. So where is the happy medium?

Regardless of what field you are in, whether you are an artist or a lawyer, the first step is to ask what the other person really needs. This means that you must differentiate between a 10 minute conversation over a design or a document, and a 3 hour long intensive research-based re-write or re-design. The former is ok, and I would argue is even a good idea. By doing a favor for your friend, family member or even a friend of a friend you are creating goodwill. If you show a little brain, you can gain the confidence of the other party. This means that when they do need serious work done they are more likely to come to you because you did them a solid the first time around. Now you have gained their trust. They understand not only that you know what you are doing, but that you are a good person to work with.

This concept of goodwill is an essential part of building your business and making sure that you are in a place to monetize yourself once the purse strings loosen. Nothing is more important now then building and maintaining genuine relationships with people who may need your services in the future. But be wary, there are also many people out there who are taking advantage of this economic power play by abusing the generosity and goodwill of those trying merely to survive. Because of those unfortunate and karmaically challenged individuals, you must know when to say no. Trust your instincts. If you begin to feel like you are being taken advantage of, it’s probably because you are. The most difficult thing in finding this balance is giving enough to be helpful, while at the same time acknowledging your worth and not letting the state of the economy challenge the value of training, knowledge and experience in your area of expertise.

Tags: building relationships, current economic stae, free work, goodwill
Posted in Los Angeles | 1 Comment »

Girls in Tech is proud to be a media sponsor for O’Reilly OSCON 2009, taking place in San Jose, CA from July 20-24.  Thanks to O’Reilly’s generous donation, we will be giving away a free ticket to the Girls in Tech member with the best answer to the question ”Why do you want to attend OSCON?”.  There are two tickets up for grabs so you have two chances to win a FREE OSCON conference ticket valued at $1500!  You can enter the contest one of two ways:

1. Leave your answer as a comment on Twitter making sure to include “@GITweet” and “#oscon” in your tweet

2. Post a comment on our Facebook Girls in Tech San Francisco group page here.

There will be one winner for each entry type.  Entries are due by 8pm PST Wednesday, July 15, 2009.  We will notify the winners on July 16.  You don’t have to be a Girls in Tech member, but you should be!  You can register for GIT membership by clicking here.

About O’Reilly OSCON
Now more than ever, open source technology is the smart choice for navigating uncertain economic waters. In a competitive business environment, open source gives you the means to drive down costs while increasing system and staff efficiencies. OSCON 2009 is where you’ll find the latest information and new ways to connect with the growing community that is open source.  To find out if you should be attending OSCON, click here.  The detailed program can be accessed here.

Tags: O'Reilly, OSCON
Posted in All Chapters | No Comments »

With the global economy in the stinker, and unemployment at nearly 10% nationwide, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of people who have experienced setbacks recently. And yes, it absolutely sucks to find yourself feeling like an unfunny version of George Costanza, but it’s an awesome opportunity to regroup, and make like Steve Jobs. This is where it can get ugly or interesting, and how you deal with it will define your shot at success.

While I don’t claim to be an expert at creating success, I do have a little experience with setbacks. My last major setback occured during the height of the dot.com bust when I lost my job at Coremetrics. I decided that my new full-time job would be to pursue my life-long dream to live and work in Europe. I had zero international experience and an equal number of contacts, but I gave it my best shot. I woke up at the crack of dawn every morning to cold call recruiters and companies in Europe, and reached out to my network for help. Five months later, with sheer determination and a bit of luck, I landed an amazing European-wide business development role based in Germany with SAS.  Success!!

Fast forward to the present, and here I am again, upping the ante in setbackland. Earlier this year, I lost my job at Mochi Media, an online games startup I adored. A month later, my fiancé and I split up. It’s never about how far we fall, what defines us is how we pick ourselves up.

Three months have passed since then, and I am astonished by the turn-around I’ve forged. The new experiences I’ve jumped into head-first include: joining the board of Girls in Tech, organizing a sold-out event on The World of Casual and Social Games, and blogging for the high-profile Geeks on a Plane tech and startup tour through Japan and China. These opportunities all grew organically as I pounded the pavement and welcomed new challenges. Had I ever sat on a board before? No. Organized a big event? No. Blogged? Barely.

I don’t have a new job or a new man yet, but I’m considering several attractive offers!  Life is a work in progress, and I hope these tips will help you with your turn around, as they have in mine.

10 Tips for Turning Setbacks into Success

1. It’s not about them, it’s about YOU. Learn from your mistakes and move forward.Fight the temptation to focus on your old company or those involved with your setback, focus your energy on the future.
2. Take it easy on yourself. It takes time to build the inner strength to overcome setbacks. Give yourself a break. And hold your head up high.
3. Lean on your loved ones. If you don’t have any, see the next seven tips.
4. Network like crazy, but do it thoughtfully. Strengthen the bonds you already have while forging new ones. You may not feel like meeting people right now, but it’s important to get out there.
5. Lunch time is the right time. Have a lunch appointment everyday so you are getting out of the house, immersing yourself in the community around you, eating (very important), and growing your network.
6. Help others. Take the focus off yourself, volunteer with causes that are close to you, and gain a new appreciation for the things you do have.
7. Do the things that make you happy. Travel, shop (within reason), visit friends and family, take up an old hobby and explore new interests.
8. Play sports, get to the gym or find a physical outlet. Physical activities help you stay balanced and keep depression at bay.
9. Embrace change. It’s all about mindset. If you think you can, you’re more than halfway there!
10. Make it happen. Identify the comeback you want to achieve, create an action plan, and give it everything you have.  Be resourceful, be resilient, and be bold.

Finally, trust that everything happens for a reason, even if you don’t know what it is at the time. I’d love to hear your comeback stories – feel free to add a comment if you have one to share.

Tags: Coremetrics, George Costanza, Mochi Media, SAS, Setbacks, Steve Jobs, Success, Tina Tran, Turnaround
Posted in All Chapters | 3 Comments »

This is a guest blog post by Boston member Tyler Putterman.  Tyler is currently working for Other Side Group, a social media and marketing strategy consulting firm located in Boston. Her full bio can be found here.

As women, we are powerful figures. Not only have we infiltrated the industries previously dominated by men, we are influencing and advancing technology. Everyday women are making strides, breaking records, and accomplishing even more than before.  We are constantly pushing forward, but take a look back and see how women have influenced technology in the past.

In a modern society where gender barriers are being crossed daily, we tend to think of items such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dishwashers as icons of domesticity.  Many of us, myself included, curse the very sight of the dreaded Hoover. However, it was women who inspired the advancements of such technologies.

One of the first vacuum brands, Bissell, was taken over by Anna Bissell after her husband passed away, and become one of the most powerful business women of that time. Even the automatic dishwasher was invented by a woman who wanted a machine that could wash faster without chipping the dishes.

With these technologies, women were able to have leisure time, and develop hobbies, skills, and a social network. The very vacuum you shun is also in a sense a symbol of advancement for women. Now, these technological advancements don’t affect just women, as we assume many roles beyond housekeeper, but they were influenced by women in a time when it was considered the woman’s responsibility to maintain house.

Even the job types are changing to accommodate the change lives of women. There are many jobs that allow telecommuting, so a woman can still have a career while maintaining the traditional nuclear family, if so desired. Now, especially in the communication age with knowledge and advice at our fingertips, we are more informed and empowered. Instead of consulting others, we have the ability to research and gain knowledge for ourselves. We can learn from credible sources, we can hear opinions, and even get professional feedback.

As we continue to shape the future of technology, we can look back on how women have impacted technology and advancement in the past. It would be a far stretch now to say that the vacuum is the key to women’s equality, because eventually the advancements become obsolete, and we work towards something else.

Tags: domestic, technology, vacuum, Vacuum cleaner, women
Posted in Boston | 1 Comment »