Girls In Tech

Founded by two women entrepreneurs, Foodily, Inc., a search engine for comparing recipes, announced it now brings together recipes and friends to make meal decisions and planning a more social experience.  Through integration with Facebook, recipes “liked” on Foodily will appear in your Facebook feed, and recipes your friends like will appear in your Foodily recipe search.  So, if you are in need of a recipe on-the-fly for that last minute Super Bowl party invite, look no further!

As former co-workers at Yahoo, Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell found that usually a part of the last of their days was spent comparing ideas & toiling over what to would make their families for dinner that night.  Foodily makes searching for recipes and food a personalized and enjoyable experience.  Knowing a friend likes a certain recipe helps consumers decide what to cook, since it gives help from  people they trust, your FB connections.  Foodily goes beyond sharing or saving recipes, including friends in the actual conversation(s) and decision-making process around that old question “What to cook for dinner?!”

“Food is the most social thing we do,” said Andrea Cutright, CEO and co-founder of Foodily,  “People want to do more than just pick a recipe off the shelf, they want to compare and share those decisions with people in their life. With so many recipe choices available online, Foodily lets people see and benefit from the decisions that their friends and family have already made, making it easier to find the right one for the right occasion.”

Foodily was created by Andrea Cutright and Hillary Mickell, two moms & business women who had become accustomed to sharing ideas around cooking and business.  Find Foodily online at:

Links:

• Website: www.foodily.com
• Blog: http://blog.foodily.com/
• Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/#!/foodily

Welcome to the age of social sharing, meal preparation and party planning via web-based tools we all already use.  Now, go out and find that recipe — have fun, be social, and share tips while you go.  Happy planning (and eating!)

P.S.  Be sure to watch the video on their website, which I found to be inventive with highly entertaining graphics.

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Cathy Brooks is not only a journalist and a storyteller: she runs Other Than That, a consulting firm that helps people telling their own stories. The services are based on new technologies and communication platforms.

Through her workshops, Cathy also helps professionals identify their personal motivations and build a solid elevator pitch.

Every Tuesday on Blog Talk Radio, Cathy hosts a program that combines Social and Media. Her guests explain how their personal story fits into what they do.

Cathy Brooks is a panelist for our upcoming Social Media Week event on Tuesday:  “The Women Driving Social Media.”

Event Details: “The Women Driving Social Media” Panel

Date: Tuesday February 8, 2011
Time: 12 noon to 2 p.m.
Place: PeopleBrowsr Office,
474 Bryant San Francisco, CA 94107

Tickets: http://gitsocialmediaweek.eventbrite.com/

Women are dominating the social web and representing the greatest number of influencers on Facebook, Twitter, various blog platforms and all around the social media. For women, social media presents opportunities to innovate, lead, and reach the top of their professions. Our successful women panelist will discuss how to not underestimate your abilities and move forward in your career.

For the entire panel of speakers and their bios, please click here.

***Editor’s Note:  We want to thank Brian Solis & Krystyl Baldwin for bringing Social Media Week to San Francisco!  Without them, this event would not have been possible.

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On Tuesday, April 19th, Girls in Tech is excited to host Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, who will discuss the explosive success of  his company’s location-based app.

Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of foursquare, a service that combines social networks, location awareness and game mechanics to encourage that people explore the world around them. Previously, Dennis founded dodgeball.com, one of the first mobile social services in the U.S., later to be acquired by Google in 2005.

“Foursquare is a location-based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. By “checking in” via a smartphone app or SMS, users share their location with friends while collecting points and virtual badges. Foursquare guides real-world experiences by allowing users to bookmark information about venues that they want to visit and surfacing relevant suggestions about nearby venues. Merchants and brands leverage the foursquare platform by utilizing a wide set of tools to obtain, engage, and retain customers and audiences.”

Crowley has been named one of the “Top 35 Innovators Under 35″ by MIT’s Technology Review magazine (2005), one of Fortune’s “40 Under 40″ (2010) and has won the “Fast Money” bonus round on the TV game show Family Feud (2009). He is currently an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

We are very excited to be having him on our stage in April and would encourage you to come and bring your questions for him.  This promises to be a great event, held in San Francisco at the invitation-only Founder’s Den in SoMA.

To register, see our Eventbrite page :: We look forward to seeing you there!

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As an actor and producer of 35, the first scripted web series to stream live on the Internet, Kathryn Jones is reinventing the concept of “theater techie.” No longer is it only about shadowed souls clad in head-to-toe black, frantically whispering into headsets, trying to perfect the lighting on Juliet’s face as she waxes poetic about her happy dagger right before plunging the rusty tool into her broken heart. No – because of Miss Jones and her crew, theater techies now perform a much more visible bow at curtain call. In fact – curtain call has taken the form of rolling credits behind the glow of our computer screens, and the theater techie, now clad with multiple cameras and vigilant live-editing skills, has risen, lens first, into the limelight.

Founded by three women, Better Left Unsaid is a cross between a play, an online video and a live-streamed event – and with already six performances under their belt, Jones (producer) has already broken cross-industry ground by merging theater, technology and social media.

Written by Joey Brennaman, the play follows eight lives as their secrets are revealed, ultimately asking the question: “How well do you know the people you love?” Performed in front of a live audience in Manhattan, the production is shot with multiple cameras, mixed in real time, and streamed live so that anyone anywhere in the world can watch, and interact during the show and via the post-show discussions ‘What You Said.’

GIRLS IN TECH: come support your fabulous, fellow GIT. Don’t leave Better Left Unsaid unsaid! SPREAD the word. And WATCH their second round of live performances, starting THIS Friday, in your pajamas at home or with armloads of flowers and applause at Center Stage in Flatiron District (48 West 21st Street, 4th Floor, between 5th and 6th Ave., Subway: F or N/R to 23rd).

Theater and online performance times:

Friday, Feb 4 – 8pm EST

Saturday, Feb 5 – 8pm EST

Sunday, Feb 6 – 3pm EST (optimized for European audiences respectively – 9PM GMT )

Sunday, Feb 6 – 7pm EST
Theater tickets are $18 while interactive online viewing tickets are a suggested donation of $2-$18.

For more information and tickets, visit www.betterleftunsaid.tv.

Tags: better left unsaid, live-streamed, New York, play, Techie, theater, women founder
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Recently, Steve Blank posted a great article on a school which gave some very lucky 12-year-olds a chance to have the experience of their young academic careers — They created their own startups!  In his post on FastCompany: “Startups: So Easy a 12-Year-Old Can Do It,”  Blank details how girls at Mountain View, California’s the Girls Middle School, were given a chance to test out their creative, communications and teamwork skills by participating in a real-world scenario where they create, pitch, and run their own businesses.

Every girl in the school is matched up with a team of 4-5 others and together they do everything from “write business plans, request start-up capital from investors, receive funding for their companies, make product samples, manufacture inventory, and sell their products to real-world customers.”  This,  in a class which has the culmination of presenting at the 7th Grade Entrepreneurial night, (at which Blank was fortunate to be a judge).  The night entailed the judges reading their business plans –which  included such sophisticated elements as revenue, fixed and variable costs, and liquidity — as part of the judging process, as the girls also presented PowerPoint presentations on their businesses;  actually sold their products at booths each team had set up for the evening; and which was open to not only their parents, but the whole Valley community.  What a stellar, impactful experience for these girls!  To quote Steve, himself, some of them were so impressive that he “couldn’t write or deliver a pitch that good until (his) third startup.”  Impressive, indeed!

In closing, I would echo the author’s sentiment that this gives us at GIT so much hope for the future of women-led startups, and women business leaders in general.  Women entrepreneurs get a lot of heat in the press:  whether they are competing too much against eachother …or there aren’t “enough” of them (some may say).  But, organizations like the  Girls Middle School, our own Technovation Challenge partnership with Iridescent, and Bizworld and The National Foundation forTeaching Entrepreneurship, mentioned by Blank, and others are shining the way to a promising new future for female entrepreneurs of all ages.

To read the full blog post of Steve’s, please click here, or at Steve’s blog.  Also visit his blog for more encouraging and relevant posts on the topic, as well.

Do you know any other entrepreneurial organizations, especially for the adolescent community, that you would like to share with us?

(quotes used by permission: Courtesy of Steve Blank.)

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You can follow me @AlliStrouse

Facebook = genius, Linked in = makes sense…but what I’ve learned recently is that there is amazing technology that will allow you to create your own social network online within minutes for basically no money. I learned all of this from a presentation by Nick Floro at Macworld 2011.

Ning, Social GO and Buddy Press make it easy to build custom and powerful social websites. I am simply amazed at the features that these companies offer. You can simply plug this community into a tab of your existing website or make the community your site’s main feature. Some of the features offered include: Custom profile creation, 50+ design options, moderation and privacy features, rich invitation engines, status updates, dynamic activity feeds, rss feeds from blogs, chat features, group creation, blogs for every member, photo and video sharing… the list continues, but the main idea is that these sites give you every feature you would ever want in your very own social community.

What does this tell me about communities online? That is the real question. Although it may sound radical, I think that we are about to see a major expansion in the social communities offered to us online. We have had a great deal of vertical expansion, and 2011 will bring us a tremendous amount of horizontal expansion. Below, I’ve listed some ways I think communities will branch out in 2011..

Growth of the Niche Social Network

Once Facebook gets saturated with people from every part of your life, users may want to find other, more niche communities to share specific aspects of their lives. Years ago, I had an idea of an art community website because for me personally, I don’t want to share my art pieces with random friends from high school. However, I would love to share them with other artists who can give me feedback and inspire my creativity with their work. In fact, this trend has already started with niche communities popping up in different places…

DeviantArt – Art Network (darn, my idea, taken!)

Coastr- Beer drinkers

Ave Maria Singles- Single Catholics

Ravelry- Knitters

Social Networks with Best in Class Privacy Policies

In addition to niche markets, Facebook users are getting sick of having privacy concerns. Remember five years ago when Facebook had the same consistent interface every day and the site looked outdated and stale? Oh, the good old days! Now, Facebook comes out with a new feature on a daily basis—and most of these features I don’t even realize until I’m on CNN.com and see headshots of my friends who have read the same article (just strange!).  Users are looking for more secure solutions, and communities have sprung up to serve these people…

Diaspora- Flexible interface but strict privacy policy

OneSocialWeb- Also, prides itself on a safer solution

Smaller Online Communities

As our Facebook friends continue to grow to include people you met once or twice, users may want to actually go back to a real community that has meaning in their lives. Path, which launched in 2010, limits the number of users a person can have in their network to 50. This may sounds strict, but I can see the point here. By having a strict cut-off, people will make sure to only have the most meaningful connections possible.

Social Communities for Specific Age Groups

At the Girls in Tech Amplify Business Pitch Competition last November, I heard an impressive pitch by the founder of Everloop.com, Hillary DeCesare. She founded Everloop for her young children whom she didn’t want on Facebook yet. Everloop targets ages 8-13 years old (users need to be at least 14 to join Facebook).

With the creation of NIng and other “Do It Yourself” social networks, I see a huge trend in the horizontal growth of social networks. Why should Facebook be the only company that can grow a community online?  Online communities are a beautiful thing, and I’m pleased to see that others are joining in on the fun.

About the Author:

Allison Strouse is a manager of Online Media and QuinStreet, Inc.  She specializes in creating online media properties for B2B clients. Currently living in San Francisco, CA, Allison enjoys writing about anything on her mind which usually includes one of the following: people who inspire her, lessons  learned from others,  internet marketing, social media, food, tech investing, performing and visual arts…A personal blog is in the works, but until then,  you can stay on top of all blog posting by visiting GirlsInTech.net or following her on twitter @AlliStrouse.

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